اختلالات فکری و روانی و پدیداری سبک شناختی: اعتدال توسط کنترل توجه

Psychopathy has long been associated with lower anxiety. This study examined the relationship between self-reported psychopathy and one of the anxiety-related cognitions, looming cognitive style (LCS; Riskind, Williams, Gessner, Chrosniak, & Cortina, 2000), among students. LCS reflects the tendency to perceive danger as rapidly increasing, as opposed to making a static risk assessment. This study focused on LCS not only because it has a strong association with anxiety, but also because studies employing the Card Playing Task have shown that psychopathy predicts difficulty in detecting changing contingencies. Attentional control was included as a possible moderator of a psychopathy–LCS link. Two questionnaire studies (n = 157 and 312) revealed an inverse relation between psychopathy and LCS in low-attention participants. This suggests that reduced cognitive resources inhibited those with psychopathic tendencies from imagining rapidly developing threats. The results are discussed in terms of the resource requirements of risk cognitions, the multi-dimensional nature of attention, and a defective behavioral inhibition system in (secondary) psychopathy. This study suggests the importance of considering attention when analyzing the psychopathy–anxiety link. Future studies should use multi-dimensional analysis of attentional control and multiple measures of psychopathy.

Psychopathy is a personality disorder with two components: primary psychopathy reflects callous unemotionality and a manipulative interpersonal style, and secondary psychopathy includes impulsivity and antisocial behaviors. These two components are represented by the two factors of the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R; Hare, Harpur, & Hakstian, 1990), which is a standard interview-based measure of psychopathy. The trait approach to psychopathy assumes it to be a maladaptive configuration of traits continuous from the normal to the criminal population (e.g., Gaughan, Miller, Pryor, & Lynam, 2009). 1.1. Reduced anxiety in psychopathy and postulated role of attention Primary psychopathy has been associated with lower anxiety, while secondary psychopathy is often related to enhanced anxiety (Hicks & Patrick, 2006). However, the mechanism for lower anxiety in primary psychopathy has not been clarified. Patrick (2007) postulated that anxious responding itself is compromised. On the other hand, the response modulation model (Newman & Lorenz, 2003) considers that psychopathic individuals have difficulty in shifting attention to information peripheral to their concerns, which lead to perseveration of reward-related responses in the face of punishment cues (Newman, Patterson, & Kosson, 1987). Dvorak-Bertsch, Curtin, Rubinstein, and Newman (2009) found that primary psychopathy was related to reduced fear-potentiated startle (FPS) among noncriminal undergraduates who were instructed to focus on the threat-irrelevant dimension of an experimental stimulus (colored letters, where color predicted electric shocks, while case did not). Newman, Curtin, Bertsch, and Baskin-Sommers (2010) found a similar pattern among prisoners. These findings suggest that attention moderates the effect of psychopathy on affective processing. These studies suggest that psychopathic individuals are good at attentional orienting (selection of incoming information). Zeier, Maxwell, and Newman (2009) used a flanker task with cueing and found that when a target was cued, inmates with primary psychopathy exhibited less interference from distractors than nonpsychopathic controls. Sadeh and Verona (2008) employed the Perceptual Load Task (Maylor & Lavie, 1998), which presents target letters on a circle, with distractors located outside the circle. Primary psychopathy (noncriminal population) predicted less interference by distractors. Based on these findings, we examined the psychopathy–anxiety link, with attentional control as a moderator. Although Dvorak-Bertsch et al. (2009) and Newman et al. (2010) demonstrated an effect of manipulated attentional focus on FPS, it is also important to examine how these variables are interrelated using different measures. Hicks and Patrick (2006) found a negative relation between psychopathy and the personality trait of negative affectivity. This study aims to examine the relationships of psychopathy, anxiety, and attention by using dispositional measures. 1.2. Looming cognitive style We use looming cognitive style (LCS; Riskind et al., 2000), a strong correlate of anxiety, which has not been used in the psychopathy literature. LCS involves the tendency to perceive danger as rapidly growing (Riskind et al., 2000). In the prevalent cognitive model, anxiety is associated with the overestimation of threat (Beck & Emery, 1985). Overestimation is often assessed using probability and/or severity ratings about hypothetical events. However, Riskind et al. (2000) found that threat assessment using items reflecting the perception of rapidly growing danger (e.g., “Are the chances of you having difficulty with the relationship decreasing, or increasing and expanding with each moment?”) was more predictive of anxiety symptoms than static risk assessment. The predictive power of LCS has been repeatedly demonstrated. It predicts the shared variance of diverse anxiety symptoms (Williams, Shahar, Riskind, & Joiner, 2005), anxiety but not depressive symptoms better than other cognitive predictors (Reardon & Williams, 2007), and short-time change (1 week) in anxiety symptoms, even after controlling for depression and intolerance of uncertainty (Riskind, Tzur, Williams, Mann, & Shahar, 2007). In addition to its high predictive power for anxiety, there is a reason to expect a relation between psychopathy and LCS. Evidence indicates that psychopathy leads to difficulty in detecting changing contingencies. Newman et al. (1987) found that psychopathic inmates had difficulty recognizing changing contingencies in the Card Playing Task (CPT) where the risk of punishment gradually rises when one continues to play instead of quitting at an appropriate point, and ends up with a larger loss. Koki and Sugiura (2007) replicated this pattern with noncriminal students. Therefore, psychopathy is expected to be associated with difficulty in recognizing increasing danger. A dynamic expectation of progressively increasing danger is the target that LCS involves. 1.3. The present study We report two studies using self-report dispositional measures to examine the relation between psychopathy and LCS, with attentional control as a moderator. Specifically, based on studies indicating that primary psychopathy predict reduced FPS when they divert their attention away from threat (Dvorak-Bertsch et al., 2009 and Newman et al., 2010), a negative correlation between primary psychopathy and LCS was expected to be pronounced for those with high attentional control. We also explored relations involving secondary psychopathy. Neuroticism was controlled for in the analyses, because it is related to LCS (Williams et al., 2005), psychopathy (Hicks & Patrick, 2006), and attentional control (Rothbart, Ahadi, & Evans, 2000).

