Testing Damasio's somatic marker hypothesis with psychopathic individuals: Risk takers or risk averse?

Abstract

Damasio and colleagues (A. R. Damasio, 1994; A. R. Damasio, D. Tranel, & H. Damasio, 1990) have theorized about a possible relationship between somatic markers and the behavior of psychopathic individuals (Ps), but, to date, there are no published data regarding the proposed relationship. The authors assessed 86 Caucasian and 71 African American male offenders using R. D. Hare's (1991) Psychopathy Checklist--Revised and used a modified version of Bechara and colleagues' (A. Bechara, A. R. Damasio, H. Damasio, & S. W. Anderson, 1994; A. Bechara, H. Damasio, D. Tranel, & A. R. Damasio, 1997) gambling task to test the hypothesis that Ps would, consistent with the somatic marker hypothesis, fail to become risk averse. Results indicated that level of anxiety, but not psychopathy, was predictive of response choices. Several limitations and implications of the study are noted.

Risky decisions and response reversal: is there evidence of orbitofrontal cortex dysfunction in psychopathic individuals?

“…However, it is worth noting that a recent study investigating boys with psychopathic tendencies found intact performance for simple response reversal [16]. With regard to the gambling task, two studies have reported non-significant differences between psychopathic and comparison groups [12,60]. However, the procedure of both studies differed significantly from those of Bechara et al [6].…”

“…Over the course of the task, healthy participants show a preference for the low-risk decks whereas patients with lesions to the OFC continue to choose disadvantageously [2,5]. Two studies have found psychopathic adults to perform similarly to comparison groups on the gambling task [60,12]. However, the studies contained significant procedural differences from those presented by Bechara et al [8].…”

“…In this version of the instructions, it is made explicit that some decks are worse than others, and that it is possible to achieve the game objectives if these poor decks are avoided. As with previous studies incorporating the gambling task, the task was split up into five blocks of 20 trials [5,6,60], and the dependent variable was the number of disadvantageous selections made in each block. [23] The ID/ED is a multi-component instrumental learning task.…”

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

“…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).…”

Neurocognitive elements of antisocial behavior: Relevance of an orbitofrontal cortex account

“…The strongest parallels between purported impairments in OFC functions and antisocial behavior have naturally been investigated with the construct of psychopathy (Damasio, 2000;Schmitt, Brinkley, & Newman, 1999).…”