Psychopathy is a devastating psychological disorder with widespread implications for affected individuals, their families, society, and the science of human behavior. There is general agreement that psychopathic individuals exhibit fear conditioning and other emotion processing deficits and that these deficits, are crucial for understanding their poor socialization and antisocial lifestyle. Despite its prominence as the core deficit in psychopathy, there is surprising little evidence documenting the problem using well-established measures of psychopathy. There is even less research on the psychobiological processes underlying these affective deficits. One possibility is that psychopathic individuals lack the capacity to experience fear and related emotions owing to abnormalities in the neural circuitry that mediates fear conditioning (e.g., Blair, 2005; Lykken, 1995). An alternative possibility is that their emotion deficits are an indirect consequence of a dysfunctional attentional system that restricts attention to affective, and other, information that is outside the focus of selective attention (Newman & Lorenz, 2003). Recent neuroscience research on cognitive-emotion interactions provides evidence that experimental manipulations that re-direct attentional focus or tax working memory can eliminate, otherwise robust emotion responses involving amygdala activation to affective facial stimuli (e.g., Pessoa et al., 2002). Such evidence provides a context for investigating whether related cognitive-emotion interactions undermine emotion processing in psychopathic individuals. We propose three studies to evaluate fear conditioning in psychopathic individuals while manipulating direction of attention and working memory load using diverse incarcerated and non-incarcerated samples. The results will clarify the extent to which the fear conditioning deficits associated with psychopathy (a) are robust when state-of-the-art assessments of psychopathy are employed; (b) are moderated by the attentional and working memory demands of the conditioning paradigm; (c) reflect a unitary psychopathy dimension or multiple causal processes that are differentially related to the major components (i.e., factors) of psychopathy; and (d) involve comparable dysfunctions in male and female samples, European- and African-American samples, and offender and non-offender samples. ? ? ?
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