Abnormal Processing of Affective Words by Psychopaths

ABSTRACT We tested the hypothesis that psychopathy is associated with abnormal processing of affective verbal material. Criminal psychopaths and nonpsychopaths, defined by the Psychopathy Checklist, performed a lexical decision task (“Is it a word or not”) while we recorded reaction time and eventre...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Psychophysiology 1991-05, Vol.28 (3), p.260-273
Main Authors: Williamson, Sherrie, Harpur, Timothy J., Hare, Robert D.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Adult
Affect - physiology
Affective words
Antisocial Personality Disorder - diagnosis
Antisocial Personality Disorder - psychology
Arousal - physiology
Attention - physiology
Biological and medical sciences
Event-related potentials
Evoked Potentials, Visual - physiology
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Humans
Information processing
Language
Lexical decisions
Male
Production and perception of written language
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Psychopathy
Psychophysiology
Reading
Semantic processing
Semantics
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Summary:ABSTRACT We tested the hypothesis that psychopathy is associated with abnormal processing of affective verbal material. Criminal psychopaths and nonpsychopaths, defined by the Psychopathy Checklist, performed a lexical decision task (“Is it a word or not”) while we recorded reaction time and eventrelated potentials in response to letter‐strings consisting of affective and neutral words and pronounceable nonwords. On the assumption that they do not make efficient use of affective information, our primary prediction was that psychopaths would show less behavioral and eventrelated potential differentiation between affective and neutral words than would nonpsychopaths. The results were in accordance with this prediction. The lexical decisions of nonpsychopaths were significantly faster, and relevant event‐related potential components were significantly larger, to affective words than to neutral words. In sharp contrast, psychopaths failed to show reaction lime facilitation or larger amplitude event‐related potentials to affective words. We suggest that psychopaths extract less information from affective words than do other individuals. Possible implications of these and related findings for understanding the behavior of psychopaths are discussed.
ISSN:0048-5772
1469-8986
1540-5958
DOI:10.1111/j.1469-8986.1991.tb02192.x