@article{ref1,
title="Attention Moderates the Fearlessness of Psychopathic Offenders",
journal="Biological psychiatry",
year="2010",
author="Newman, J. P. and Curtin, John J. and Bertsch, Jeremy D. and Baskin-Sommers, Arielle R.",
volume="67",
number="1",
pages="66-70",
abstract="BACKGROUND: Psychopathic behavior is generally attributed to a fundamental, amygdala-mediated deficit in fearlessness that undermines social conformity. An alternative view is that psychopathy involves an attention-related deficit that undermines the processing of peripheral information, including fear stimuli. METHODS: We evaluated these alternative hypotheses by measuring fear-potentiated startle (FPS) in a group of 125 prisoners under experimental conditions that 1) focused attention directly on fear-relevant information or 2) established an alternative attentional focus. Psychopathy was assessed using Hare's Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R). RESULTS: Psychopathic individuals displayed normal FPS under threat-focused conditions but manifested a significant deficit in FPS under alternative-focus conditions. Moreover, these findings were essentially unchanged when analyses employed the interpersonal/affective factor of the PCL-R instead of PCL-R total scores. CONCLUSIONS: The results provide unprecedented evidence that higher-order cognitive processes moderate the fear deficits of psychopathic individuals. These findings suggest that psychopaths' diminished reactivity to fear stimuli, and emotion-related cues more generally, reflect idiosyncrasies in attention that limit their processing of peripheral information. Although psychopathic individuals are commonly described as cold-blooded predators who are unmotivated to change, the attentional dysfunction identified in this study supports an alternative interpretation of their chronic disinhibition and insensitive interpersonal style.<p /> <p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="0006-3223",
doi="10.1016/j.biopsych.2009.07.035",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2009.07.035"
}