Individuals with Psychopathic Traits view Distracting Neutral Information as Negatively Valenced

Research has shown that psychopathic individuals ignore information that is outside their goaldirected focus of attention. When affective information is goal-irrelevant, ignoring it results in a blunted affective response for psychopathic individuals. In cognitive science, though, an interesting phenomenon named inhibitory devaluation occurs in the context of neutral information. When neutral information is not relevant to a goal, ignoring it actually results in individuals’ evaluating the neutral information as negatively valenced. In a sample of adult male offenders (N D 82), we used a pattern localizer task to examine the relationship between inhibitory devaluation and psychopathy (using scores on the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised). Results indicated that individuals high on the interpersonal-affective traits of psychopathy displayed significantly greater inhibitory devaluation, meaning that they ascribed more affective valence to goal-irrelevant neutral information. This finding provides further support for the importance of attention abnormalities in the neurobiology of psychopathy-related affective and interpersonal deficits.