Psychopathy 2 Flashcards
Psychopathy in group settings?
Intellectualise
Turn simple things into debates
Evasive
Acts as a leader and lawyer (I am the law?)
Dramatic outbursts
- disruptive in treating in group settings
Psychopathy ‘on the wing’ - individually?
Attention seeking
Highly manipulative, e.g. staff to bring in contraband
Quick to exploit loopholes in rules - reinterpret rules to their own advantage
Target vulnerable staff for manipulation
Rigid rules for other people that don’t apply to them
Speak at people, not with them
Emotional deficit theory of psychopathy?
Came from psychopaths showing low fear and anxiety.
Amygdala role
Amygdala is linked to fear
Paralimbic system role
Responsible for emotion processing, goal-setting, motivation aand self-control
Response modulation
Attentional deficit in psychopathy, not emotional
Psychopaths have very focused attention and fixate on things at the expense of others
Fear response in psychopathy - Hare et al.
Participants shown screen which counts down to a loud noise blast
Measure skin conductance - arousal should increase when counts down and anticipating noise blast
Skin conductance is sig. reduced in psychopaths
Fear potentiated startle (FPS) - images response
When something sudden happens it triggers startle response - defensive reaction
Measure using eye blink response with electrodes
Startle response is moderated by emotional state - relaxed = little startle, anxious = high startle
Can induce emotional state by showing happy/neutral/disturbing images and then measure blink rate during FPS noise blast
Low PCL-R = low startle for pleasant, high startle rate for unpleasant
High PCL-R = low startle rate for pleasant (same as Low PCLR), no increase in unpleasant condition
Factor 1 (affective/interpersonal) seems to drive FPS difference
BUT no physiological change for skin conductance
FPS and TriPM
Measured psychopathy with TriPM (3 aspects)
Boldness was associated with decreased FPS to threat stimuli only - mutilation/erotica/neutral had no diff between high/low boldness
Threatening, not negative images in general
Lexical Decision Task
Words are associated with explicit (literal) and implicit (emotional) meaning
Neutral, emotional, and unpronounceable words shown in random order on a screen
Decide if it is a word or isn’t a word
People are faster with emotional words - demands more attention to process faster
Psychopaths show increased reaction time for positive and negative (all types of emotional) words, but typical for neutral words
Fear Potentiated Startle - Red and Green Letters (Attention task)
Trained ppts to expect shocks to red letters but not green letters
Fear-focus condition - deciding if letter was red or green (inducing fear if reporting red - focusing on the dimension of fear)
- psychopaths startle more to red letters when asked to focus on it
Alternative-focus condition - deciding if letter was uppercase or lowercase (not focusing on dimension of fear)
- startle disappears in psychopaths
Emotion recognition in faces - Blair et al.
Morphed faces from one expression to another
High psychopathy = only have deficits in fear recognition
Psychopaths in neuropsychological tasks
Tasks affected were
- Go-Nogo
- smell discrimination
- Porteus maze
- Iowa gambling task (failed to learn through failure - factor 2)
- Tower of London (positive urgency impacted planning - too impulsive to think before acting)
- Brixton task (inability to stick to the rules - could learn the rule well but kept trying to beat the system)
– all these tasks target OFC
– OFC dysfunction?
Tasks not affected were
- WCST (can learn rules well)
– these tasks target DLPFC
Pupillometry & negative sounds - Gray et al.
Measured against TriPM model
Sounds - so that the light wouldn’t impact pupil constriction
Presented negative, neutral and positive sounds
Negative and positive sounds increase pupils most, with neutral sounds in the middle
Effect reduction correlated with Meanness scale of the TriPM
- no effect in boldness/disinhibition
Convicted murders - PET scan
Reduced prefrontal cortex activity and volume in murders
Same effect was not found in those with predatory murders
