The problem is that the words themselves are conflicting color words, such as “red” printed in blue ink, so the subjects must suppress a strong inclination to read the words. ![]() The standard task for assessing this is called the Stroop task, in which the subject must state which color words are printed in. Top-down attentional processes monitor the field of attention for conflicts and resolve them. When the hunter is scanning for deer, a rabbit hopping into the periphery of his visual field automatically attracts his attention. In normal people, this process tends to happen automatically. Psychopaths have trouble using top-down attention to accommodate information that activates bottom-up attention during a task. But bottom-up attention can temporarily capture top-down attention, as when movement in the periphery of our visual field attracts our attention. Top-down attention tends to be under voluntary control, whereas bottom-up attention happens involuntarily. They also have trouble understanding metaphors and abstract words. Psychopaths do not show the same differential brain response to emotional terms over neutral terms that normal people do (Williamson et al., 1991). This casual use of words may be attributable to what some researchers call a shallow sense of word meaning. She can lie with the straightest face, and after she's found in the most outlandish lies she still seems perfectly easy in her own mind” (Cleckley, 1941, p. It's not that she seems bad or exactly that she means to do wrong. The criteria for APD include “conning others for personal profit or pleasure.” One concerned father of a young sociopathic woman said, “I can't understand the girl, no matter how hard I try. Ranging from what the PCL describes as “glibness” and “superficial charm,” to Cleckley’s “untruthfulness” and “insincerity,” to outright “pathological lying,” there is a trend toward devaluing speech among psychopaths by inflating and distorting it toward selfish ends. But psychopaths have extremely high thresholds for disgust, as measured by their reactions when shown disgusting photos of mutilated faces or exposed to foul odors. We find certain types of unethical actions disgusting, and this works to keep us from engaging in them and makes us express disapproval of them. The emotion of disgust also plays an important role in our ethical sense. Psychopaths are also not good at detecting fear in the faces of other people (Blair et al., 2004). These disconnects seem to be responsible for the psychopath’s inability to feel emotions deeply. ![]() The brains of psychopaths have been found to have weak connections among the components of the brain’s emotional systems. For most people, caring is a largely emotion-driven enterprise. The PCL describes psychopaths as being callous and showing a lack of empathy, traits which the PPI describes as “coldheartedness.” The criteria for dissocial personality disorder include a “callous unconcern for the feelings of others.” There are now several lines of evidence that point to the biological grounding for the uncaring nature of the psychopath. If we overlay all of these lists of criteria, we can see them coalescing into the following core set: Uncaring
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |