اختلالات فکری و روانی و حساسیت به قطبیت احساسی صورتهای مجازی

Clinical and research evidence indicates that psychopathy is associated with anomalies in processing and using the emotional components of language. However, most research on the topic has involved simple verbal stimuli, thereby telling us little about how psychopaths process and use emotional material that is part of a more complex linguistic process. We administered an “Emotional Metaphor Q-Sort” task to 35 male inmates assessed for psychopathy with the Hare Psychopathy Checklist–Revised (PCL–R; Hare, 1991). The task consisted of metaphorical statements that had to be sorted along a continuum according to the direction and degree of their emotional valence, ranging from very negative to very positive. Although psychopaths and nonpsychopaths did not differ in their literal understanding of the metaphors, psychopaths made significantly more sorting errors than did nonpsychopaths, particularly with what should have been emotionally unambiguous metaphors. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that incarcerated psychopaths do not understand or make effective use of the emotional content of language.

Psychopathy is a clinical construct characterized by a cluster of interpersonal, affective, and lifestyle features, including egocentricity, grandiosity, deceptiveness, shallow emotions, lack of empathy, guilt, or remorse, impulsivity, irresponsibility, and the ready violation of social and legal norms and expectations (Cleckley, 1976, Hare, 1991 and Hare, 1998a). Recent empirical research on the disorder has benefited from the use of paradigms and procedures of cognitive and affective neuroscience, particularly those associated with linguistic processes. The ways in which psychopaths process and use language provide us with clues about the nature of their cognitive and emotional world. Clinicians have long noted that psychopaths apparently fail to appreciate fully the emotional and abstract nuances of language (e.g. Cleckley, 1976). Empirical research, though consistent with this position (see reviews by Hare, 1998a and Hare, in press), is limited by the general focus on relatively simple verbal stimuli, such as isolated words. Few studies have investigated the role of affect in more complex forms of psychopathic language, such as sentences and phrases used to communicate ideas and emotions. The objective of this study was to assess the ability of psychopaths to understand the literal and emotional meanings of metaphors, linguistic constructions that closely capture language as it is used in everyday life. Metaphors consist of any linguistic device whereby “aspects of one object are carried over or transferred to another object so that the second object is spoken of as if it were the first” (see Bernstein, 1987). Forming the basis of many types of figures of speech (e.g. simile, idiom, slang, metonymy, synecdoche, irony, analogy, proverb), they are a fundamental and ubiquitous component of language (Beck, 1987). Metaphors assist us in making our communications more vivid, memorable, comprehensible, and aesthetically pleasing (Allbritton, 1995 and Katz, 1996). Like language in general, metaphors have both denotative/literal and connotative/affective meanings. It is the latter that should present a problem to psychopaths, given the evidence that they do not show normal behavioral, electrocortical, or neuroimaging differentiation between neutral and emotional words (e.g. Intrator et al., 1997, Kiehl et al., 1999, Kiehl et al., 2001, Hare, 1998a and Hare, in press). A study by Williamson et al., 1990 and Hare, 1998a included a metaphor component in the investigation of the psychopath's emotional language. Their “word triad” task required psychopaths and nonpsychopaths to choose the two words in a triad of words that were most similar in meaning. The words (warm, cold, deep, shallow, loving, hateful, wise, and foolish) were presented in various combinations, three at a time, and were chosen to allow relationship-based groupings into six possible categories: antonym, domain, metaphor, polarity, domain and polarity, and no relation. Psychopaths used polarity relationships (pleasant–unpleasant) less often than did nonpsychopaths, but did not differ from them in their use of metaphor, domain, and antonym. The authors suggested that psychopaths “are able to form metaphorical relationships at the single word level and this may compensate for their insensitivity to affective valence” (p. 13). However, the metaphoric relationship consisted of only two words, which is clearly metaphor at its most elemental. Furthermore, the authors noted that the psychopaths could have based their metaphorical pairings more on a denotative than on a connotative understanding of the words. Consistent with this possibility was the additional finding by Williamson et al., 1990 and Hare, 1998a that psychopaths performed poorly on a task that required them to match sentences on the basis of their inferred emotional polarity; they made many “opposite polarity errors.” For example, they recognized that “A man running from a monster” and “A man surfing on a large wave” each had emotional connotations (one fear, the other exhilaration or excitement), but they rated them as being similar (positive) in polarity. Presumably, most people would consider one to have negative (bad) and the other to have positive (good) connotations, respectively. In contrast, it is possible that the psychopaths were more influenced by the arousal value of the event (high arousal is good, low arousal is bad) than by the emotional valence of the event. That is, they may have identified both events/experiences as arousing and therefore positive, thereby giving the impression of an apparent “confusion of, or insensitivity to, emotional polarity.” The results of several subsequent lexical decision ( Intrator et al., 1997, Kiehl et al., 1999 and Williamson et al., 1991) and blink-startle ( Patrick, Bradley, & Lang, 1993) investigations are consistent with this speculation. The purpose of this study was to examine the psychopath's ability to interpret metaphors and to make decisions based on the emotional valence of such complex linguistic material. We developed an Emotional Metaphor Q-Sort, consisting of 60 metaphorical statements that ranged from very negative to very positive in emotional valence. The participant's task was first to explain the literal meaning of each statement, and then to sort the statements into six bins according to their emotional valence. The number of statements to be placed in each bin approximated a normal distribution. We expected that psychopaths would understand the literal meaning of the statements, but would make significantly more sorting errors (i.e. emotional polarity errors) than would nonpsychopaths.