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Psychopaths: Emotional

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Psychopaths: Emotional & Behavior Responses Profiling Psychopathology Dr. Kline FSU-PC I. What is psychopathy? (review) Core features- Psychopaths lack remorse ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: Psychopaths: Emotional


1
Psychopaths Emotional Behavior Responses
  • Profiling Psychopathology
  • Dr. Kline
  • FSU-PC

2
I. What is psychopathy? (review)
  • Core features-
  • Psychopaths lack remorse
  • Poverty of emotions (positive negative)
  • Psychopaths are
  • Superficially charming
  • Pathological liars cheaters
  • Impulsive sensations seekers
  • Manipulative, will change story to fit facts
  • Less responsive to fear/anxiety
  • Immoral
  • Usually diagnosed in men

3
II. What is the fundamental distinction between
APD psychopathy???
  • Lack of remorse, is needed for a diagnosis of
    psychopathy, but not for Antisocial Personality
    disorder.

4
Prevalence of psychopathy
  • Affects approximately 1 of the general
    population (Hare, 1991).
  • Approximately 15-25 of incarcerated offenders
    meet criteria for psychopathy.

5
III. Historical Perspective of Clinical
description of Psychopathy
  • Pinel, a physician in the 1700s, noticed that
    some of his patients were impulsive
    self-destructive. These patients were aware of
    the irrationality of their acts their reasoning
    abilities were intact.
  • He called this illness, manie sans delire
    (insanity without delirium)
  • Benjamin Rush also reported cases of individuals
    who were clear in their thought processes, yet
    engaged in morally-deficient behavior. He coined
    the term psychopathic to describe these folks.
  • In his book, The Mast of Sanity, Cleckley
    developed a description of psychopathy based on
    observations of caucasian, middle-class male
    patients who were inpatients of a psychiatric
    facility.

6
Historical perspectives contd.
  • In 1941 Cleckley wrote, The Mask of Sanity, in
    which he provided not only a comprehensive
    description of psychopathy, but a method for
    assessing it.
  • His description of psychopathy was made on the
    basis of observations of caucasian, middle-class
    male inpatients in a psychiatric institution.
    This concept is still stable today.
  • Note Cleckley focused on the psychopaths
    personality traits (poor judgment, impulsivity,
    lack of guilt or remorse, inability to learn from
    punishment, blaming others, etc.) and not on the
    patients criminal history.

7
Hart Hare (1998)s summary of Cleckleys
psychopath
  • Interpersonally, psychopaths are grandiose,
    arrogant, callous, superficial, and manipulative
    affectively, they are short-tempered, unable to
    form strong emotional bonds with others, and
    lacking in empathy, guilt or remorse and
    behaviorally, they are irresponsible, impulsive,
    and prone to violate social and legal norms and
    expectations. (p.25)

8
Hares contribution
  • Hare developed the Psychopathy Checklist in 1980
    then revised it in 1991. This checklist is the
    goal standard that is used today to assess
    psychopathy in both criminal non-criminal
    populations.
  • Hare based his checklist largely on Cleckleys
    original criteria for psychopathy.

9
IV. Items on the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised
(PCL-R)
  • Factor 1- Factor 2-
  • Interpersonal//Affective Social Deviance
  • Superficial charm Need for stimulation
  • Grandiosity easily bored
  • Pathological lying parasitic lifestyle
  • Lack or remorse/guilt poor behavioral controls
  • Manipulative early behavioral problems
  • Shallow affect lack of realistic long-term
    goals
  • Callousness/lacks- Impulsivity
  • Empathy Irresponsibility
  • Failure to accept ones Juvenile delinquency
  • Responsibilities

10
Rating system of Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R)
  • The PCL-R (Hare, 1991) consists of 20 items.
  • A 3-point scale is used to score items
  • 0item does not apply
  • 1item applies somewhat
  • 2item definitely applies
  • Scores range from 0 to 40. A score of 30 or
    greater indicates psychopathy.

11
V. Do psychopaths experience emotions like
non-psychopathic individuals??
  • No!!! According to several studies (Hare, 1978
    Siddle Trasler, 1981 Kiehl, Hare, McDonald,
    Brink, 1999 Patrick, 1994).
  • Psychopaths produce overt facial verbal
    responses that are consistent with socially
    appropriate emotions, but produce autonomic
    activity that is incongruent with their overt
    behavioral responses!!!

