Electrophysiological correlates of empathic processing and its relation to psychopathic meanness.

Objective: A lack of empathy and the presence of predatory tendencies are considered key features of psychopathic meanness. Previous electrophysiological studies on empathy in relation to psychopathic traits have focused mainly on empathy for pain; therefore, little is known about the electrophysiological correlates of empathy in aggressive situations that are particularly relevant for psychopathic meanness.

Method: We employed electroencephalography in a community sample ( = 70), the majority of whom had attained a higher level of education.

Age-related reorganization of encoding networks directly influences subsequent recognition memory.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to link performance-related brain activity during two word encoding tasks to subsequent recognition for those words in young and older adults. There were no significant group differences in performance during encoding, but the young subjects performed better than the older at the recognition task. Performance-related brain networks strongly differed between the two groups.