Vocal affect recognition and psychopathy: Converging findings across traditional and cluster analytic approaches to assessing the construct.

Deficits in emotion processing have been widely reported to be central to psychopathy. However, few prior studies have examined vocal affect recognition in psychopaths, and these studies suffer from significant methodological limitations. Moreover, prior studies have yielded conflicting findings regarding the specificity of psychopaths’ affect recognition deficits. This study examined vocal affect recognition in 107 male inmates under conditions requiring isolated prosodic vs. semantic analysis of affective cues and compared subgroups of offenders identified via cluster analysis on vocal affect recognition. Psychopaths demonstrated deficits in vocal affect recognition under conditions requiring use of semantic cues and conditions requiring use of prosodic cues. Moreover, both primary and secondary psychopaths exhibited relatively similar emotional deficits in the semantic analysis condition compared to nonpsychopathic control participants. This study demonstrates that psychopaths’ vocal affect recognition deficits are not due to methodological limitations of previous studies and provides preliminary evidence that primary and secondary psychopaths exhibit generally similar deficits in vocal affect recognition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Delay of gratification in psychopathic and nonpsychopathic offenders.

Delay of gratification is a prototypical measure of self-control that merits systematic investigation in psychopaths. White male prisoners were provided with repeated opportunities to select an immediate response with uncertain reward or a delayed response with a higher rate of reward under 1 of 3 incentive conditions. Psychopaths' performance depended on their level of trait anxiety and incentive condition: Whereas low-anxious psychopaths were relatively unwilling to delay when omission of expected rewards also incurred monetary punishments, they displayed relative superior performance when the task involved rewards only. Findings complement those for passive avoidance learning in psychopaths and suggest that inhibitory self-control in low-anxious psychopaths is somewhat impaired under conditions involving a combination of monetary rewards and punishments. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emotion processing in the criminal psychopath: The role of attention in emotion-facilitated memory.

The response modulation hypothesis specifies that low-anxious psychopathic individuals have difficulty processing information outside their primary attentional focus. To evaluate the applicability of this model to affective processing, the authors had 239 offenders, classified with the Psychopathy Checklist--Revised (R. D. Hare, 2003) and the Welsh Anxiety Scale (G. Welsh, 1956), perform 1 of 3 emotion memory tasks that examined the effects of emotion on memory for primary and contextual information. Regardless of anxiety level, psychopathic and control offenders demonstrated a significant and comparable memory bias for emotional over neutral words in the primary conditions. However, psychopathic individuals showed significantly less memory bias than did controls in the contextual conditions. Results indicate that the impact of emotion on memory is moderated by attentional factors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Utilization of emotion cues in male and female offenders with antisocial personality disorder: Results from a lexical decision task.

Antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) diagnoses have demonstrated good reliability and validity in male offenders. However, there is a paucity of research assessing utilization of emotion cues in ASPD individuals and the extent to which correlates of ASPD in males generalize to females. This investigation examined emotion utilization in incarcerated men and women with and without ASPD using a lexical decision task with emotional and neutral words. The performance of male offenders with ASPD was similar to that of male controls, whereas women with ASPD demonstrated greater emotional facilitation than female controls. Moreover, the number of violent crimes committed by female inmates with ASPD was related to emotion facilitation, suggesting a link between their sensitivity to emotion cues and antisocial behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Frontal lobe functions in psychopaths.

Hypothesized that psychopaths would exhibit deficits on tasks tapping the frontal lobe functions of cognitive flexibility and perseverance. 20 male psychopaths (mean age 26.5 yrs), 23 male psychiatric controls, and 18 normal male controls (18–20 yrs old) completed the Socialization scale of the California Psychological Inventory, a behavioral checklist, and a task battery. Relative to controls, psychopaths exhibited the performance pattern of frontal lesion patients on all measures empirically related to frontal dysfunction: perseverative errors on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task, errors on a sequential matching memory task, and Necker Cube reversals. Results encourage the pursuit of a conceptualization of psychopathy based on deficits in cognitive functions previously associated with frontal lobe. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"Worth a thousand words": Absolute and relative decoding of nonlinguistic affect vocalizations.

