Investigating the Relationship between Psychopathic Personality Traits and Decision Making Deficits in a Prison Population

For many years, the concept of psychopathy has spoken vividly to people’s imagination and it received substantial attention in empirical studies . Even though psychopathy is not included officially among the personality disorders in the Diagnosticand statistical manual of mental disorders, both 4th and 5th editions(DSM-IV-TR; DSM- 5) and International statistical classification of diseases and related health problems, tenth revision (ICD-10), it is widely accepted as a real and potentially detrimental phenomenon. The definition of psychopathy by Hare is applied most. According to this definition, psychopathy is portrayed by a constellation of affective, interpersonal and behavioural characteristics, such as egocentricity, impulsivity, lack of remorse and empathy, shallow affect, manipulativeness and persistent violation of social norms. 

Hare divides these traits across two factors; factor one refers to remorseless, cold personality traits (callous unemotional traits), while factor two refers to aspects of an antisocial and impulsive lifestyle. Despite the global use of this concept, there are still different views on the exact nature of the core features of psychopathy, which could be clarified by gaining more insight in its neurocognitive underpinnings. Indeed, growing neuroscientific evidence points to specific neurocognitive deficits in people suffering from psychopathy. For example, problems have been found in people with psychopathy with respect to focussing attention to emotional cues, either leading to low distractability by these cues or to reduced facilitation by emotional helpful clues.  Read more..............