Psychopathic Personality Traits and Iowa Gambling Task Performance in Incarcerated Offenders

Risk taking and the triarchic model of psychopathy

“…Still other investigations have found the opposite relationship (Hughes, Dolan, Trueblood, & Stout, 2015). Some of these studies have also considered which aspects of psychopathy might be related to risk9taking behavior on the IGT.…”

Investigating the Relationship between Psychopathic Personality Traits and Decision Making Deficits in a Prison Population

“…Only two of the studies that differentiated between these two subtypes in forensic samples indeed showed a larger tendency for risky decision making in relation to antisocial lifestyle aspects of psychopathy [21,22]. However, the two studies with the largest samples (N = 49 and N = 157) found no such relation [26,27], and results of another relative large study (N = 49) showed that the antisocial lifestyle component was related to better decision making [28]. These results seem to indicate that differentiating between psychopathy subtypes doesn't help to clarify if and how psychopathic traits are related to increased risk taking during decision making.…”

“…The results of several studies at least partly support this hypothesis in normal (young) adult samples [15][16][17][18][19], as well as in clinical and forensic samples [20][21][22][23] and children [24,25]. Nonetheless, other studies showed no [26,27] or even a negative correlation [28]. Interesting in this regard is that these latter studies were all conducted in criminal samples, where psychopathic personality traits may be eminently pronounced and destructive.…”

“…Given the heterogeneity and complexity of the psychopathy construct, it has been suggested that studies should further distinguish between subtypes or specific traits of psychopathy in relation to decision making, so the aforementioned scientific inconsistencies could be better explained [28]. For example, some researchers reason that risky decision making would be primarily related to aspects of an antisocial and impulsive lifestyle [17,29] (factor two of the Hare construct).…”

The Psychopath Next Door: How Similar Are They to Those Behind Bars? Criminality, Executive Functioning, and Emotion Processing in 'Noncriminal' Psychopathy

“…Indeed, the variable findings in relation to the role of anxiety (S. S. Smith et al, 1992) and degree of antisocial markers (M. A. Hughes et al, 2014) suggest greater complexity. It is likely that complex interactions between various prefrontal and other neuroanatomical regions underlie normal executive processing and that damage to any one of these (or combination of) prefrontal or related neuroanatomical regions may result in deficits on a task that relied on the complex interaction.…”