Abstract
University of Wisconsin--Madison To investigate the hypothesis that psychopaths allocate most of their attentional capacity to stimuli and responses of immediate interest, we assessed psychopaths' dual-task performance under two instructional sets. Using Hare's (1980) checklist, we classified 72 white male prison inmates as psy- chopaths or nonpsychopaths. We predicted that psychopaths would divide attention adequately be- tween a visual search and probe-reaction time task, but that when instructions defined the search as subjects primary task, psychopaths would overfocus on it and outperform nonpsychopaths at the cost of relatively poor secondary task performance. The results of our study challenge the utility of the oveffocusing hypothesis. Subject groups performed equally well on the search when it received instructional priority, but psychopaths made more search errors (p < .01) under divided-attention instructions. Psychopaths also responded more slowly than nonpsychopaths to auditory probes (p < .05) across conditions. The results suggest that psychopaths may incur relatively large capacity costs in attempting to shift their attentional resources between processing tasks. Psychopaths' proclivity for acting on what appear to be mere whims or half-hearted desires (e.g., Cleckley, 1982) has prompted speculation that their impulsiveness reflects an ab- sence of cognitive controls to modulate the expression of such inclinations. For instance, Shapiro attributed to psychopaths a cognitive style in which attention is easily dominated by what is of immediate, concrete, personal relevance (Shapiro, 1965, p. 167). As a result, hc argued, psychopaths do not integrate their short-range goals with information about the needs of oth- ers or the likely long-term consequences of their actions. Empirical evidence also appears consistent with an atten- tional explanation of psychopathic behavior. Newman (1980) and Newman, Widom, and Nathan (1985) varied the relative competition between the reward and punishment contingencies of a go/no go discrimination task and found that psychopathic delinquents were differentially poor at learning passive avoid- ance when reward and punishment contingencies conflicted. They proposed that psychopaths' responsiveness to one set of salient contingencies interferes with attending to competing contingencies. Jutai and Hare (1983) reported smaller Nl00 This study was conducted toward partial fulfillment of the require- ments for the Master of Science Degree at the University of
Published Version
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