A wealth of evidence demonstrates that, in contrast to ordinary criminality, psychopathy is a serious form of psychopathology that has terrific costs to the affected individual as well as society (Hare, 1996). The long-range goal of this research is to specify the psychological processes responsible for their maladaptive breakdown of self-regulation. Success in this endeavor would enable the early identification of relevant processing anomalies and allow for the implementation of informed interventions to treat and/or prevent their maladaptive expressions. Predictions regarding the psychological processes responsible for the breakdown of adaptive self-regulation in psychopaths are derived from the response modulation hypothesis (Gorenstein and Newman, 1980; Patterson and Newman, 1993). In contrast to theories which attribute psychopathy to """"""""low fear"""""""" or """"""""insensitivity to punishment cues"""""""" (e.g., Fowles, 1980; Lykken 1995), the response modulation hypothesis predicts (a) that primary psychopaths' insensitivity to punishment cues will be relatively specific to circumstances in which the cues are peripheral to ongoing, goal-directed behavior; and (b) that primary psychopaths will be less sensitive to motivationally neutral, as well as motivationally significant, peripheral stimuli while they are engaged in goal-directed behavior. Results from the first 5-6 years of this grant provide solid evidence for both of these hypotheses and suggest that attentional deficit involving the use of contextual cues may underlie psychopaths' cognitive and affective processing deficiencies and account for their deficits in self-regulation. Moreover, we have demonstrated that psychopaths' anomalous processing of both affective and non-affective contextual (i.e., secondary) cues relates to cerebral asymmetries in the allocation of attention. In this competing renewal, we propose to (a) specify the types of information that do or do not influence the behavior of psychopaths; (b) clarify the circumstances that enable or preclude psychopaths from processing available information; and (c) elaborate the association between psychopaths' cognitive and affective information processing deficits and their left hemisphere processing anomalies. Analogous to identifying a specific learning disability, the proposed studies will not only specify a dysfunction and, thus, clarify the etiology of psychopathy, but will serve to identify particular strategies for preventing the serious consequences of the dysfunction.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
5R01MH053041-11
Application #
6893726
Study Section
Special Emphasis Panel (ZRG1-BBBP-5 (01))
Program Officer
Breiling, James P
Project Start
1995-09-30
Project End
2008-05-31
Budget Start
2006-06-01
Budget End
2008-05-31
Support Year
11
Fiscal Year
2006
Total Cost
$284,162
Indirect Cost
Name
University of Wisconsin Madison
Department
Psychology
Type
Schools of Arts and Sciences
DUNS #
161202122
City
Madison
State
WI
Country
United States
Zip Code
53715
Miskovich, Tara A; Anderson, Nathaniel E; Harenski, Carla L et al. (2018) Abnormal cortical gyrification in criminal psychopathy. Neuroimage Clin 19:876-882
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Zeier, Joshua D; Newman, Joseph P (2013) Feature-based attention and conflict monitoring in criminal offenders: interactive relations of psychopathy with anxiety and externalizing. J Abnorm Psychol 122:797-806
Zeier, Joshua D; Newman, Joseph P (2013) Both self-report and interview-based measures of psychopathy predict attention abnormalities in criminal offenders. Assessment 20:610-9
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Wolf, Richard C; Carpenter, Ryan W; Warren, Christopher M et al. (2012) Reduced susceptibility to the attentional blink in psychopathic offenders: implications for the attention bottleneck hypothesis. Neuropsychology 26:102-9
Baskin-Sommers, Arielle R; Vitale, Jennifer E; Maccoon, Donal et al. (2012) Assessing emotion sensitivity in female offenders with borderline personality symptoms: results from a fear-potentiated startle paradigm. J Abnorm Psychol 121:477-83
Zeier, Joshua D; Baskin-Sommers, Arielle R; Hiatt Racer, Kristina D et al. (2012) Cognitive control deficits associated with antisocial personality disorder and psychopathy. Personal Disord 3:283-93
Baskin-Sommers, Arielle; Curtin, John J; Li, Wen et al. (2012) Psychopathy-related differences in selective attention are captured by an early event-related potential. Personal Disord 3:370-8
Baskin-Sommers, Arielle R; Curtin, John J; Newman, Joseph P (2011) Specifying the attentional selection that moderates the fearlessness of psychopathic offenders. Psychol Sci 22:226-34

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