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. ? ? ?
| Philippi, Carissa L; Pujara, Maia S; Motzkin, Julian C et al. (2015) Altered resting-state functional connectivity in cortical networks in psychopathy. J Neurosci 35:6068-78 |
| Wolf, Richard C; Pujara, Maia S; Motzkin, Julian C et al. (2015) Interpersonal traits of psychopathy linked to reduced integrity of the uncinate fasciculus. Hum Brain Mapp 36:4202-9 |
| Motzkin, Julian C; Baskin-Sommers, Arielle; Newman, Joseph P et al. (2014) Neural correlates of substance abuse: reduced functional connectivity between areas underlying reward and cognitive control. Hum Brain Mapp 35:4282-92 |
| 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 |
| Baskin-Sommers, Arielle R; Curtin, John J; Newman, Joseph P (2013) Emotion-modulated startle in psychopathy: clarifying familiar effects. J Abnorm Psychol 122:458-68 |
| 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 |
| Koenigs, Michael; Kruepke, Michael; Zeier, Joshua et al. (2012) Utilitarian moral judgment in psychopathy. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci 7:708-14 |
| Ly, Martina; Motzkin, Julian C; Philippi, Carissa L et al. (2012) Cortical thinning in psychopathy. Am J Psychiatry 169:743-9 |
| Baskin-Sommers, Arielle; Wolf, Richard; Buckholtz, Joshua et al. (2012) Exaggerated Attention Blink Response in Prisoners with Externalizing. J Res Pers 46:688-693 |
Showing the most recent 10 out of 30 publications
