Psychopathy is a severe personality disorder associated with persistent antisocial behavior, unstable relationships, and violence. This program of research is designed to achieve several goals. First among these is to provide comprehensive tests of two contemporary hypotheses for psychopaths' unresponsiveness to important contingencies. These hypotheses are (1) the overfocusing hypothesis, which states that psychopaths allocate too large a share of their processing resources to tasks of immediate, concrete relevance and consequently have little attention available for processing all other contingencies, and (2) the unusual cerebral asymmetry hypothesis, which proposes that among right- handed psychopaths, many kinds of information processing typically mediated by left hemisphere resources are instead mediated by right hemisphere resources. The two hypotheses are not contradictory but make divergent predictions for a variety of situations involving right handed subjects. The use of dual task paradigms with lateralized stimuli and tasks matched for difficulty and complexity allows simultaneous tests of these two hypotheses. Additionally, by assessing the performance of psychopaths under different task combinations, this research will add importantly to our current knowledge base on information processing and behavioral deficits in psychopaths. Controlling the modality of the primary and secondary task stimuli permits tests of the generality of each hypothesis. Controlling subjects' opportunities to shift attention within a trial and the extent to which attention may be precued allows examination of several specific mechanisms proposed to underlie overfocusing, while providing quantitative information on psychopaths' breadth of attention and ability to shift attention under these conditions. Second, using adolescents at heightened risk for psychopathy as subjects, proposed studies will examine the relation between proposed processing deficits and superiorities and specific personal and familial characteristics that have been reported to be important to the etiology of psychopathy. This research will also assess which of these factors and which interactions between these factors account for the most variance in adolescent psychopathic behavior, while providing preliminary evidence on the validity of psychopathy criteria for use with unincarcerated adolescents. Finally, this project will provide additional information about the relations between these processing deficits and the factors said to underlie psychopathy ratings and will examine the relevance of these hypotheses to Black and Hispanic male inmates as well as White male inmates, and unincarcerated adolescent White and Black males at heightened risk for psychopathy.
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