Cleckley and others have reported what is called an emotion paradox in psychopaths. Tests indicate that psychopaths are as good as normal subjects in recognizing and appraising emotional cues but they are unable to utilize these emotional cues to control their response in laboratory settings. Such experimental findings correlate with real life where psychopaths are found to demonstrate normal level of understanding of emotional cues and situations during abstract verbal discussions, but they are not able to apply such information to influence their judgments and behavior in actual life situations.
Newman and others have proposed a response modulation hypothesis (RMH) to account for the observed emotion paradox phenomenon.
Source:
Deficient Response Modulation and Emotion Processing in Low-Anxious Caucasian Psychopathic Offenders: Results From a Lexical Decision Task
Amanda R. Lorenz and Joseph P. Newman
APA , 2002
[quote author=Lorenz and Newman]
Response modulation is defined as a brief and highly automatic shift of attention that enables individuals to monitor and, if relevant, use information that is peripheral to their dominant response set (i.e., deliberate focus of attention).
According to the RMH, the impulsivity, poor passive avoidance, and emotion-processing deficits of psychopathic individuals may all be understood as a
failure to process the meaning of information that is peripheral or incidental to their deliberate focus of attention.
Consistent with the RMH, psychopathic individuals display adequate passive avoidance (
this refers to inhibition of responses that would lead to punishment) when avoiding punishment is their primary (i.e., sole) task but manifest performance deficits when avoidance requires them to process nondominant (i.e., secondary or latent) information.
Moreover, there is evidence that psychopaths are insensitive to secondary neutral as well as secondary emotional cues (Newman, Schmitt, & Voss, 1997).
[/quote]
Psychopaths are strongly goal driven and have a rather one track mind over a short term. The media efforts to glorify psychopathy exploit this focused goal centeredness in white collar psychopaths and the "results" such a focus can achieve in various fields of human activities including the corporate and military sectors. If RMH is on the right track, psychopaths are
unable to process information (emotional or otherwise) that is not directly relevant to their goal. This inability is not an impairment of conscious processing but rather an impairment of the adaptive unconscious.
[quote author=Lorenz and Newman]
Newman and Lorenz (in press) recently proposed that psychopaths’ deficits in emotion processing may be understood as a failure to process the associative networks primed by secondary emotion cues. Although emotion processing may operate effortlessly and automatically to influence the behavior of most individuals (e.g., Bower, 1981), we proposed that emotions are less likely to influence the behavior of low-anxious psychopaths because their
emotion processing is more dependent on deliberate processing (i.e., less automatic).
Restated,
psychopaths may be less likely to activate and/or use the associative networks primed by peripheral emotional cues that other individuals use automatically.
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With regard to the emotion paradox, then, the RMH is consistent with the hypothesis that psychopathic
individuals
(a) display normal emotion processing when instructed to attend to emotion stimuli and
(b) are less influenced by emotion cues that are peripheral to their dominant response set (i.e., directed attention).
[/quote]
For female psychopaths, it has been observed that
- female psychopaths display similar psycho-physiological abnormalities in emotion processing as their male counterparts eg measuring eye blink reflex while looking at unpleasant pictures (
Emotion among women with psychopathy during picture perception )
BUT
- female psychopaths show better behavior regulation than their male counterparts in and their performance in behavior regulation tasks is similar to non-psychopathic females. (
Response perseveration in psychopathic women )
Response perseveration refers to continuing behavior to get a reward despite being punished for it. Female psychopaths do not exhibit the response perseveration seen in male psychopaths during a typical test that has been used in conjunction with the traditional psychopathy checklist PCL-R.
There is debate among researchers whether the PCL-R is adequate for assessing female psychopathy. Carefully conducted tests to evaluate female psychopaths with RMH show some interesting results.
