Social Reasoning in Psychopathy

描述（由候选人提供）：精神病是一种严重的人格障碍，包含人际、情感和行为成分。精神病的一个特征是持续违反社会契约，即欺骗。在像人类这样的合作物种中，这种行为的社会成本是巨大的。的确，与动物王国的其他动物相比，（正常）人类合作的频率和程度令人震惊。进化分析已经确定了合作进化所必需的几种认知能力，包括发现作弊者的能力。大量数据表明，正常人在推理社会交换时善于发现骗子，而有关大脑哪个区域决定了这种能力的证据已经开始积累。行为和神经数据都表明，社会交换推理在功能上不同于其他类型的推理（如预防性推理）。本研究的目的是探讨精神病患者的社会交换推理。具体来说，目的是解决以下问题：关于社会交换的推理（即骗子检测）是否在精神病中受损？精神病患者是否会像正常健康的人一样，使用相同的大脑区域来思考社会交换？社会交换推理与精神变态者的情商之间的关系是否和正常人一样？本研究采用事件相关功能磁共振成像（event- correlation functional magnetic resonance imaging）研究在押精神病患者的行为表现和大脑基础，并利用沃森选择任务（Wason selection task）对社会交换规则、预防性规则和社会描述性规则的推理进行控制。包括这两种类型的规则将使我们能够研究结果对社会交换的特殊性。正常人在社会交流和预防规则方面表现同样良好；精神病患者是高风险的冒险者，这表明预防性推理将是有益的。社会描述性规则也具有社会性，但不符合社会交换规则的输入条件；正常人对这种区别非常敏感。沃森选择任务是成像研究的理想选择，因为这三种类型的推理问题只是在内容上有所不同——不同类型的问题的任务要求是相同的。

DESCRIPTION (provided by candidate): Psychopathy is a serious personality disorder with interpersonal, affective, and behavioral components. One hallmark of psychopathy is the persistent violation of social contracts, i.e., cheating. In a cooperative species such as humans, the societal costs of this behavior are tremendous. Indeed, the frequency and extent of (normal) humans' cooperation is astounding compared to the rest of the animal kingdom. Evolutionary analyses have identified several cognitive abilities necessary for cooperation to evolve, including the ability to detect cheaters. A large body of data has demonstrated that normal individuals are adept at detecting cheaters when reasoning about social exchange, and evidence about which brain regions underlie this ability has begun to accrue. Both the behavioral and neural data indicate that social exchange reasoning is functionally distinct from other types of reasoning (e.g., precautionary reasoning). The goal of the proposed research is to investigate social exchange reasoning in psychopathy. Specifically, the aim is to address the following questions: Is reasoning about social exchange (i.e., cheater detection) impaired in psychopathy? Do psychopaths recruit the same brain regions to reason about social exchange that normal, healthy individuals do? Does social exchange reasoning show the same relationship with emotional intelligence in psychopaths as it does in normal individuals? The proposed studies employ event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate the behavioral performance and brain basis of incarcerated psychopaths' and control participants' reasoning about social exchange, precautionary, and social descriptive rules, using the Wason selection task. Including these two types of rules will allow us to investigate the specificity of the results to social exchange. Normal individuals perform equally well on social exchange and precautionary rules; psychopaths are high risk-takers,suggesting precautionary reasoning will be informative. Social descriptive rules are also social in nature, but fail to fit the input conditions for social exchange rules; normal individuals are very sensitive to this distinction. The Wason selections task is ideal for imaging studies in that the three types of reasoning problems differ only in their content-the task demands are identical across problem type.