Skin conductance response to both signaled and unsignaled noxious stimulation predicts level of socialization.

The present experiment tested the hypothesis that the reduced skin conductance response (SCR) to noxious stimulation shown by sociopathic or undersocialized persons is mediated by the ability to use cues of impending noxious events to attenuate their impact. Eighty young adults, males and females scoring high, medium, or low on the Socialization Scale of the California Psychological Inventory, were exposed to 30 pairings of a warning signal with a 98-dB (SPL) noise while palmar skin conductance and subjective estimations of stimulus intensity were recorded. The interval between warning and noise was varied (0, .5, 1, 3, or 11 sec) for each subject. The low-socialization group gave significantly smaller SCRs to noise than the high-socialization group, revealing a negative relationship between level of socialization and amplitude of the SCR to a noxious stimulus in a normal population. Previous studies reporting this relationship contrasted clinical sociopaths with nonsociopathic control subjects. The differences between groups in the SCR were significant at the 0-sec, (i.e., no warning) as well as the remaining warning intervals, indicating that the difference between groups is not mediated by "cue-utlization" ability. Control procedures permitted excluding differential sensory sensitivity, rates of SCR habituation, and general skin conductance responsivity as mediators of the difference between groups in the SCR to noxious stimulation.