Delay of gratification in psychopathic and nonpsychopathic offenders.

Abstract

Delay of gratification is a prototypical measure of self-control that merits systematic investigation in psychopaths. White male prisoners were provided with repeated opportunities to select an immediate response with uncertain reward or a delayed response with a higher rate of reward under one of three incentive conditions. Psychopaths' performance depended on their level of trait anxiety and incentive condition: Whereas low-anxious psychopaths were relatively unwilling to delay when omission of expected rewards also incurred monetary punishments, they displayed relatively superior performance when the task involved rewards only. Findings complement those for passive avoidance learning in psychopaths and suggest that inhibitory self-control in low-anxious psychopaths is somewhat impaired under conditions involving a combination of monetary rewards and punishments.

Deficient Behavioral Inhibition and Anomalous Selective Attention in a Community Sample of Adolescents with Psychopathic Traits and Low-Anxiety Traits

“…The results clearly replicate prior research with adult offenders which demonstrates that low-anxious psychopathic male and female offenders experience significantly less interference on the PW task than low-anxious non-psychopathic offenders (e.g. Hiatt et al, 2004;Newman et al, 1997), and that low-anxious, psychopathic males commit significantly more passive avoidance errors (e.g., Newman & Schmitt, 1998) than low-anxious nonpsychopathic males. The boys in the current sample who reported having relatively low levels of anxiety and relatively higher levels of psychopathic traits displayed the same differences in comparison to boys with relatively low levels of anxiety and psychopathic traits.…”

“…For instance, research suggests that the association between psychopathy and deficient response modulation is relatively specific to a subgroup of Caucasian psychopathic offenders with low levels of anxiety as assessed by the Welsh Anxiety Scale. Research with African American samples has failed to yield significant group differences on the passive avoidance or picture-word tasks (Kosson, Smith, & Newman, 1990;Newman & Schmitt, 1998;Newman et al, 1997;Thornquist & Zuckerman, 1995) and comparisons involving high-anxious psychopathic and nonpsychopathic offenders have also yielded non-significant results (Newman & Schmitt, 1998;Newman, Howland, Patterson, & Nichols, 1990;Newman et al, 1997). Thus, although response modulation deficits may be relevant to the disinhibited behavior of low-anxious, Caucasian psychopathic individuals, they do not appear to be central to the disinhibited behavior of these other groups.…”

“…In this task, participants are asked to name a series of line drawings with incongruent words superimposed over them (e.g., picture of pig with the word COW superimposed). Although the incongruent words reliably elicit significant interference in normal controls, low-anxious psychopathic offenders demonstrate significantly less interference (i.e., better performance) than controls on such tasks (Hiatt, Schmitt, & Newman, 2004;Newman, Schmitt, & Voss, 1997).…”

“…Median splits the APSD were used to divide participants into highand low-APSD groups. The medians were 11.00 for males and 9.00 for females.The Welsh Anxiety Scale (WAS; Welsh, 1956)-Following Newman and colleagues (e.g., Hiatt et al, 2004;Newman et al, 1985;Newman et al, 1997), the WAS was used as the measure of anxiety. The WAS is a 39-item true/false questionnaire, derived from the MMPI, that measures anxiety and negative affect.…”

A cognitive neuroscience perspective on psychopathy: Evidence for paralimbic system dysfunction

“…Psychopaths have problems with processing certain aspects of affective speech and face stimuli (Blair et al, 1997;Kosson et al, 2002;Louth et al, 1998). Psychopaths, under certain contextual demands, also show poor response inhibition Lapierre et al, 1995), response modulation (Newman and Kosson, 1986;Newman et al, 1987Newman et al, , 1992Newman and Schmitt, 1998) and more recently response reversal . Boys with psychopathic tendencies and adult psychopaths tend to show impairments on the Bechara gambling test of decision making (Blair, 2001;Mitchell et al, 2002), though not all studies have found this effect (Schmitt et al, 1999).…”