Abstract
Evidence for performance deficits in psychopathic offenders on emotional processing tasks have been documented. However, studies that show performance improvements or elimination of anomalies under certain conditions are not consistent with a general insensitivity to emotion stimuli. The current study tests the hypothesis set forth by the Affect Regulation Theory (Penney and Kosson, manuscript submitted to Clinical Psychological Science) that psychopathic participants’ performance on an affective lexical decision task will reflect a speed-accuracy trade-off wherein accuracy on emotion-word trials correlates with response latency among psychopathic participants but not controls. Participants were 86 incarcerated male offenders divided into three groups using scores on the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised and DSM-IV criteria for ASPD (non-ASPD/non-psychopathic, ASPD/non-psychopathic; and ASPD + psychopathic). There was a significant Group x Response latency interaction for negative word trials, with greater accuracy associated with slower response times on negative word trials for ASPD + psychopathic individuals but not for the other groups. The implications of these results for hypotheses about emotional functioning in psychopathic offenders and for the recently proposed ART are discussed.
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Notes
Accuracy and response latency data from this lexical-decision task were previously presented in Lorenz and Newman (2002). However, the analyses for that study examined latency only for correct responses and did not address speed-accuracy relationships.
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Funding
This research was supported by National Institute of Mental Health Grant MH-53041.
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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.
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Jennifer Vitale, David Kosson, Zachary Resch, and Joseph Newman declare that they have no conflict of interest.
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Vitale, J., Kosson, D.S., Resch, Z. et al. Speed-Accuracy Tradeoffs on an Affective Lexical Decision Task: Implications for the Affect Regulation Theory of Psychopathy. J Psychopathol Behav Assess 40, 412–418 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10862-018-9652-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10862-018-9652-z