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.
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