Psychopathy, IQ, and Violence in European American and African American County Jail Inmates.

The accuracy of the prediction of criminal violence may be improved by combining psychopathy with other variables that have been found to predict violence. Research has suggested that assessing intelligence (i.e., IQ) as well as psychopathy improves the accuracy of violence prediction. In the present study, the authors tested this hypothesis by using a contemporary measure of psychopathy, the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (R. D. Hare, 2003), in a sample of 326 European American and 348 African American male offenders. The postdictive power of psychopathy was evident for both ethnic groups and robust across most changes in the operationalization of violence and the analysis conducted, whereas the postdictive power of IQ was not. No Psychopathy x IQ interactions were identified. Implications of these results for violence prediction are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Effects of Auditory and Visual Linguistic Distractors on Target Localization.

In this experiment, a Stroop-like paradigm was used to investigate the ability to attend to visuospatial cues while ignoring distracting stimuli in the auditory or visual modality. In Part 1, the authors investigated whether linguistic cue words (i.e., RIGHT, LEFT, DOWN, and UP) would induce endogenous shifts of attention to visual targets. In Part 2, a relevant distractor stimulus was introduced in a different modality from the endogenous cues to investigate effects of interference. Twenty-five right-handed students served as participants. Auditory and visual linguistic cues were effective in inducing shifts of visual attention when cues were presented alone. Furthermore, introducing a distractor stimulus decreased the efficacy of these cues differently depending on modality, suggesting that language processing and visuospatial attention may share neuronal resources. Implications for unimodal and supramodal mechanisms of selective attention and relevant neuronal networks are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

BIODEGRADATION PROCESS ANALYSIS BY ULTRAFILTRATION

Detailed analysis of biological processes for hazardous waste-water treatment presents extreme difficulty. Complexity of organic and inorganic solute mixtures in solution prohibits GC-MS analysis. Gross parameters must be used to monitor treatment process performance. Ultrafiltration, coupled with gross parameter estimation, provides enhanced definition of treatment. Results, employed to monitor in-situ biodegradation of a hazardous landfill leachate, are discussed.     

Response perseveration in psychopaths.

Prison psychopaths and nonpsychopaths performed a card-playing task involving monetary rewards and punishments under three conditions. In all conditions, the probability of punishment increased by 10% with every block of 10 cards from 10% to 100%. The dependent measure—number of cards played before terminating the task—provided a measure of response perseveration. As predicted, psychopaths played significantly more cards (and lost more money) than did nonpsychopaths when the task involved immediate feedback only. Although providing subjects with a display illustrating their cumulative response feedback did little to reduce this deficit, there were no group differences apparent when cumulative feedback was accompanied by a 5-s waiting period during which subjects were prevented from making another response. The results suggest that procedures designed to reduce psychopaths' maladaptive perseveration by imposing a delay between response feedback and the next opportunity to respond may prove clinically important. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Understanding psychopathy through an evaluation of interpersonal behavior: Testing the factor structure of the interpersonal measure of psychopathy in a large sample of jail detainees.

Interpersonal characteristics are core features of the psychopathy construct which have a unique pattern of correlations with a variety of external correlates. To improve the assessment of interpersonal traits, the current study evaluated the internal structure of the Interpersonal Measure of Psychopathy (IM–P) through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) in a large sample of jail inmates. A 17-item, 3-factor (Dominance, Grandiosity, and Boundary Violations) structure evidenced good fit in European American inmates. A second CFA demonstrated good fit for this structure in a sample of African American inmates. Moreover, a multigroup CFA indicated structural invariance between European and African American inmates. External validity was tested and demonstrated through positive correlations between IM–P factor scores and Psychopathy Checklist—Revised total and facet scores (R. D. Hare, 2003) and antisocial personality disorder symptoms and diagnoses. Modest correlations between Grandiosity scores and scores on the Shipley Institute of Living Scale—Revised (R. A. Zachary, 1994) were also observed. Finally, a step-down hierarchical regression was conducted to test for racial bias of the IM–P factor scores in relation to external correlates. Little evidence was found for slope bias, but there was evidence of intercept bias for some analyses. Implications and advantages of assessing psychopathy through a comprehensive evaluation of interpersonal traits are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Psychopathy and violence: The importance of factor level interactions.

