A study of anxiety in the sociopathic personality.

Lykken, David T.

doi:10.1037/h0047232

Cited by 1,102 publications

(674 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…Because the ASD-group activated the right insula more than the PSY-group this could reflect that exposure to fearful facial expressions is associated with more bodily arousal in the ASD-group compared to the PSY-group. This reasoning is in line with earlier studies showing that psychopathic subjects have lower autonomic responses during exposure to emotionally relevant information [43,[48][49][50][51][52]. The PSY-group had higher activation in the ACC compared to the ASD-group which could be connected to the possible inhibition of amygdala reactivity.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 80%

Brain Processing of Fearful Facial Expression in Mentally Disordered Offenders

Howner¹,

Fischer²,

Dierks³

et al. 2011

JBBS

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Emotional facial expressions are important cues for interaction between people. The aim of the present study was to investigate brain function when processing fearful facial expressions in offenders with two psychiatric disorders which include impaired emotional facial perception; autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and psychopathy (PSY). Fourteen offenders undergoing forensic psychiatric assessment (7 with ASD, and 7 psychopathic offenders) and 12 healthy controls (HC) viewed fearful and neutral faces while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Brain activity (fearful versus neutral faces) was compared both between HC and offenders and between the two offender groups (PSY and ASD). Functional co-activation was also investigated. The offenders had increased activity bilaterally in amygdala and medial cingulate cortex as well as the left hippocampus during processing fearful facial expressions compared to HC. The two subgroups of offenders differed in five regions compared with each other. Results from functional co-activation analysis suggested a strong correlation between the amygdala and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) in the left hemisphere only in the PSY group. These findings suggest enhanced neural processing of fearful faces in the amygdala as well as in other facial processing brain areas in offenders compared to HC. Moreover, the coactivation between amygdala and ACC in the PSY but not the ASD group suggested qualitative differences in amygdala activity in the two groups. Since the sample size is small the study should be regarded as a pilot study.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 80%

Brain Processing of Fearful Facial Expression in Mentally Disordered Offenders

Howner¹,

Fischer²,

Dierks³

et al. 2011

JBBS

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“…Conversely, O'Brien and Frick (1996) found that anxious children who exhibited psychopathic features did not differ from the control group, and their results are consistent with Gray's (1982) psychobiological theory of personality (O'Brien & Frick, 1996). Lykken (1957) proposed that individuals with psychopathic traits were unresponsive to punishment cues and demonstrated deficits in passive avoidance learning, where behavior elicited by a stimulus is halted on the basis of the resultant punishment of the response. As such, he suggests that the techniques relying on the fear of punishment would be ineffective in the modification of behavior with psychopathic individuals (Lykken, 1957).…”

Section: Callous and Unemotional Children's Sensitivity To Reward Andsupporting

confidence: 57%

Exploring The Development of Social Responses in Children with Callous and Unemotional Traits: An Examination of The Impact of Hypothesized Reinforcing and Aversive Stimuli

Maharaj¹

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“…RHA-I and RLA-I) strains, which have been psychogeneticallyselected for their extreme responses in anxiety-related tasks, the low anxious (and high impulsive) RHA-I strain do not show fear-induced potentiation of startle in a typical cue-conditioning procedure, while the relatively high anxious (and low impulsive) RLA-I strain show clear fear-potentiated startle responses [12]. Second, some seminal conditioning studies in psychopaths using single cue paradigms and electrodermal activity showed less conditioning in these subjects compared with control participants [16,17], and recent studies have also shown that psychopathic and antisocial individuals do not show increased skin conductance responses to CS+ stimuli in differential conditioning paradigms [18,19]. Thus, antisocials, psychopaths and low trait-anxiety subjects could share an endophenotype related to vulnerability for a deficient excitatory conditioning to danger cues.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cued aversive classical conditioning in humans: The role of trait-anxiety

Andión¹,

Caseras²,

Fullana³

et al. 2013

OJPsych

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No study so far has specifically addressed the influence of individual differences in trait-anxiety on aversive classical conditioning as indexed by the startle reflex response. We compared the startle reflex responses between participants classified as high (n = 25) and low (n = 26) in trait-anxiety while undergoing a single-cue aversive classical conditioning procedure. High trait-anxiety group showed a greater startle response to the CS relative to the ITI at the post-acquisition compared with the pre-acquisition phase. Low trait-anxiety group did not show such a clear pattern of conditioning, and results from this group seem to be concealed by differences in the startle responses to the CS and the ITI during the pre-acquisition phase. However, a post-hoc analysis in which such differences at pre-conditioning were removed showed no conditioning effects in low trait-anxiety participants. Taking together, these results suggest differences between high and low trait-anxiety groups in the acquisition of the CS-US association. However, further research should clarify the unexpected pattern of responses shown by low trait-anxiety group.

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A study of anxiety in the sociopathic personality.

Cited by 1,102 publications

References 20 publications

Brain Processing of Fearful Facial Expression in Mentally Disordered Offenders

Brain Processing of Fearful Facial Expression in Mentally Disordered Offenders

Exploring The Development of Social Responses in Children with Callous and Unemotional Traits: An Examination of The Impact of Hypothesized Reinforcing and Aversive Stimuli

Cued aversive classical conditioning in humans: The role of trait-anxiety

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