Evaluating the generalizability of a fear deficit in psychopathic African American offenders.

Journal of Abnormal Psychology Evaluating the Generalizability of a Fear Deficit in Psychopathic African American Offenders

Passive avoidance in psychopathic offenders: a replication and extension.

A passive avoidance task was administered to 97 Caucasian and 110 African American offenders to (a) replicate prior research demonstrating poor passive avoidance in psychopathic individuals (Ps) with low anxiety, (b) compare the effects of anxiety, neuroticism, and fear in identifying subgroups of Ps and controls who differ in passive avoidance, and (c) reevaluate the generalizability of this f...

Attention moderates the fearlessness of psychopathic offenders.

BACKGROUND Psychopathic behavior is generally attributed to a fundamental, amygdala-mediated deficit in fearlessness that undermines social conformity. An alternative view is that psychopathy involves an attention-related deficit that undermines the processing of peripheral information, including fear stimuli. METHODS We evaluated these alternative hypotheses by measuring fear-potentiated sta...

Do emotion and information processing deficiencies found in Caucasian psychopaths generalize to African-American psychopaths?

Research on psychopathy has yet to establish whether the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised [PCL-R; Hare, R. D. (1991). Manual for the revised psychology checklist. Vancouver, Canada: University of British Columbia] predicts the same etiologically relevant correlates in African-American offenders as it does in Caucasians. Toward this end, we examined affective and information-processing deficits whi...

Emotion-modulated startle in psychopathy: clarifying familiar effects.

The behavior of psychopathic individuals is thought to reflect a core fear deficit that prevents these individuals from appreciating the consequences of their choices and actions. However, growing evidence suggests that psychopathy-related emotion deficits are moderated by attention and, thus, may not reflect a reduced capacity for emotion responding. The present study attempts to reconcile thi...