The authors compared the accuracy of emotion decoding for nonlinguistic affect vocalizations, speech-embedded vocal prosody, and facial cues representing 9 different emotions. Participants (N = 121) decoded 80 stimuli from 1 of the 3 channels. Accuracy scores for nonlinguistic affect vocalizations and facial expressions were generally equivalent, and both were higher than scores for speech-embedded prosody. In particular, affect vocalizations showed superior decoding over the speech stimuli for anger, contempt, disgust, fear, joy, and sadness. Further, specific emotions that were decoded relatively poorly through speech-embedded prosody were more accurately identified through affect vocalizations, suggesting that emotions that are difficult to communicate in running speech can still be expressed vocally through other means. Affect vocalizations also showed superior decoding over faces for anger, contempt, disgust, fear, sadness, and surprise. Facial expressions showed superior decoding scores over both types of vocal stimuli for joy, pride, embarrassment, and “neutral” portrayals. Results are discussed in terms of the social functions served by various forms of nonverbal emotion cues and the communicative advantages of expressing emotions through particular channels. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emotion responsivity, social cognition, and functional outcome in schizophrenia.

Social functioning deficits have long been a defining feature in schizophrenia, but relatively little research has examined how emotion responsivity influences functional outcome in this disorder. The goal of the current study was to begin to elucidate the relationships between emotion responsivity, social cognition, and functional outcome in schizophrenia. Participants were 40 outpatients diagnosed with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed.; American Psychiatric Association, 1994) and 40 controls. Each participant completed measures of emotion responsivity, social cognition (both emotion and social perception), and functional outcome. Individuals with schizophrenia demonstrated somewhat reduced emotion responsivity for positive and negative stimuli, as well as deficits in both social cognition and functional outcome, in comparison with controls. Additionally, results indicated that both social perception and emotion responsivity were positively correlated with functional outcome. Importantly, the relationship of emotion responsivity to functional outcome was not mediated by social perception and showed a significant relationship to functional outcome independent of social cognition. This finding suggests that emotion responsivity is an important factor in understanding functional outcome in schizophrenia. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognitive abstraction, shifting, and control: Clinical sample comparisons of psychopaths and nonpsychopaths.

Gorenstein (1982) suggested that psychopaths exhibit deficits in cognitive processes commonly associated with frontal lobe functioning, but other investigators reported collecting findings (Hare, 1984; Sutker, Moan, & Allain, 1983). There is also evidence indicating that intellectual level influences performances in measures of frontal lobe integrity and mitigates against expression of cognitive dyscontrol especially among psychopaths. The present study extended previous research by comparing clinical samples of psychopaths and nonpsychopaths identified by object instrument and behavioral self-report data. Dependent measures included test of concept formation, abstraction, flexibility, planning, and control. Compared to men defined as normal controls, male psychopaths showed no greater deficits in abstraction, flexibility, control, or planning. Intelligence significantly influenced performances on dependent measures for both groups. Results suggest that analogies between psychopathy and frontal lobe deficits are premature, if not unsupported. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Altering a dominant response: Performance of psychopaths and low-socialization college students on a cued reaction time task.

The passive avoidance learning deficits of disinhibited Ss have been attributed to their difficulty inhibiting dominant responses. To date, evidence for this hypothesis has been derived from complex tasks. In 2 experiments, a cued reaction time (RT) task requiring no learning or memory was used to evaluate the degree to which groups of disinhibited Ss inhibit simple dominant responses. Disinhibited groups were incarcerated psychopaths identified with R. D. Hare's (1985) Psychopathy Checklist and undergraduate males who scored low on the Socialization Scale. Both disinhibited groups committed more errors than controls on trials containing misleading cues, but in both samples, findings were limited to trials in which Ss expected to make right-hand responses. Although alternative interpretations are possible, these data are consistent with the proposal that disinhibited individuals are less likely to inhibit well-established dominant responses. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Recognition of Interlingual Homophones in Bilingual Auditory Word Recognition.

