Processing of Emotional Words in Psychopathic and Non psychopathic Young Offenders

Abstract

The present study addresses the relationship between reaction times (RTs) on a series of three lexical decision making tasks, and psychopathy. The latter term refers to a set of persistent and maladaptive personality traits which predispose one to a variety of antisocial and criminal behaviors. Newman and Wallace (1993) have proposed that this condition may stem, in part, from functional deficits in automatic cognitive processing. Experiments 2 and 3 provided a formal test of this hypothesis by comparing both psychopathic and nonpsychopathic male young offenders on a semantic matching task. In Experiment 2, subjects were required to make timed lexical decisions as to the relatedness of word pairs presented on a microcomputer screen. Prior research by Williamson, Harper, and Hare (1991) used a similar strategy and found a RT facilitation effect for emotional but not neutral words. This effect was observed in the data of nonpsychopaths, but not psychopathic subjects. Experiment 3 was similar to Experiment 2, but the target word in each pair was presented in reverse lettering to force controlled processing, so as to interfere with the effect of priming. The cancellation of any priming effects, and therefore response facilitation, using this strategy would provide support for Newman and Wallace's (1993) hypothesis. Experiment 1 was a replication of Williamson et al's (1991) study, intended to provide a bridge between their findings using adult subjects, and a group of young offenders. No significant interaction effects emerged from any of the three experiments, nor were any between group differences statistically significant. These results failed to replicate the findings of Williamson et al (1991), and offer no support for the automatic processing hypothesis. Possible explanations for these findings are discussed, and the relevant literature from the areas of psychopathy and information processing are revie