Aberrant motor contagion of emotions in psychopathy and high-functioning autism.
Level 4 - case-series / case-control
Case-control neuroimaging study comparing clinical cohorts to healthy controls
PubMed 35332920 · doi:10.1093/cercor/bhac072
What was done
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was performed on 19 incarcerated male offenders with high psychopathic traits, 20 males with high-functioning autism, and 19 age-matched healthy control males. Participants viewed dynamic emotional facial expressions (happy, angry, disgusted) and listened to emotional sounds (laughter, crying) to assess neural responses linked to motor contagion.
What was found
The abstract reports no numerical data. Psychopathy was associated with reduced somatomotor responses to nearly all tested emotional expressions, whereas participants with autism demonstrated less pronounced and emotion-specific alterations in the somatomotor region.
Why it matters
Both conditions involve altered empathy, but only psychopathy typically presents with marked violence and antisocial behavior. This study indicates that the underlying neural disruptions in socioemotional processing and motor contagion differ qualitatively and quantitatively between the two groups.
Limits
The study had a small sample size (58 total participants; 19–20 per group) and included only male participants, precluding generalizability to females. The psychopathic cohort was drawn from an incarcerated population, introducing potential confounding variables such as institutionalization. Quantitative effect sizes and behavioral data were omitted from the abstract.
Cited by
- partial Individuals with psychopathy do not experience contagious yawning, contagious smiling, or contagious laughter.