when they focus on a task that promises immediate reward, they screen everything “irrelevant” out. They get emotional “tunnel vision.”
He and his coworkers presented a group of psychopaths and non-psychopaths with a series of mislabeled images, such as those shown in figure 2.7 .
Figure 2.7. The picture-word Stroop task (adapted from Rosinski, Golinkoff, and Kukish, 1975)
Their task, a favorite among cognitive psychologists, especially those interested in the mechanisms underlying attention, seems simple enough: name the picture while ignoring the incongruent word—against the clock, over a series of consecutive trials.
Most people, in fact, find this a tad tricky. The explicit instruction to name the focal image conflicts with the urge to read the discrepantword, a grinding of the gears that leads to hesitation. This hesitation, or “Stroop interference,” as it’s known (after J. R. Stroop, the man who came up with the original paradigm in 1935), is a measure of attentional focus. The faster you are, the narrower your attentional spotlight. The slower you are, the wider the arc of the beam.
If Newman’s theory was to cut any ice and psychopaths really did suffer from the kind of information-processing deficit (or talent) that he was talking about, then it didn’t take a rocket scientist to work out what should happen. They should be faster at naming the pictures than the non-psychopaths. They should zone in exclusively on the particular task at hand.
The results of the study couldn’t have turned out better. Time and again, Newman found that while the non-psychopathic volunteers were completely undone by the discrepant picture-word pairings—taking longer to name the images—the psychopaths, in contrast, sailed through the task, pretty much oblivious to the jarring inconsistencies. What’s more—and this is where things start to get a little sticky for Scott Lilienfeld and the psychopathic spectrum—Newman has detected an anomaly in the data: an abrupt discontinuity in response patterns once a critical threshold is reached. Everyone performs about the same, encounters the same degree of difficulty with such tasks, on the lower slopes of the PCL-R. But as soon as you hit psychopathy’s clinical base camp, a score of 28 to 30, the dynamic dramatically changes. Indigenous populations at these rarer, higher altitudes suddenly find it easy. They just don’t seem to process the glaring peripheral cues that, to everyone else, appear obvious.
And it’s not that they’re immune to them. Far from it.In a separate study, Newman and his colleagues presented psychopaths and non-psychopaths with a series of letter strings on a computer screen. Some of them were red. And some of them were green. And some of them were downright painful: volunteers were told that, following the random display of an arbitrary number of reds, they’d receive an electric shock. As expected, when their attention was cued away from the prospect of shock (i.e. when they were asked to state whether the letters appeared as upper- or lowercase), the psychopaths showedconsiderably less anxiety than the non-psychopaths. But incredibly, when the prospect of shock was made salient (i.e. when volunteers were explicitly asked to state what colors the letters appeared in, red or green), the trend, as Newman and his coauthors predicted, reversed. This time it was actually the psychopaths who got more edgy.
“People think [psychopaths] are just callous and without fear,” he says. “But there is definitely something more going on. When emotions are their primary focus, we’ve seen that psychopathic individuals show a normal [emotional] response. But when focused on something else, they become insensitive to emotions entirely.”
With a disconnect in response sets showing up at precisely the point on the PCL-R that things start to get clinical, the mystery as to what, precisely, psychopathy really is—whether it lies on a continuum or is
He and his coworkers presented a group of psychopaths and non-psychopaths with a series of mislabeled images, such as those shown in figure 2.7 .
Figure 2.7. The picture-word Stroop task (adapted from Rosinski, Golinkoff, and Kukish, 1975)
Their task, a favorite among cognitive psychologists, especially those interested in the mechanisms underlying attention, seems simple enough: name the picture while ignoring the incongruent word—against the clock, over a series of consecutive trials.
Most people, in fact, find this a tad tricky. The explicit instruction to name the focal image conflicts with the urge to read the discrepantword, a grinding of the gears that leads to hesitation. This hesitation, or “Stroop interference,” as it’s known (after J. R. Stroop, the man who came up with the original paradigm in 1935), is a measure of attentional focus. The faster you are, the narrower your attentional spotlight. The slower you are, the wider the arc of the beam.
If Newman’s theory was to cut any ice and psychopaths really did suffer from the kind of information-processing deficit (or talent) that he was talking about, then it didn’t take a rocket scientist to work out what should happen. They should be faster at naming the pictures than the non-psychopaths. They should zone in exclusively on the particular task at hand.
The results of the study couldn’t have turned out better. Time and again, Newman found that while the non-psychopathic volunteers were completely undone by the discrepant picture-word pairings—taking longer to name the images—the psychopaths, in contrast, sailed through the task, pretty much oblivious to the jarring inconsistencies. What’s more—and this is where things start to get a little sticky for Scott Lilienfeld and the psychopathic spectrum—Newman has detected an anomaly in the data: an abrupt discontinuity in response patterns once a critical threshold is reached. Everyone performs about the same, encounters the same degree of difficulty with such tasks, on the lower slopes of the PCL-R. But as soon as you hit psychopathy’s clinical base camp, a score of 28 to 30, the dynamic dramatically changes. Indigenous populations at these rarer, higher altitudes suddenly find it easy. They just don’t seem to process the glaring peripheral cues that, to everyone else, appear obvious.
And it’s not that they’re immune to them. Far from it.In a separate study, Newman and his colleagues presented psychopaths and non-psychopaths with a series of letter strings on a computer screen. Some of them were red. And some of them were green. And some of them were downright painful: volunteers were told that, following the random display of an arbitrary number of reds, they’d receive an electric shock. As expected, when their attention was cued away from the prospect of shock (i.e. when they were asked to state whether the letters appeared as upper- or lowercase), the psychopaths showedconsiderably less anxiety than the non-psychopaths. But incredibly, when the prospect of shock was made salient (i.e. when volunteers were explicitly asked to state what colors the letters appeared in, red or green), the trend, as Newman and his coauthors predicted, reversed. This time it was actually the psychopaths who got more edgy.
“People think [psychopaths] are just callous and without fear,” he says. “But there is definitely something more going on. When emotions are their primary focus, we’ve seen that psychopathic individuals show a normal [emotional] response. But when focused on something else, they become insensitive to emotions entirely.”
With a disconnect in response sets showing up at precisely the point on the PCL-R that things start to get clinical, the mystery as to what, precisely, psychopathy really is—whether it lies on a continuum or is
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