12
The Mirror Has Two Faces
  • In other words, psychopaths can produce normal
    facial expressions reactions to emotional
    events, but their bodily sensations dont match
    their facial expressions.
  • (E.g., When psychopaths anticipate receiving
    electric shocks, they produce an anxious facial
    expression consistent with fear or anxiety, but
    show reduced galvanic skin responses (sweating)
    in response to receiving shocks. Normal
    individuals sweat more, not less when
    anticipating being shocked.)

13
VI. Studying emotion in psychopaths
  • A. Startle Blink studies
  • The startle blink (eye blink) response is a good
    non-verbal indicator of emotional state.
  • Magnitude (strength) of the startle blink changes
    with emotional state.
  • Startle increases for a negative emotional state
    decreases for a positive emotional state (e.g.,
    you may be more likely to be startled after
    watching a horror movie, than when watching a
    comedy).

14
Patrick (1994) Startle blink study on psychopaths
  • Subjects 4 groups of prisoners selected with
    Hare checklist participated.
  • Group 1 nonpsychopaths (low on antisocial
    behavior emotional detachment)
  • Group 2 Detached white collar offenders (high
    only on emotional detachment)
  • Group 3 Antisocial offenders (high only on
    antisocial behavior)
  • Group 4 Psychopaths (high on both factors).

15
Experimental Paradigm-Patricks study
  • Baseline condition- prisoners were presented with
    a visual cue, and sometimes a blast of loud
    noise.
  • Experimental condition - Ss experienced the
    visual cue were told that when it disappeared
    the loud noise would occur.
  • Results Both psychopaths detached offenders
    showed much smaller increases in their startle
    responses, indicating that less fear had been
    aroused.

16
B. Facial Affect Recognition studies in
psychopaths
  • Kosson, Suchy, Mayer, Libby (2002) examined the
    accuracy with which psychopaths non-psychopaths
    classify facial expressions based on six specific
    emotions fear, anger, disgust, happiness,
    sadness, and surprise.
  • Psychopaths (n34) non-psychopaths (N33) were
    presented with 30 adult male female caucasian
    faces each representing a specific emotion (5
    slides for each of the 6 emotions) required to
    press a button on a key pad signaling which
    emotion the face depicted.

17
Results of study
  • 1. Psychopaths accuracy in classifying the
    disgust faces was significantly impaired
    compared to the non-psychopaths. This effect was
    not found for the other emotions in this study.
  • 2. These results indicate the psychopaths
    exhibit deficits in non-verbal emotional
    processing, specifically in recognizing a
    particular emotion from faces.

18
C. Skin conductance Studies
  • Do psychopaths show less empathy for distress of
    others?
  • Yes!!! Blair coworkers (1997), examined skin
    conductance of psychopaths controls (men) to
    slides of varying images.
  • Ss were shown threatening (guns, knives), neutral
    (lamp, chair), distress-provoking (crying
    person) slides.

19
Results of Blairs study
  • 1. Both psychopaths and non-psychopaths showed
    same skin conductance responses to the
    threatening neutral slides.
  • 2. Interestingly, psychopaths were less
    responsive to the distress slides.
  • This suggests psychopaths are impaired in or lack
    the ability to empathize with others.

20
VII. Do psychopaths show neurological
differences in processing of emotional
information compared to normal people?
  • Yes!!! Kiehl, Smith, Hare, Mendrek, Forster,
    Brink, Liddle (2001) measured functional MRI in
    psychopaths and normals while they read
    emotionally-ladden words.
  • Overall, psychopaths showed less affect-related
    brain activity compared to baseline conditions
    than did non-psychopaths.

21
Kiehl et al., (2001) results contd.
  • Criminal psychopaths showed less activation in
    the anterior cingulate cortex, posterior
    cingulate, left inferior frontal gyrus, amygdala,
    hippocampus, and frontal cortex.
  • Neural processing of non-affect related
    information, was not different for the
    psychopaths and non-psychopaths.
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