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The purpose of this study was to analyse young psychopathic offenders’ speech compared with controls and to determine whether it was dissimilar. An examination of two subsets of disfluencies in speech was conducted (i.e., filled pauses and discourse markers) to explore their disfluent language. Transcripts of Psychopathy Checklist–Revised Youth Version (PCL:YV) interviews from a sample of young offenders were analysed using Wmatrix software (Rayson, 2003, 2008). The young offenders were divided into a high psychopathy group (HP; n = 13) and a low psychopathy group (LP; n = 13). HP participants included more words relating to basic needs (i.e., money, sex) in their speech than their counterparts, but not fewer words relating to social needs (i.e., family, kin), which could reflect viewing the world in a more unemotional and instrumental way by HP individuals compared with LP participants. HP participants had fewer total disfluencies and filled pauses (i.e., uh, um) in their speech than LP participants. However, the usage of discourse markers (i.e., I mean, you know, like) was similar for HP and LP participants. Like adult psychopaths, the young offenders with higher psychopathic tendencies tended to use more basic needs words in their speech. Reduced filled pause use, which has been found to be related to individual’s self-consciousness, may reflect less self-monitoring in psychopaths when they are engaging in secondary tasks (i.e., tasks that will not offer rewards). These findings provide further support that individual differences can be reflected by characteristics in speech.

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People often inhibit or override their dominant response tendencies in order to complete tasks successfully. Exerting such selfcontrol has been shown to influence attentional breadth differently depending on approach-motivated tendencies, as indexed by individuals' behavioral activation system (BAS) scores. Approach motivation and attentional breadth have previously been associated with frontal alpha asymmetry (i.e., lateralized cortical activity in the frontal regions) where greater left-frontal activation is associated with greater approach motivation and reduced attentional breadth. The process model of self-control posits that exercising self-control leads to a subsequent increase in approach behavior in high BAS individuals, and this could be due to a shift towards left-hemisphere-frontal processing. This was the first study to examine both frontal asymmetry and attentional breadth before and after exercising self-control in low and high BAS individuals. Greater BAS, and greater difficulty exercising self-control, both positively related to more narrowed attentional breadth after completing the manipulation relative to before, but only after exercising self-control. However, breadth of attention and changes in attentional breadth were unrelated to frontal asymmetry, suggesting that the influence of self-control on individuals' attentional breadth was not due to changes in frontal activation patterns.

Event-related potentials (ERPs) to hierarchical stimuli have been compared for global/local target trials, but the pattern of results across studies is mixed with respect to understanding how ERPs differ with local and global bias. There are reliable interindividual differences in attentional breadth biases. This study addresses two questions. Can these interindividual differences in attentional breadth be predicted by interindividual ERP differences to hierarchical stimuli? Can attentional breadth changes over time within participants (i.e., intraindividual differences) be predicted by ERPs changes over time when viewing hierarchical stimuli? Here, we estimated attentional breadth and isolated ERPs in response to Navon letter stimuli presented at two time points. We found that interindividual differences in ERPs at Time 1 did not predict attentional breadth differences across individuals at Time 1. However, individual differences in changes to P1, N1, and P3 ERPs to hierarchical stimuli from Time 1 to Time 2 were associated with individual differences in changes in attentional breadth from Time 1 to Time 2. These results suggest that attentional breadth changes within individuals over time are reflected in changes in ERP responses to hierarchical stimuli such that smaller N1s and larger P3s accompany a shift to processing the newly prioritized level, suggesting that the preferred level required less perceptual processing and elicited more attention.