Attention‐affect interactions and triarchic psychopathy: New electrophysiological insights from the late positive potential

Abstract

One of the most prominent characteristics of psychopathy is a reduced processing of emotionally relevant information. However, it is still unclear how attentional mechanisms may modulate this deficit. The current study aimed to examine the impact of attentional focus on emotion processing in relation to the triarchic constructs of boldness, meanness, and disinhibition. Participants performed two tasks in which pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant framed pictures were presented. In the first task, participants were required to indicate the color of the frame (alternative‐focus task), whereas in the second task they were instructed to indicate the emotional category of the image (affect‐focus task). The Late Positive Potential (LPP) was used as an index of sustained engagement of attention to affective material. Confirming a successful task manipulation, we observed reduced LPP amplitudes, particularly for affective relevant material, in the alternative‐focus task compared to the affect‐focus task. Most interestingly, our results evidenced that trait meanness scores were associated with blunted elaborative processing of affective material (both appetitive and aversive) when this information was task‐relevant (affect‐focus task), but not when it was task‐irrelevant (alternative‐focus task). These findings indicate that high mean individuals are characterized by blunted elaborative processing of affective stimuli when their motivational relevance is determined in a top‐down manner (i.e., when it is task‐relevant). Our results highlight the need for further studying of the bottom‐up and top‐down dynamics of emotional attention in psychopathy.

Psychopathic callousness and perspective taking in pain processing: an ERP study

“…For each participant, separate ERP averages were computed for each sensor and condition. The LPP was scored as the mean amplitude of a 14-sensor centroparietal cluster (EGI sensors: 45, 79, 80, 81, 89, 90, 100, 101, 129, 130, 131, 132, 143 and 257; see Ribes‐Guardiola et al ., 2023 , for the same electrode configuration) during a 400–1000 ms time window following stimulus onset. This time window was selected based on prior research investigating LPP amplitudes for pain pictures in relation to callousness ( Decety et al ., 2015 ; Brislin et al ., 2022 ).…”

“…Consistent with the multifaceted perspective of psychopathy ( Fowles and Dindo, 2009 ; Patrick and Bernat, 2009 ), impairments in empathic-emotional processing within psychopathy are particularly associated with its callousness–unemotionality/meanness traits ( Campos et al ., 2022 , for a recent meta-analysis), which encompass phenotypic attributes such as lack of close attachments with others, emotional coldness and insensitivity, absence of guilt, and empowerment through cruelty (see, for example, Patrick and Bernat, 2009 ). Empirical studies have supported this relationship, demonstrating that psychopathy callousness traits —mainly assessed by the Meanness scale of the Triarchic Psychopathy Measure (TriPM; Patrick, 2010 ) and by the Inventory of Callous-Unemotional traits (ICU; Frick, 2004 ; Kimonis et al ., 2008 )— predict decreased recognition accuracy and blunted electrocortical responses to fearful faces ( Brislin et al ., 2018 ; Brislin and Patrick, 2019 ), reduced reactivity of the right amygdala to fear expressions ( Viding et al ., 2012 ), diminished potentiation of the noise-elicited startle reflex in response to violent films ( Fanti et al ., 2016 ), and reduced elaborative processing —as indexed by diminished amplitudes of the late positive potential (LPP) —of pictures depicting aggressive interactions ( van Dongen et al ., 2018 ) and task-relevant affective pictures ( Ribes‐Guardiola et al ., 2023 ).…”

Physiological Harmony or Discord? Unveiling the Correspondence Between Subjective Arousal, Valence and Physiological Responses

“…In other words, within individuals, do similar affective experiences produce comparable physiological reactions? Here, we aimed at answering this fundamental question with potential clinical implications [8][9][10][11][12] , by investigating the intraindividual correspondence between affective subjective experiences and physiological reactions in two different samples 13,14 for three wellknown affect-inducing tasks 15 .…”