A Fix for Psychopaths?

In his presentation Dr. Joe Newman discussed differences in the cognitive abilities of psychopaths in comparison to that of the general population.  Dr. Newman explained how what is termed as "Primary Psychopathy" seems to be an intrinsic problem with socialization.  Why is there this difference?

Some believe it is because the psychopath has a low fear response, resulting in little fear conditioning.  In other words, because the psychopath does not seem to response to fear as much as the average person, conditioning the psychopath to cultural norms and acceptable behavior becomes a much more difficult task  (Lykken 1995).

Dr. Newman however, believes that there is a deficiency in information processing that doesn't allow a psychopath to take in other information while performing a goal-directed behavior.  Dr. Newman focuses on
 response modulation in his research on psychopaths.  He defines this as "a brief and relatively automatic shift of attention from the organization and implementation of goal-directed action to its evaluation." (Newman p. 85).  This type of modulation allows an individual to adjust their behavior if they are getting responses that indicate the behavior is wrong, or unacceptable.  What this does is not allow for psychopaths to correct these behaviors and figure out what behavior is in inappropriate.  One study Newman ran to test the idea that psychopaths were focusing all attention on goal directed action while missing contextual cues was a stroop-box task.  In the task a subject must click a button indicating the color of the box, however the box is surrounding a word that is also a color.  For example a blue box may be around the word yellow, in this case the participant would click the button indicating blue rather than yellow.  For most participants reaction time slows down as a result of having to inhibit their urge to click the color of the word they read.  Psychopaths showed no such increase in reaction time.  They performed on the task as well as they would if the word were the correct response.

An example of a simple color stroop task

Dr. Newman believes these results support his response modulation hypothesis.  The psychopath does so well on this task because their goal is defined and they do not give attention to anything outside of that goal.  This type of processing allows them to perform very well on this type of task and explains their great reaction times. 

Towards the end of his presentation Dr. Newman suggested that with this information it may be possible to begin to change psychopaths.  If it truly is a deficiency in their ability to regulate because they cannot give contextual clues attention, then simple helping and teaching them to do so could be a type of rehabilitation or therapy.  One thing is for sure, more research needs to be done to more closely examine what is occurring in the mind of a psychopath and what, if anything can be done to help assimilate them safely into society.

Cook, D. J., Forth, A. E., & Hare, R. D. (1998). An Information Processing Prospective. Psychopathy: Theory, Research and Implications for Society (pp. 84-86, 93). Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.