Experimental Studies On Emotion Processing With Psychopathic Personality Traits

Individuals with psychopath often described as callous,remorseless,insincere, and they cannot predict the consequences of their behavior, it's more likely for them to break the law. Compared with non-psychopathic offenders, psychopathy are more likely to commit the first time of crime in their earlier age, and display more extreme pattern of violations and have high rate of recidivism. Former studies consider those anti-social conducts are related to their emotional dysfunction. This article have reviewed the researches and theories involving emotional dysfunction of psychopathy. Integrated Emotion Systems (IES) and Response Modulation Hypothesis (RMH) are the most commly models to explain psychopaths'dysfunction in the recognizition of emotional information. IES conclude psychopathy's emotional dysfunction is due to the impairment of amygdala while RMH assert it is the result of their attentional dysfunction which means psychopathy has dysfunction in response modulation. PCL-R and self-report inventories are the most commonly used ways to evaluate psychopath. But PCL-R has many limitations. It needs more times and energies than self-report inventory, and it cannot be used in non-criminal groups. And there lacks measuring tool which can be used massively in China.Firstly, we revised the Psychopathic Personality Inventory (PPI) and examine the reliability and validity in China. Then two experiments are conducted to explore the mechanism of processing emotional information by psychopathy under two different conditions. The emotional information is the focus of attention in the first condition while in the second condition, emotional information is displayed as a distractive information.The study gets the conclusions as following:(1)PPI can be used in China. Result has show that PPI have good reliability and validity, and can successfully screen out people with high psychopathic traits.(2)The total scores of subjects (including juvenile offenders and inmates) conducted in this study is close to the scores conducted in inmates sample in the foreign study, which both are higher than the group of non-offenders. It suggested that psychopathic traits and prevalent in criminal groups than non-offenders group.(3)There are no definite link between psychopathic traits and age,education level or type of crime, but the number of crime are have significant impact on psychopathic traits. Recidivist'scores are significantly higher than a first offender.(4)Psychopathy cannot automatically process the emotional informations which are not in the attentional focus, regardless of the emotional informations are negtive or positive. Regular person can automatically process the negtive emotional informations which are not in the attentional focus, but cannot process the positive emotional informations automatically. For the emotional informations which are the focus of psychopathy's attention, it can be processed by psychopathy only when the emotional informations are positive, rather than negtive.(5)Both emotional dysfunction and attentional dysfunction can be attributed to explain the phenomenon of failing to process emotional information which are outside of the psychopathy's attentional focus.(6)The range of IES to explain why psychopathy cannot recognise emotional informaitons should be limit to negtive emotional informations, rather than whole range of emotional informations.Recent reasearch have found that PPI have good reliability and validity after it is revised, and can be used in China. It has important values to promote the study of psychopath in China. This article have reviewed the forgein researches involving emotional dysfunction of psychopathy, then conducted two experiments to explore the mechanism of processing emotional information under different conditions. These results can provide experimental basis for theoretical debates, and show great references to crime prevention and rehabilitation of psychopathy in China.