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Summary Taak 6 Antisocial PD and psychopathy
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Taak 6 antisocial PD and psychopathy MHS4503 personality disorders Master Mental Health
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Taak 6 Antisocial PD and psychopathyBlair Turning a Deaf Ear to Fear: Impaired Recognition of Vocal Affect in Psychopathic
Individuals
- The processing of emotional expressions is fundamental for normal socialization and
interaction. Reduced responsiveness to the expressions of sadness and fear has been
implicated in the development of psychopathy. The current study investigates the
ability of adult psychopathic individuals to process vocal affect. Psychopathic and
non-psychopathic adults, defined by the Hare Psychopathy Checklist—Revised, were
presented with neutral words spoken with intonations conveying happiness, disgust,
anger, sadness, and fear and were asked to identify the emotion of the speaker on the
basis of prosody. The results indicated that psychopathic inmates were particularly
impaired in the recognition of fearful vocal affect. These results are interpreted with
reference to the low-fear and violence inhibition mechanism models of psychopathy.
- low-fear explanation suggests that failed socialization in psychopathic individuals is
the result of an attenuated ability to experience fear and, subsequently, a reduced
ability to adjust their behavior in response to the negative consequences their behavior
has led to in the past.
- Violence inhibition mechanism: VIM model suggests that there is a system that
preferentially responds to sad and particularly fearful emotional displays. The
functional integrity of this system is thought to be crucial for moral socialization; the
healthy individual learns to avoid initiating behaviors that result in the sadness or fear
of others because this is aversive to the observer. One of the important predictions of
the VIM model is that psychopathic individuals should show particular difficulty when
processing sad and fearful expressions.
- In the current study, the participants were presented with neutral words spoken with
intonations conveying happiness, disgust, anger, sadness, and fear and were asked to
identify the emotion of the speaker on the basis of prosody. The goal of the study was
to explore the ability of psychopathic individuals to recognize emotional vocal
intonations.
Methods
- 39 men, who were inmates in jail in the London area
- Vocal Affect Recognition Test. consisted of 60 stimuli. Each stimulus consisted of one
of six bisyllabic concrete nouns of neutral denotation. The emotions conveyed were
happiness, disgust, anger, sadness, and fear, chosen because they have unique prosodic
characteristics. The participants were asked to listen to the voice speaking the words
and to determine what emotion the speaker was feeling when the word was spoken.
Each participant was reminded that the meaning of the words would not convey any
emotion
Results
- psychopathic individuals were severely impaired in the recognition of fearful vocal
affect relative to comparison individuals. In addition, there was an association between
impaired recognition of sad vocal affect and higher scores on the PCL–R. There were
no significant group effects for any other vocal emotion
- The low-fear explanation suggests that psychopathic individuals are poorly socialized
as a result of a failure to adequately process impending threat or punishment.
Although the current finding of impaired fearful vocal affect would be in line with the
low-fear account, the absence of impaired recognition of angry vocal affect would not
be.
- VIM model also considers moral socialization to involve aversive conditioning but
considers the important aversive US for this conditioning to be the sad and fearful
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, expressions of others. The current study supports the suggestion that psychopathic
individuals have difficulty in processing displays of sadness and fear whether these are
in the visual or auditory modality
- Disfunction of the amygdala
Caspi Role of Genotype in the Cycle of Violence in Maltreated Children
- We studied a large sample of male children from birth to adulthood to determine why
some children who are maltreated grow up to develop antisocial behavior, whereas
others do not. A functional polymorphism in the gene encoding the neurotransmitter-
metabolizing enzyme monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) was found to moderate the
effect of maltreatment. Maltreated children with a genotype conferring high levels of
MAOA expression were less likely to develop antisocial problems. These findings may
partly explain why not all victims of maltreatment grow up to victimize others, and
they provide epidemiological evidence that genotypes can moderate children’s
sensitivity to environmental insults.
- Genetic deficiencies in MAOA activity have been linked with aggression in mice and
humans. Increased aggression and increased levels of brain NE, 5-HT, and DA were
observed in a transgenic mouse line in which the gene encoding MAOA was deleted.
- Because MAOA is an X-linked gene, affected males with a single copy produced no
MAOA enzyme— effectively, a human knockout. However, this mutation is
extremely rare.
- Deficient MAOA activity may dispose the organism toward neural hyperreactivity to
threat
- Lage MAOA -> grotere kans antisociaal
- we tested whether antisocial behavior would be predicted by an interaction between a
gene (MAOA) and an environment (maltreatment).
- 4 outcome measures: adolescent conduct disorder, convictions of violent crimes,
personality disposition toward violence, symptoms of antisocial personality disorder.
- the effect of childhood maltreatment on antisocial behavior was significantly weaker
among males with high MAOA activity than males with low MAOA activity
- For adolescent conduct disorder, maltreated males (including probable and severe
cases) with the low–MAOA activity genotype were more likely than nonmaltreated
males with this genotype to develop conduct disorder by a significant odds ratio (OR)
of 2.8
- For adult violent conviction, maltreated males with the low–MAOA activity genotype
were more likely than nonmaltreated males with this genotype to be convicted of a
violent crime by a significant odds ratio of 9.8
- For self-reported disposition toward violence and informant-reports of antisocial
personality disorder symptoms, males with the low–MAOA activity genotype who
were maltreated in childhood had significantly elevated antisocial scores relative to
their low-MAOA counterparts who were not maltreated. In contrast, males with high
MAOA activity did not have elevated antisocial scores, even when they had
experienced childhood maltreatment.
Cima Psychopaths know right from wrong but don’t care
- Adult psychopaths have deficits in emotional processing and inhibitory control,
engage in morally inappropriate behavior, and generally fail to distinguish moral from
conventional violations. These observations, together with a dominant tradition in the
discipline which sees emotional processes as causally necessary for moral judgment,
have led to the conclusion that psychopaths lack an understanding of moral rights and
wrongs. We test an alternative explanation: psychopaths have normal understanding of
right and wrong, but abnormal regulation of morally appropriate behavior. We
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