How do bilinguals recognize interlingual homophones? In a gating study, word identification and language membership decisions by Dutch-English bilinguals were delayed for interlingual homophones relative to monolingual controls. At the same time, participant judgments were sensitive to subphonemic cues. These findings suggest that auditory lexical access is language nonselective but is sensitive to language-specific characteristics of the input. In 2 cross-modal priming experiments, visual lexical decision times were shortest for monolingual controls preceded by their auditory equivalents. Response times to interlingual homophones accompanied by their corresponding auditory English or Dutch counterparts were also shorter than in unrelated conditions. However, they were longer than in the related monolingual control conditions, providing evidence for online competition of the 2 near-homophonic representations. Experiment 3 suggested that participants used sublexical cues to differentiate the 2 versions of a homophone after language nonselective access. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Morphological alterations in the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala in unsuccessful psychopaths.

Although deficits in several cortical and subcortical structures have been found in psychopaths, it remains unclear whether the neuropathology differs between subgroups of psychopaths (i.e., unsuccessful and successful). Using both traditional and novel image analyses methods, this study aims to reveal gross and subtle morphological changes in the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala in unsuccessful and successful psychopaths. Volumetric segmentation, cortical pattern matching, and surface-based mesh modeling methods were used to examine prefrontal and amygdala structures in 16 unsuccessful psychopaths, 10 successful psychopaths, and 27 controls. Significant reduced gray matter volume and cortical thickness/surface shape in the middle frontal, orbitofrontal cortex and the amygdala were found in unsuccessful psychopaths but not successful psychopaths, compared with controls. This study provides the first evidence of greater prefrontal and amygdala structural deficits in unsuccessful psychopaths, which may predispose them to poor behavioral control and impaired decision-making, thus making them more prone to convictions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Physical abuse amplifies attention to threat and increases anxiety in children.

Two experiments using event-related potentials (ERPs) examined the extent to which early traumatic experiences affect children's ability to regulate voluntary and involuntary attention to threat. The authors presented physically abused and nonabused comparison children with conflicting auditory and visual emotion cues, posed by children's mothers or a stranger, to examine the effect of emotion, modality, and poser familiarity on attention regulation. Relative to controls, abused children overattended to task-relevant visual and auditory anger cues. They also attended more to task-irrelevant auditory anger cues. Furthermore, the degree of attention allocated to threat statistically mediated the relationship between physical abuse and child-reported anxiety. These findings indicate that extreme emotional experiences may promote vulnerability for anxiety by influencing the development of attention regulation abilities. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Contextual insensitivity in schizophrenic language processing: Evidence from lexical ambiguity.

The authors investigated whether contextual failures in schizophrenia are due to deficits in the detection of context or the inhibition of contextually irrelevant information. Eighteen schizophrenia patients and 24 nonpsychiatric controls were tested via a cross-modal semantic priming task. Participants heard sentences containing homonyms and made lexical decisions about visual targets related to the homonyms' dominant or subordinate meanings. When sentences moderately biased subordinate meanings (e.g., the animal enclosure meaning of pen), schizophrenia patients showed priming of dominant targets (e.g., paper) and subordinate targets (e.g., pig). In contrast, controls showed priming only of subordininate targets. When contexts strongly biased subordinate meanings, both groups showed priming only of subordinate targets. The results suggest that inhibitory deficits rather than context detection deficits underlie contextual failures in schizophrenia. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The specificity of age-related decline in interpretation of emotion cues from prosody.

Older adults are not as good as younger adults at decoding prosodic emotions. We sought to determine the specificity of this finding. Performance of older and younger adults was compared on a prosodic emotion task, a “pure” prosodic emotion task, a linguistic prosody task, and a “pure” linguistic prosody task. Older adults were less accurate at interpreting prosodic emotion cues and nonemotional contours, concurrent semantic processing worsened interpretation, and performance was further degraded when identifying negative emotions and questions. Older adults display a pervasive problem interpreting prosodic cues, but further study is required to clarify the stage at which performance declines. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Facial affect recognition in criminal psychopaths.

