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Abstract
Empathy is a prerequisite for developing concern for others. In highly psychopathic individuals, however, empathic concern and perspective-taking capacity is largely diminished. Yet, it remains unclear how such individuals neurologically represent others’ pain, if at all. The current project compares neural activity in regions involved in processing empathy for pain, including the amygdala, ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), the ventral striatum (VS), and the anterior insula (AI), between an incarcerated sample of psychopathic female subjects and low-psychopathy controls during an empathy-for-pain task (EPP). Representational similarity analysis (RSA), an approach which allows for comparisons of brain activity to specific, individual stimuli across conditions, demonstrates that control subjects may be better at identifying whether people are in pain (versus not in pain) than high-psychopathy participants are able. Moreover, controls represent their own self’s pain and other’s pain more similarly in empathy-processing regions than highly psychopathic individuals do. Keywords: RSA, psychopathy, empathy for pain, perspective-taking, mentalizing