Exam #2 Flashcards
(33 cards)
Callous-Unemotional (CU) Traits
Pattern of behaviors including lack of empathy, guilt, or remorse, shallow or deficient affect, and lack of concern over one’s own actions/feelings and others’ feelings
- CU traits are NOT psychopathy
CD+CU
A particularly severe form of antisocial behavior in youth
- a way to specify youth with CD (diagnosis must be CD+CU)
Predictors of CU traits
- Genetic Heritability
- Parental Harshness/Low Warmth
- GxE Interactions
Heritability
The proportion of variation in psychopathy that can be attributed to genetic factors, as opposed to environmental factors
- Twin studies provide moderate to strong heritability for CU traits [particularly fearlessness]
- 40-78% of the variation in CU traits is attributable to genetic influences
- Genetic influence is stronger at younger time points
Psychopathy
Personality disorder defined by antisocial behavior paired with callousness, low empathy, and low interpersonal emotions
- Can reliably be measured across age and gender
- 30 out of 40 traits on the checklist
- A disorder associated w/ increased goal-directed instrumental aggression AND frustration-based relative aggression
Primary Psychopathy
Low anxiety and thought to result from a genetic predisposition
- Affective and attention-related deficits
- Primary = Prototypic
Secondary Psychopathy (Sociopathy)
Stems from social disadvantage, excessive neurotic anxiety, and/or some other forms of psychopathy
- High anxiety and thought to develop in response to environmental adversity
Factor1 (F1)
Interpersonal-Affective Trait of Psychopathy
- Narcissistic personality disorder (“grandiose”)
- Superficial charm/conning/manipulative = Interpersonal
- Lack of remorse/callous = Affective
Factor2 (F2)
Impulsive-Antisocial Trait of Psychopathy
- ASPD (“externalizing”)
- Impulsive/Irresponsibility/Parasitic Lifestyle = Lifestyle
- Early behavioral problems / criminal versatility = Antisocial
- Related to EF deficits
Reactive Aggression
Impulsive response to a perceived threat
CD w/o CU
Instrumental/Proactive Aggression
Premeditated and motivated by an anticipation for reward
CD+CU
Fear Conditioning
Learning paired associations between a conditioned stimulus (CS) and an unconditioned stimulus (US)
Study: photos of 2 male neutral faces (CS) and a 10ms pressure stimulus/shock (US)
- w/ Psychopathy = showed less arousal to threat/shock
- Lower electro modal, amygdala, and OFC response
- Poor fear conditioning; difficulty associating fear stimuli from non-fearful stimuli
Passive Avoidance
Learning to avoid responding to a previously punished stimulus
Study: Newman et. al - modified passive avoidance
- w/ psychopathy = can respond to punishment if it is the goal focus
MAOA
An enzyme that breaks down neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin.
Variations in the MAOA gene have been associated with an increased risk of psychopathy and aggressive behaviors.
vmPFC
processes moral outcomes and inhibits emotional responding
OFC
integrates signals and represents the VALUE of emotion information
Amygdala
controls, or “gates” the outflow of fear and detects salient information
Serial Attention
Processing style that focuses on one source of information at a time, potentially contributing to impulsivity and lack of inhibition
Attention Bottleneck
Refers to the limited capacity of attention to process multiple streams of information simultaneously.
May have diminished ability to attend to multiple streams of information, leading to ‘serial attention’.
Executive Function (EF)
the mental process that enables us to plan, focus attention, remember instructions, and juggle multiple tasks successfully
Utilitarian
The view that what is the morally right thing to do is whatever produces the best overall consequences
Example: Pushing the person into the train tracks or letting it kill 5 people
Cognitive Empathy
Refers to understanding and representation of mental states that enables an individual to explain and predict others’ behaviors
- recognize another agent’s feelings or thoughts (perspective taking)
- Individuals with the “anti-social only” subtype have largely intact CE
Theory of Mind/Mentalizing
Forming an inference about the feeling and thoughts of the other agent
Emotional Empathy
Includes response to affective displays by others (e.g. facial expressions) and emotionally evocative stimuli (e.g. phrases and stories)
- Even though psychopaths can read other people’s emotions well, they are unable to FEEL another person’s emotions
Study: Affective empathy tasks:
- CD: Reduced performance, increased amygdala activity
- ASPD: reduced performance, decreased neural activity
- Indication of difficult appear in inferring the emotions of others when cues are very subtle or tasks place greater demands on EF (e.g. abstraction, memory)
