Abstract: Psychopathy is a personality disorder with a cluster of interpersonal, affective, behavioral and antisocial traits. Compared with non-psychopath, psychopaths are more likely to violate social rules and laws. They display crueler and extreme aggression models, with earlier onset age of crime, more extensive and diverse criminal activities, and higher recidivism rates. Recent event-related potential (ERP) researches of criminal psychopaths indicated deficits in attentional orientation, semantic and affective processing, and later stage of mistake processing. MRI and fMRI studies showed that the abnormal brain structure and frontolimbic circuit activities are relevant to psychopaths.

Key words: Psychopath, EPR, fMRI