We can speculate that psychopathic individuals, with their default hyper approach-orientation have difficulty appraising impending threats, when there are attentional limitations. This study raised some untested possibilities about looming cognition. Does it require executive resources? Is it related to IGT, CPT, or any other performance task related to response modulation? There are two major limitations to the present study. Firstly, there are no published data on the Japanese LMSQ. Although LMSQ demonstrated adequate internal consistency and a relationship with neuroticism, further validation is clearly needed. Our unpublished data indicate its incremental validity in predicting anxiety symptoms over other cognitive predictors and negative affectivity (N = 201). Secondly, we used only the LSRP to measure noncriminal psychopathy. Results using just one measure may not generalize, considering recent studies indicating that different self-reported psychopathy scales, especially the subscales for primary psychopathy, tap different aspects of psychopathy ( Gaughan et al., 2009). LSRP seems to be biased toward secondary psychopathy ( Lilienfeld & Hess, 2001). Moreover, LSRP primary psychopathy did not show a negative correlation with neuroticism ( Lynam et al., 1999), although we found a relationship between LSRP and reduced anxiety under low attention. Future studies should use multiple measures of psychopathy. Since we investigated reduced anxiety in psychopathy, the Psychopathic Personality Inventory-Revised ( Lilienfeld & Widows, 2005), a comprehensive measure of psychopathy may be especially useful, because its Factor 1 is related to low anxiety. Moreover, more differentiated measures of attention facets (especially, orienting and executive control), such as the Attention Network Test ( Fan, McCandliss, Sommer, Raz, & Posner, 2002) should be used in future studies.