The computational psychiatry of antisocial behaviour and psychopathy

Antisocial behaviours such as disobedience, lying, stealing, destruction of property, and aggression towards others are common to multiple disorders of childhood and adulthood, including conduct disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, psychopathy, and antisocial personality disorder. These disorders have a significant negative impact for individuals and for society, but whether they represent clinically different phenomena, or simply different approaches to diagnosing the same underlying psychopathology is highly debated. Computational psychiatry, with its dual focus on identifying different classes of disorder and health (data-driven) and latent cognitive and neurobiological mechanisms across disorders (theory-driven), is well placed to address these questions. The focus on transdiagnostic symptoms provides an important framework for shedding light on mechanisms that can characterise latent processes across different disorders of antisocial behaviour. In this review, we critically discuss the contribution of computational research to our understanding of various antisocial behaviour disorders, and highlight suggestions for how computational psychiatry can address important clinical and scientific questions about these disorders in the future.