Attention-Emotion Interactions in Psychopathy

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The broad goal of the proposed project is to examine risk factors for the development and maintenance of psychopathy, a personality disorder characterized by chronic antisocial behavior (Douglas, Vincent, & Edens, 2006), predatory interpersonal traits (Hare, 2003), and poor treatment outcomes (Harris & Rice, 2006). The present application will test a new etiological model of psychopathy that re-conceptualizes the attentional and emotional deficits associated with the disorder in an integrative framework. Specifically, the project will address (1) the interactive effects of emotion and attention as contributing factors to the processing deficits observed in psychopathy using psychophysiological measures (i.e., event-related potentials, electromyography), and (2) the potential moderating effects of monoaminergic genes as risk factors for the deficient emotional reactivity associated with the disorder. The proposed study seeks to advance current etiological conceptualizations of the disorder by examining biological and psychological risk factors for psychopathy in a sample of high-risk individuals involved in the criminal justice system. Event-related potentials, startle reflex, and genetic data will be collected from individuals recruited from probation and parole who have been classified as high or low on psychopathic traits using the Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version (Hart, Cox, Hare, 1999). These measures will be used to index the unique and interactive effects of attentional and emotional systems while participants view unpleasant and neutral pictures matched on visual complexity selected from the International Affective Picture System (Lang et al., 2005). Based on extant literature, it is hypothesized that the results will support an etiological model of psychopathy in which genes confer risk for the deficient emotionality observed in the disorder, which, in conjunction with reduced attentional capacity, result in psychopathic traits. The long-term objective of the project is to provide data on risk factors for psychopathy that can be used to improve treatment interventions for the disorder. No validated interventions presently exist for this disorder (Harris & Rice, 2006), which is likely due in part to the fact that the etiology of psychopathy remains uncertain. PUBLIC HEATLH RELEVANCE The lack of effective treatment interventions has placed a substantial burden on the criminal justice system in that approximately 20 - 30% of incarcerated individuals are psychopathic (Louth et al., 1998), despite a 1% prevalence rate in the general population. Thus, the extent to which the study can inform future treatment interventions it has the potential to reduce the financial and emotional burden posed by this socially quite important type of psychopathology