Affective decision making and psychopathic traits

Psychopathy is a complex developmental personality disorder, which is associated with higher risks of offending, recidivism, and poor treatment responsivity. Recent neurocognitive explanations have linked psychopathy to dysfunction in the frontostriatal circuit linking the amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), which is responsible for the reciprocal modulation of emotion and cognition. Disruptions in this circuit could therefore alter the ability to learn from punishment and reward, impacting on decision making. The overall goal of the studies presented in my thesis was to assess the relationships between decision making and psychopathy. Due to the multidimensional nature of psychopathy, in addition to examining overall psychopathy, we also assessed underlying psychopathy characteristics. We assessed relationships between decision making and psychopathy in a sample of prisoners (n=60) and community members (n=20). Psychopathic traits were characterised using the Psychopathic Personality Inventory – Revised (PPI-R) and the Psychopathic Check List: Screening Version (PCL:SV). Decision making was assessed using the Moral Judgement Task (MJT), The Regret Task, and the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT). Participant’s choices on the IGT were additionally analysed using the Prospect Valence Learning (PVL) model to extract the specific cognitive processes relating to their decisions. We found that higher scores on psychopathy measures were associated with endorsement of more harmful social actions on the MJT, but not with general deficits in experience of regret or deficits in decision making on the IGT. In each decision making task, specific aspects of psychopathy related differentially to performances, suggesting that psychopathic traits could differentially relate to decision making processes. Thus, the key finding of our studies was that there is specificity between psychopathy traits and the various elements and types of decision making we studied. Such relationships were found across three different decision making tasks, supporting the validity of trait-specific and decision task specific relationships. A key outcome of our findings is the need for further development of robust tools that can accurately capture and quantify psychopathy traits in both prison and community samples. Further investigation into the relationship between decision making and psychopathic traits with more robust measures will lead to further uncovering the cognitive underpinnings of this complex disorder. In turn, this information will provide essential evidence for developing treatments that are more specifically targeted at the underlying cognitive and motivational processes at play in psychopathy.