Source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3136379/
Abnormal Selective Attention in Psychopathic Female Offenders
Jennifer E. Vitale, Chad A. Brinkley, Kristina D. Hiatt, and Joseph P. Newman
Neuropsychology 2007
In these studies, we tested the hypothesis that specific abnormalities in selective attention predicted by the RMH and characteristic of low-anxious, psychopathic males would be manifested among low-anxious, psychopathic females.
....
This study provides support for the RMH proposal (Hiatt et al., 2004; MacCoon et al., 2003; Newman et al., in press) that psychopathic individuals' response modulation deficit is manifested in response to both emotionally neutral and emotionally valenced stimuli. Moreover, the results are consistent with recent characterizations of the RMH that associated the information-processing deficits of psychopathic individuals with difficulty integrating bottom-up information into a top-down mediated focus of selective attention.
These data also suggest that the deficit in response modulation exhibited by psychopathic individuals is somewhat different from behavioral impulsivity. Although early investigations relied on paradigms designed to elicit impulsive responding (e.g., passive avoidance tasks, the card perseveration task) to test the RMH, recent examinations such as the current study show that this deficit can be detected in paradigms that do not evoke such responses. Further, these tasks help to clarify the role of motivation in psychopathic performance. Specifically, the deficit observed on tasks such as the PW and PW Stroop actually results in better performance (i.e., responses with less interference) by psychopathic participants than by nonpsychopathic participants.
Although the specifications tested here increase the predictive specificity of the RMH for psychopathy, further refinement is needed. Whereas psychopathic individuals appear less able to accommodate information that is peripheral to their dominant response set (i.e., top-down focus of selective attention), the exact content of any individual's dominant response set can be difficult to specify. In the absence of such specifications, the content of these sets can be determined only post hoc, on the basis of what information did not appear to be used or processed on a particular task. However, this problem is not unique to the RMH for psychopathy. Gray and McNaughton (2000) noted a similar problem in their discussion of passive avoidance learning in animals. Specifically, they noted that an organism's goals are “defined by the subject and not always recognizable by the experimenter” (Gray & McNaughton, 2000, p. 268). The exact content of an individual's dominant response set may be determined by a number of biological, experiential, and situational factors. Thus, the top-down focus of selective attention may not be “absolutely predictable” (Gray & McNaughton, 2000, p. 268). However, recent formulations of the RMH represent progress towards clarifying when and how the content of the individual's dominant response set—regardless of the specific content—will be modulated by bottom-up influences.
In other words, what exactly is the primary goal of a subject that determines this "dominant response set" in a given situation is difficult to predict - despite setting things up in a particular way in a lab experiment. Generally speaking, it appears that male and female psychopaths differ in what their goals are as well as in the dominant behavior sets adopted to achieve these goals in different situations.
The analytic strategy used in the present study also highlights the possibility that, just as the symptoms associated with psychopathy may be less pronounced among females, so too might the behavioral expressions of underlying etiological processes. This would be consistent with the difficulty researchers have had replicating passive avoidance deficits among psychopathic women and would also be somewhat consistent with the current data. Specifically, although the psychopathic women in this study demonstrated selective attention deficits similar to those demonstrated by psychopathic males, comparison of the effect sizes across studies suggests that these deficits may be less pronounced among women.
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One possibility is that the behavioral expression of the underlying deficits associated with psychopathy in women differs from the expression of these deficits in psychopathic men as a result of motivational, environmental, or socialization differences across gender that influence behavioral regulation (e.g., Sutton et al., 2003; Vitale & Newman, 2001). For example, societal strictures on female aggression and impulsivity may have contributed to the formation of more effective behavior regulation strategies among psychopathic females relative to psychopathic males.
And in the above context, it would seem that the prototype male psychopath across cultures would display similar characteristics and would not look that different. For the female psychopath, the picture is likely to vary to a much greater degree across cultures due to the difference in societal strictures and cultural mores that shape the environment in which they find themselves. OSIT
Be aware, she was 14 or 15 years old by the time.
