The startle reflex as an indicator of psychopathic personality from childhood to adulthood: A systematic review

Attention‐affect interactions and triarchic psychopathy: New electrophysiological insights from the late positive potential

“…Similarly, Baskin‐Sommers et al (2013) reported blunted aversive startle potentiated responses in psychopathic individuals during novel, but not familiar pictures, whereas they found the opposite pattern for the LPP response (i.e., reduced affective modulations of the LPP during familiar, but not novel, pictures in psychopathic individuals). Thus, different psychophysiological measures, such as the LPP (Vallet et al, 2020, for a meta‐analysis) or aversive startle potentiation (Oskarsson et al, 2021, for a review), might provide non‐redundant information about the affective processing deviations linked to psychopathic personality. In this regard, future studies using similar paradigms such as the one used in the present study could aim to collect diverse psychophysiological indicators to better characterize psychopathy‐related alterations in the processing of affective material.…”

“…According to the RMH, the reduced responsiveness towards emotionally relevant material reflects attentional abnormalities (i.e., an attentional bottleneck; see Baskin-Sommers & Brazil, 2022, for a recent review) that preclude the processing of any type of information (irrespective of their emotional relevance) when it is not the current focus of attention (for an in-depth discussion on the relevance of the RMH and its comparison to other theoretical accounts of psychopathy, see Lilienfeld et al, 2016;Newman & Baskin-Sommers, 2016;Smith & Lilienfeld, 2015). In support of this model, some studies have found that well-replicated correlates of emotional processing deficits linked to psychopathy, such as a deficient aversive startle potentiation (Oskarsson et al, 2021, for a review), are more evident when threat cues are not the primary focus of attention (Baskin-Sommers et al, 2011;Newman et al, 2010).…”