Selective attention among offenders with psychopathy was investigated using 3 Stroop paradigms: a standard color-word (CW) Stroop, a picture-word (PW) Stroop, and a color-word Stroop in which the word and color were spatially separated (separated CW). Consistent with "overselective" attention, offenders with psychopathy displayed reduced Stroop interference on the separated CW and PW tasks relative to offenders who were not psychopathic. However, offenders with psychopathy displayed normal Stroop interference on the standard CW Stroop. Further, the reduced interference of offenders with psychopathy on the separated CW Stroop was accompanied by normal facilitation. These findings suggest a circumscribed attentional deficit in psychopathy that hinders the use of unattended information that is (a) not integrated with deliberately attended information and (b) not compatible with current goal-directed behavior.

Research on psychopathy in women has generated equivocal laboratory findings. This study examined the performance of psychopathic women in 2 laboratory tasks designed to assess abnormal selective attention associated with response modulation deficits: a computerized pictureword (PW) task, and a picture-word Stroop (PW Stroop) task. Consistent with data from psychopathic men, women receiving high scores on the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (Hare, 1991) displayed reduced Stroop interference on the PW and PW Stroop tasks. Results suggest that despite some differences in the expression of psychopathy across gender, psychopathic women are characterized by selective attention abnormalities predicted by the response modulation hypothesis and similar to those exhibited by psychopathic men. Keywordspsychopathy; response modulation; women; attention Psychopathic individuals assessed using the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R; Hare, 1991) are characterized by callous, antisocial behaviors and attitudes; an apparent inability to forge or maintain emotional connections with others; and a failure to accept responsibility for their actions (Cleckley, 1976). Understanding the etiology of this syndrome has become a goal of researchers in both criminal justice and psychopathology (Hare, 1996).The emergence of reliable and valid assessments of psychopathy in the past 20 years has enabled systematic investigation of the emotional, behavioral, and attentional abnormalities associated with this disorder (Hare, 1996). Such research has revealed emotion processing deficits in startle-probe paradigms (Levenston, Patrick, Bradley, & Lang, 2000;Patrick, 1994;Sutton, Vitale, & Newman, 2002), countdown to punishment paradigms measuring changes in electrodermal activity (Hare, Frazelle, & Cox, 1978;Ogloff & Wong, 1990), and lexical decision tasks assessing emotion facilitation (Lorenz & Newman, 2002a;Williamson, Harpur, & Hare, 1991 show deficient behavioral inhibition as assessed by response perseveration in the presence of punishment cues (Newman, Patterson, & Kosson, 1987) and by poor passive avoidance on go/no-go discrimination tasks involving rewards and punishments (Lykken, 1957;Newman & Kosson, 1986;Newman & Schmitt, 1998;Thornquist & Zuckerman, 1995). Finally, psychopathic individuals exhibit abnormalities in attention processing, particularly when stimuli are secondary or peripheral to their primary focus of selective attention (Hare & Jutai, 1988;Hiatt, Schmitt, & Newman, 2004;Newman, Schmitt, & Voss, 1997).The response modulation hypothesis (RMH; Gorenstein & Newman, 1980;Newman & Lorenz, 2003;Patterson & Newman, 1993) proposes that these abnormalities in psychopathic individuals' emotional and behavioral responding are associated with an underlying information processing deficit involving the relatively automatic shift of attention from the effortful organization and implementation of goal-directed behavior to the evaluation of that behavior. According to the model, a deficit in response modulation interferes with the...

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Several lines of evidence suggest the possibility of abnormal interhemispheric communication in psychopathy, but there have been few direct empirical studies. To address this gap in the literature, we examined one important aspect of interhemispheric communication, the efficiency with which information is transferred across the corpus callosum. Using Poffenberger's (1912) paradigm for estimating interhemispheric transfer time (IHTT) from simple motor responses to lateralized stimuli, we found a substantially prolonged IHTT among psychopathic criminals relative to nonpsychopathic criminals. This prolonged IHTT was somewhat more pronounced when participants were using their right hand to respond. This study provides initial behavioral evidence of slowed interhemispheric transfer in psychopathy.