University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 603 East Daniel Street, Champaign, IL 61801, USA.
Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci. 2012 Jun;12(2):346-60. doi: 10.3758/s13415-011-0079-1.
A long-standing debate is the extent to which psychopathy is characterized by fundamental deficits in attention or emotion. We tested the hypothesis that the interplay of emotional and attentional systems is critical for understanding processing deficits in psychopathy. A group of 63 offenders were assessed using the Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and fear-potentiated startle (FPS) reflexes were collected while participants viewed pictures selected to disentangle an existing confound between perceptual complexity and emotional content in the pictures typically used to study fear deficits in psychopathy. As predicted, picture complexity moderated the emotional processing deficits. Specifically, the affective-interpersonal features of psychopathy were associated with greater allocation of attentional resources to processing emotional stimuli at initial perception (visual N1), but only when the picture stimuli were visually complex. Despite this, results for the late positive potential indicated that emotional pictures were less attentionally engaging and held less motivational significance for individuals high in affective-interpersonal traits. This deficient negative emotional processing was observed later in their reduced defensive fear reactivity (FPS) to high-complexity unpleasant pictures. In contrast, the impulsive-antisocial features of psychopathy were associated with decreased sensitivity to picture complexity (visual N1) and were unrelated to emotional processing, as assessed by both ERPs and FPS. These findings are the first to demonstrate that picture complexity moderates FPS deficits, and they implicate the interplay of attention and emotional systems as deficient in psychopathy.
一个长期存在的争论是，精神病态在多大程度上表现为注意力或情绪的基本缺陷。我们检验了这样一种假设，即情绪和注意力系统的相互作用对于理解精神病态中的处理缺陷至关重要。一组 63 名罪犯接受了《精神病态检查表：筛查版》的评估。当参与者观看图片时，收集了事件相关脑电位（ERPs）和恐惧增强的惊跳（FPS）反射，这些图片旨在分离通常用于研究精神病态中恐惧缺陷的图片中存在的感知复杂性和情感内容之间的混淆。正如预测的那样，图片的复杂性调节了情绪处理的缺陷。具体来说，精神病态的情感-人际特征与对初始感知时处理情绪刺激的注意力资源的更大分配有关（视觉 N1），但只有当图片刺激具有视觉复杂性时才会出现这种情况。尽管如此，晚期正电位的结果表明，对于高情感-人际特质的个体来说，情绪图片的注意力吸引力较小，并且对动机的重要性较低。这一缺乏负性情绪处理的现象在他们对高复杂性不愉快图片的防御性恐惧反应（FPS）减少时表现得更为明显。相比之下，精神病态的冲动-反社会特征与对图片复杂性的敏感性降低有关（视觉 N1），与情绪处理无关，这可以通过 ERP 和 FPS 来评估。这些发现首次表明，图片复杂性调节了 FPS 缺陷，并且表明注意力和情绪系统的相互作用在精神病态中存在缺陷。
