With some exceptions, personality pathology in adolescence resembles that in adults and is diagnosable in adolescents ages 14-18. Categories and criteria developed for adults may not be the optimal way of diagnosing adolescents. Data from samples of adolescents may prove useful in developing an empirically and clinically grounded classification of personality pathology in adolescents.

The authors examined the reliability of facial affect processing deficits found in psychopathic individuals (R. Blair et al., 2004) and whether they could be modified by attentional set. One hundred eleven offenders, classified using the Psychopathy Checklist--Revised (R. Hare, 2003) and Welsh Anxiety Scale (G. Welsh, 1956), performed a facial affect recognition task under 2 conditions. On the basis of research linking psychopathy, amygdala dysfunction, and deficits in facial affect recognition, the authors predicted that psychopathic offenders would display performance deficits when required to identify the emotional expression of particular faces. In addition, given evidence linking the affective processing deficits in psychopathy to focus of attention, the authors predicted that any deficits in facial affect processing would disappear when participants could anticipate which affective cues would be relevant on a given trial. Contrary to expectation, psychopathic offenders performed as well as controls in both conditions. The authors conclude that the conditions that reveal affective deficits in psychopathic individuals require further specification.

Psychopathic individuals are infamous for their chronic and diverse failures of social adjustment despite their adequate intellectual abilities. Non-cognitive factors, in particular trait emotional intelligence (EI), offer one possible explanation for their lack of success. This study explored the association between psychopathy and EI, as measured by the Psychopathy Checklist -Revised (PCL-R; Hare, 2003) and Trait Meta-Mood Scale (TMMS, Salovey, Mayer, Golman, Turvey & Palfai, 1995). Consistent with the Response Modulation (RM) model of psychopathy (Newman & Lorenz, 2003), low-anxious psychopathic individuals had significantly lower scores on TMMS Repair and Attention compared to controls. Consistent with proposals by Patrick and Lang (1999) regarding PCL-R factors, these EI deficits related to different aspects of the psychopathy construct. Correlations revealed significant inverse associations between PCL-R factor 1 and Attention and PCL-R factor 2 and Repair. We propose that the multi-dimensional EI framework affords a complementary perspective on laboratory-based explanations of psychopathy.

We report a multidimensional meta‐analysis of psychotherapy trials for bulimia nervosa published between 1980 and 2000, including multiple variables in addition to effect size such as inclusion and exclusion, recovery, and sustained recovery rates. The data point to four conclusions. First, psychotherapy leads to large improvements from baseline. Approximately 40% of patients who complete treatment recover completely, although 60% maintain clinically significant posttreatment symptoms. Second, individual therapy shows substantially better effects than group therapy for the therapies tested. Third, additional approaches or treatment parameters (e.g., number of sessions) need to be tested for the substantial number of patients who enter treatment and do not recover. Finally, the utility of meta‐analyses can be augmented by including a wider range of outcome metrics, such as recovery rates and posttreatment symptom levels.

The response modulation hypothesis specifies that low-anxious psychopathic individuals have difficulty processing information outside of their primary attentional focus. To evaluate the applicability of this model to affective processing, 239 offenders, classified using the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (Hare, 2003) and the Welsh Anxiety Scale (Welsh, 1956), performed one of three emotion memory tasks that examined the effects of emotion on memory for primary and contextual information. Regardless of anxiety level, psychopathic and control offenders demonstrated a significant and comparable memory bias for emotional over neutral words in the primary conditions. However, psychopathic individuals showed significantly less memory bias than controls in the contextual conditions. Results indicate that the impact of emotion on memory is moderated by attentional factors. Keywords psychopathy; emotion; memoryPsychopathy is a highly unique and intriguing form of psychopathology because psychopathic individuals appear to lack the guiding force of emotion (Blair, 2005). Theoretical conceptualizations of psychopathy have focused on this affective poverty, emphasizing the psychopathic individual's inability to learn from punishment and insensitivity to the rights and feelings of others. A particularly common view is that psychopathic individuals have a diminished capacity for emotional responding which, in turn, undermines both their ability to learn from punishment and their motivation to conform behavior to the expectations of others (Blair;Lykken, 1995).The response modulation hypothesis (RMH), by contrast, holds that psychopathic individuals are capable of normal emotional responses but have difficulty processing affective information when it is peripheral to their primary attentional focus (Newman & Lorenz, 2003). Consistent with this model, psychopathic and non-psychopathic offenders display comparable behavioral and psychophysiological responses to threat cues when they are the focus of attention, but psychopathic individuals display significantly weaker responses when they are focused on earning rewards (Arnett, Smith & Newman, 1997;Newman & Kosson, 1986). Whereas emotion-based models predict weaker responses to affective cues regardless of attentional focus, the RMH holds that attentional factors determine the quality of emotion processing (Newman & Lorenz). Correspondence Gray's (1982) theory of behavioral inhibition system (BIS) functioning (Fowles, 1980) which, like the RMH, is based on the septo-hippocampalorbitofrontal system (Gorenstein & Newman, 1980). According to Gray, the BIS is sensitive to punishment stimuli, cues that predict omission of expected rewards and novelty. In response to such cues, the BIS functions to increase non-specific arousal, "inhibit all ongoing behaviour, whether instrumental or classically conditioned or innate" and "perform the maximum possible analysis of current environmental stimuli, especially novel ones" (Gray, p. 13). When operating effectively, the BIS enables a ...