Performing in a social context can result in negative feelings when our actions harm another person, but it can also lead to positive feelings when observing an opponent fail. The extent to which individuals scoring high on psychopathic traits, often characterized as self-centered with reduced concern for others' welfare, are sensitive to own and others' success and failure is yet unknown. However, knowledge about these processes is crucial for comprehending how these traits are involved in understanding ourselves and others during social interactions. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, healthy females scoring low or high on psychopathic traits performed a cannon-shooting game in non-social, cooperative, and competitive contexts. We hypothesized group differences regarding: (1) monitoring of own actions in a non-social context (errors that only negatively affect oneself) versus cooperative context (errors that also harm others), (2) successfully performing with either positive (shared gain) or negative consequences (selfish gain) for the co-player, and (3) observing other's performance leading to shared or selfish gain for oneself. Decreased performance-monitoring-related activations were found in posterior medial frontal cortex for females scoring high on psychopathic traits in the social versus non-social context. When observing others, striatal activations were stronger for selfish gains for high scorers and for shared gains for low scorers. The current outcomes demonstrate that performance-monitoring and reward-related brain activations importantly depend on the interplay between psychopathic traits and social context. We propose that these neural mechanisms may underlie the more self-centered behavior of individuals scoring high on psychopathic traits. As such, the current findings may open up new research avenues, which could advance our understanding of how personality traits impact performance monitoring in a wide variety of social contexts and could possibly lead to the development of interventions aimed at normalizing reduced concern for others.

在社交场合中表现会在我们的行为伤害他人时导致负面情绪，但在观察到对手失败时也会导致正面情绪。在精神病性状上得分高的个人（通常以自我为中心，对他人福利的关注减少）在多大程度上对自己和他人的成功与失败敏感。但是，有关这些过程的知识对于理解这些特质在社会互动过程中如何理解自己和他人至关重要。在这项功能性磁共振成像（fMRI）研究中，精神病性状得分偏低或偏高的健康女性在非社交，合作和竞争性环境中进行了大炮射击游戏。我们假设在以下方面存在群体差异：（1）在非社会环境中监控自己的行为（仅对自己产生负面影响的错误）与在合作环境中监控自身的行为（也危害他人的错误）；（2）成功地表现出积极（共同收益）或消极后果（自私收益） ）（3）观察他人的表现，从而为自己带来共同或自私的收益。在社交和非社交场合中，在精神病性状评分较高的女性中，在后内侧额叶皮层中发现了与绩效监控相关的激活减少。当观察其他人时，纹状体的激活对于高得分者的自私收益和对于低得分者的共同收益都更强。目前的结果表明，绩效监控和与奖励有关的大脑激活在很大程度上取决于精神病性状和社交环境之间的相互作用。我们认为这些神经机制可能是精神病性状评分较高的个人更以自我为中心的行为的基础。因此，当前的发现可能会开辟新的研究途径，这可能会加深我们对人格特质如何影响各种社会背景下的绩效监控的理解，并可能导致旨在减轻对他人关注的正常化的干预措施的发展。