The aim of this research is to clarify the psychological mechanism responsible for the breakdown of adaptive self-regulation in psychopaths. Traditional explanations for psychopathic behavior emphasize a motivational deficit involving insensitivity to punishment. However, they have not led to significant advances in the assessment, treatment or prevention of the disorder. An alternative explanation for the breakdown of self-regulation in psychopaths involves deficient response modulation. The response modulation hypothesis holds that psychopaths are deficient in the automatic accommodation of new/unexpected information once they are engaged in goal-directed behavior. Consistent with this hypothesis, psychopaths engaged in goal-directed behavior are less likely ban controls to alter their response strategies on the basis on new information, but research is needed to determine whether such differences reflect an involuntary information processing deficit or some other process. The proposed research employs two laboratory paradigms to evaluate the information processing component of the response modulation hypothesis. The paradigms manipulate contextual information while psychopaths and nonpsychopaths are engaged in goal-directed behavior. To minimize voluntary processing, the contextual cues are irrelevant to task performance and should be ignored. In fact, automatic associations elicited by the contextual cues will actually interfere with task performance. Thus, automatic processing of the contextual cues can be assessed using the magnitude of the interference effects. It is predicted that nonpsychopaths will display larger interference effects than psychopaths. Support for this hypothesis would-clarify a specific mechanism for the psychopath's poorly regulated behavior and have immediate implications for conceptualizing, assessing, and treating """"""""risk"""""""" for psychopathy.
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