| dc.description.abstract | The present study addresses the relationship
between reaction times (RTs) on a series of three
lexical decision making tasks, and psychopathy. The
latter term refers to a set of persistent and
maladaptive personality traits which predispose one to
a variety of antisocial and criminal behaviors. Newman
and Wallace (1993) have proposed that this condition
may stem, in part, from functional deficits in
automatic cognitive processing. Experiments 2 and 3
provided a formal test of this hypothesis by comparing
both psychopathic and nonpsychopathic male young
offenders on a semantic matching task.
In Experiment 2, subjects were required to make
timed lexical decisions as to the relatedness of word
pairs presented on a microcomputer screen. Prior
research by Williamson, Harper, and Hare (1991) used a
similar strategy and found a RT facilitation effect for
emotional but not neutral words. This effect was
observed in the data of nonpsychopaths, but not
psychopathic subjects. Experiment 3 was similar to
Experiment 2, but the target word in each pair was
presented in reverse lettering to force controlled
processing, so as to interfere with the effect of
priming. The cancellation of any priming effects, and
therefore response facilitation, using this strategy
would provide support for Newman and Wallace's (1993)
hypothesis.
Experiment 1 was a replication of Williamson et
al's (1991) study, intended to provide a bridge between
their findings using adult subjects, and a group of
young offenders.
No significant interaction effects emerged from
any of the three experiments, nor were any between
group differences statistically significant. These
results failed to replicate the findings of Williamson
et al (1991), and offer no support for the automatic
processing hypothesis.
Possible explanations for these findings are
discussed, and the relevant literature from the areas
of psychopathy and information processing are revie | en_US |
