Enhancing Neuroimaging Genetics through Meta-analysis (ENIGMA): Antisocial Behaviour working group

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The overarching aim of this project is to explore how early life experiences, brain activity, and behaviour relate one another. The proposed PhD will use several approaches to address this question with a focus on psychopathy in both clinical/forensic and community samples. Studies investigating neuroanatomical correlates of psychopathy have tended to focus on males from clinical/forensic populations with a reliance on samples from Western nations. As such, it remains pertinent to explore such associations in community samples and consider sex as a variable within the research design. This project will use data collected from a non- Western community sample of males and females. Using neuroimaging data, it will examine associations between dimensional measures of psychopathy, its subcomponent facets, cortical density and brain network connectivity. A further component will focus on structural/functional MRI data covering the entire lifespan, conduct problems/disorder in youths, as well as antisocial personality disorder/psychopathy in adults. A meta-/mega-analyses of brain imaging and genetic data will focus on disorders and categorical approaches, and also dimensional approaches where data can be linked to dimensional measures indexing externalising behaviours and environmental risk factors. Finally, the project will use a neuroimaging epigenetic approach to go beyond the genome and examine the role of epigenetic modifications. It will capitalise on existing data sets available from collaborators to systematically examine the association between early life experiences, DNA methylation, internalising and externalising behaviours and structural/functional MRI data. It is hoped this will further our understanding of the molecular mechanisms of risk for psychopathy. The project will combine methods from psychology, neuroimaging, and computer/data science, which together put this project at the forefront of research on antisocial behaviour and psychopathy.