The power of scales based on the Psychopathy Checklist (PCL; R. D. Hare, 1980) for prediction of violent behavior is well established. Although evidence suggests that this relationship is chiefly due to the impulsive and antisocial lifestyle component (Factor 2), the predictive power of psychopathy for violence may also reflect the multiplicative effects of this component with interpersonal and unemotional traits (Factor 1). The determination of the extent to which psychopathy subcomponents interact to predict violence has theoretical and practical implications for PCL-assessed psychopathy. However, the relationship between violence and the interactive effects of psychopathy subcomponents remains largely undetermined. The authors used prospective and cross-sectional designs to examine the independent and interactive effects of the factors of PCL-assessed psychopathy in 2 samples: (a) 199 county jail inmates and (b) 863 civil psychiatric patients. The Factor 1 × Factor 2 interaction predicted violence in both samples, such that the predictive power of Factor 2 was attenuated at lower levels of Factor 1. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Speed and accuracy of facial expression classification in avoidant personality disorder: A preliminary study.

The aim of this preliminary study was to examine whether individuals with avoidant personality disorder (APD) could be characterized by deficits in the classification of dynamically presented facial emotional expressions. Using a community sample of adults with APD (n = 17) and non-APD controls (n = 16), speed and accuracy of facial emotional expression recognition was investigated in a task that morphs facial expressions from neutral to prototypical expressions (Multi-Morph Facial Affect Recognition Task; Blair, Colledge, Murray, & Mitchell, 2001). Results indicated that individuals with APD were significantly more likely than controls to make errors when classifying fully expressed fear. However, no differences were found between groups in the speed to correctly classify facial emotional expressions. The findings are some of the first to investigate facial emotional processing in a sample of individuals with APD and point to an underlying deficit in processing social cues that may be involved in the maintenance of APD. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reaction to punishment, reflectivity, and passive avoidance learning in extraverts.

Passive avoidance learning occupies a central role in accounts of disinhibited behavior, ranging from psychopaths' persistent criminality (Hare, 1970) to extraverts' gregariousness (Gray, 1972). To explore the mechanism underlying passive avoidance deficits, we assessed the relation of extraversion, neuroticism, and response latency after punishment to passive avoidance learning by using two successive go/no go discrimination tasks. The tasks were designed to examine two aspects of subjects' reactions to punishment: response speed on trials immediately following punishment (Experiment 1) and time to terminate punishment feedback between successive trials (i.e., reflectivity; Experiment 2). Consistent with previous findings, the results of Experiment 1 showed that extraverts commit more passive avoidance errors than introverts do (Newman, Widom, & Nathan, 1985) and fail to pause following punished errors (Nichols & Newman, 1986). In Experiment 2, only neurotic extraverts displayed this pattern of performance differences. In both experiments, longer pausing following punishment predicted better learning from punishment for both introverts and extraverts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Socialization and attentional deficits under focusing and divided attention conditions.

Conducted two studies to test and refine the hypothesis that, when undersocialized individuals focus on events of immediate interest, they allocate too large a proportion of their processing resources to those events and have little attention available for processing other important events. College students who completed the Socialization (So) scale (Gough, 1960) performed visual and auditory tasks simultaneously under conditions favoring the visual task, an equal division of processing resources between the tasks, or both. In both studies, low-So Ss performed relatively poorly on the auditory task under focusing conditions but displayed no primary task advantage and no significant performance deficits under divided attention conditions. These data support the utility of theories relating antisocial behavior to individual differences in allocation of attention. Low-So Ss' unresponsiveness to secondary events is not a simple function of the reallocation of resources to the primary task or a speed–accuracy trade-off. Moreover, under certain conditions, this deficit may disappear, given substantial practice. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Passive avoidance learning in psychopathic and nonpsychopathic offenders.

Research on passive avoidance learning has demonstrated reliable differences between psychopaths and controls when avoidance errors result in electric shock but not in loss of money. Using monetary punishments, J. P. Newman et al (see record 1985-22847-001) found that psychopathic delinquents performed more poorly than controls in an experimental paradigm employing monetary reward as well as the avoidance contingency. The present study was conducted to replicate and extend these findings using adult psychopaths and a computer controlled task. 60 White male prisoners (mean age approximately 25 yrs) were assigned to psychopathic or nonpsychopathic groups using R. D. Hare's psychopathy checklist and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III). Ss were administered a "go/no-go" discrimination task involving monetary incentives. One condition entailed competing reward and punishment contingencies; the other, 2 punishment contingencies. As predicted, psychopaths made significantly more passive avoidance errors than nonpsychopaths when the task contained competing goals but performed as well as controls when the Ss' only goal was avoiding punishment. Results corroborate earlier findings that psychopaths are relatively poor at learning to inhibit reward-seeking behavior that results in monetary punishment. (22 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)