Prior studies provide consistent evidence of deficits for psychopaths in processing verbal emotional material but are inconsistent regarding nonverbal emotional material. To examine whether psychopaths exhibit general versus specific deficits in nonverbal emotional processing, 34 psychopaths and 33 nonpsychopaths identified with Hare's (R. D. Hare, 1991) Psychopathy Checklist-Revised were asked to complete a facial affect recognition test. Slides of prototypic facial expressions were presented. Three hypotheses regarding hemispheric lateralization anomalies in psychopaths were also tested (right-hemisphere dysfunction, reduced lateralization, and reversed lateralization). Psychopaths were less accurate than nonpsychopaths at classifying facial affect under conditions promoting reliance on right-hemisphere resources and displayed a specific deficit in classifying disgust. These findings demonstrate that psychopaths exhibit specific deficits in nonverbal emotional processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Lexical characteristics of words used in emotional Stroop experiments.

Validity of the emotional Stroop task hinges on equivalence between the emotion and the control words in terms of lexical features related to word recognition. The authors evaluated the lexical features of 1,033 words used in 32 published emotional Stroop studies. Emotion words were significantly lower in frequency of use, longer in length, and had smaller orthographic neighborhoods than words used as controls. These lexical features contribute to slower word recognition and hence are likely to contribute to delayed latencies in color naming. The often-replicated slowdown in color naming of emotion words may be due, in part, to lexical differences between the emotion and control words used in the majority of such studies to date. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Interpersonal conflict and cooperation in psychopaths.

Studied interpersonal behavior in 15 primary and 17 secondary male psychopaths (under age 40) using the Prisoner's Dilemma game. Various personality characteristics frequently cited as distinguishing psychopaths from others were operationalized and studied. 12 male controls matched for age, IQ, and education were also used, and all Ss were assigned to within-group pairs and played the game for 60 trials under 2 conditions (communication and noncommunication). Ss' predictions, intentions, and perceptions of their role and the other person's role in the game situation were recorded. Contrary to some current theories, data suggest that psychopaths may be quite capable of cooperating, tolerating boredom, and predicting the behavior of another person in specific situations. Although both psychopath groups perceived their role and the other person's role in this situation similarly, they did not behave similarly. Secondary psychopaths seemed less able to function efficiently and responsively in the game. (16 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Impact of intended emotion intensity on cue utilization and decoding accuracy in vocal expression of emotion.

Actors vocally portrayed happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust with weak and strong emotion intensity while reading brief verbal phrases aloud. The portrayals were recorded and analyzed according to 20 acoustic cues. 15 listeners (7 men and 8 women, aged 19-44 yrs) decoded each portrayal by using forced-choice or quantitative ratings. The results showed that (a) portrayals with strong emotion intensity yielded higher decoding accuracy than portrayals with weak intensity, (b) listeners were able to decode the intensity of portrayals, (c) portrayals of the same emotion with different intensity yielded different patterns of acoustic cues, and (d) certain acoustic cues (e.g., fundamental frequency, high-frequency energy) were highly predictive of listeners' ratings of emotion intensity. It is argued that lack of control for emotion intensity may account for some of the inconsistencies in cue utilization reported in the literature. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emotion recognition from faces and prosody following temporal lobectomy.

The anteromedial temporal lobe has been found to participate in processing emotion, but there are unresolved discrepancies in the literature. To address this issue, the authors investigated recognition of emotion from faces and from prosody in 26 participants with unilateral temporal lobectomy (15 left, 11 right) and in 50 brain-damaged controls. Participants with right, but not left, temporal lobectomy did significantly worse in recognizing fear from facial expressions. There were no group differences in recognizing emotional prosody. Neither IQ nor basic perceptual function accounted for task performance; however, there was a moderate negative correlation between extent of amygdala damage and overall performance. Consistent with some prior studies, these findings support a role for the right anteromedial temporal lobe (including amygdala) in recognizing emotion from faces but caution in drawing conclusions from small group samples. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emotion experience, expression, and regulation in Alzheimer's disease.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is associated with intact experience but abnormal expression of emotion. Because emotion regulation is important in determining levels of experienced and expressed emotion, individuals with AD and control participants were asked to watch film clips under conditions of spontaneous expression, suppression, or amplification of emotion. Both groups had difficulties with behavioral amplification that were related to performance on a measure of theory of mind. However, intentional use of suppression was intact even for those with AD, consistent with models of aging that regard some emotion control processes as being relatively more automatic in older adulthood. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)