Psychopathy and neurodynamic brain functioning: A review of EEG research

•EEG methodology may help us better understand the neurological underpinnings of psychopathy.•The EEG findings reviewed indicated that psychopathic individuals generally have intact orienting and cognitive control.•The EEG findings also a indicated that those with elevated psychopathic traits showed no obvious deficits in memory updating, associative learning or error processing (although they do not perseverate on errors).•Psychopathic individuals diverge most from those with low levels of the trait in their processing of stimuli with emotional content and this appears to be evidenced across a variety of EEG measurements.•A precise understanding of the neurological functioning of those with psychopathic traits will assist in the fine-tuning of interventions including neural interventions. Studies related to psychopathy and EEG have increased over the past decade making it a good time to examine where the field is on this topic as well as to determine future directions. The current study reviewed 68 research reports that focused on psychopathy and various components of EEG. We examined early, mid, and late level ERP processing as well as spectra analyses. The results indicate that psychopathic individuals exhibit generally unencumbered performance categorizing cognitive stimuli and demonstrate the typical facilitation of physical responses commensurate with an intact orienting response. Moreover, the results suggest that individuals with elevated psychopathic traits are especially adept at screening out distracting threat-related and other irrelevant information allowing them to allocate attention to stimuli that are goal-relevant. Those with elevated psychopathic traits also do not appear to have significant impairments in associative learning or error processing. Where psychopathic individuals diverge most from those with low levels of these traits is in relation to processing affect-laden content. In some contexts, psychopathic individuals appear to quickly terminate the processing of emotional information and in other contexts (e.g., seeing others in pain) they elaborately process emotional information both of which may help explain their prototypical lack of conscience. Much of the aberrant functioning of those with elevated psychopathic traits depends on the psychopathy factor being examined with F1 traits showing less cognitive impairment than F2 traits. Recommendations for future research are provided.