Psychopathic behavior is characterized by an inability to have emotional involvement with others and by repeated violation of the rights of others.¹ Psychopaths, who are part of a wider group of persons with antisocial personality disorder, seem to lack the ability to anticipate punishment and are deficient in autonomic responding, eg, skin conductance responses (SCRs), in anticipation of threatening events.² High intelligence and high socioeconomic status may protect psychopaths from developing a criminal career and turn them into successful psychopaths who display a high incidence of reckless, risk-taking, and emotionally insensitive behavior patterns.³ Most psychopaths seem to lack the ability to predict impending harm from signals of threat and may thus show deficient fear conditioning where a formerly neutral stimulus (conditioned stimulus [CS]) comes to predict a fear-eliciting stimulus (unconditioned stimulus [US]) after they have been paired several times.^4-6

A brain-computer interface (BCI) based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) records noninvasively activity of the entire brain with a high spatial resolution. We present a fMRI-based BCI which performs data processing and feedback of the hemodynamic brain activity within 1.3 s. Using this technique, differential feedback and self-regulation is feasible as exemplified by the supplementary motor area (SMA) and parahippocampal place area (PPA). Technical and experimental aspects are discussed with respect to neurofeedback. The methodology now allows for studying behavioral effects and strategies of local self-regulation in healthy and diseased subjects.