Reduced transfer of affective value to instrumental behavior in violent offenders.

Instrumental or goal-directed aggression is a core feature in violent offenders with psychopathic tendencies. To understand this type of behavior, previous work in the field of aggression has focused on affective processing, with mixed results. We propose that instrumental aggression is best understood in terms of the consequences of affective processing for instrumental behavior rather than affective processing per se.

Testosterone Modulates Altered Prefrontal Control of Emotional Actions in Psychopathic Offenders(1,2,3).

Psychopathic individuals are notorious for their controlled goal-directed aggressive behavior. Yet, during social challenges, they often show uncontrolled emotional behavior. Healthy individuals can control their social emotional behavior through anterior prefrontal cortex (aPFC) downregulation of neural activity in the amygdala, with testosterone modulating aPFC-amygdala coupling.

Psychopaths lack the automatic avoidance of social threat: relation to instrumental aggression.

Psychopathy (PP) is associated with marked abnormalities in social emotional behaviour, such as high instrumental aggression (IA). A crucial but largely ignored question is whether automatic social approach-avoidance tendencies may underlie this condition. We tested whether offenders with PP show lack of automatic avoidance tendencies, usually activated when (healthy) individuals are confronted with social threat stimuli (angry faces).