Utilization of emotion cues in male and female offenders with antisocial personality disorder: Results from a lexical decision task.

2002 ◽  
Vol 111 (3) ◽  
pp. 513-516 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda R. Lorenz ◽  
Joseph P. Newman
Author(s):  
Shilpa Nanjappa ◽  
Sandra Sebastian ◽  
M.S. Deepa

AbstractThe present study investigated the association between the taxonomic, thematic and combined (taxonomic-thematic) conditions during the lexical decision task in Kannada-English speaking bilingual children. Further, the study explored the nature of categorization skills in typically developing Kannada-English speaking bilingual children with respect to the taxonomy and thematic aspects across gender.Considered for the study were 20 preschool children including ten boys and ten girls in the age range of 4–5 years. A total of 50 pictures, including ten target, ten taxonomically related, ten thematically related and 20 distracters were taken from an internet source. Three tasks were introduced to examine the association of the pictures based on taxonomic, thematic and combined conditions. For the first and second task (considered as Experiment I), the children were expected to relate pictures based on taxonomic relationship followed by thematic relationship in the second task. For the final task (Experiment II), both relationships (taxonomic and thematic) were given for each target picture, and the children were expected to relate it with either one of them. Responses were scored and statistically analyzed.There was a significant difference in the performances between male and female children for the taxonomic condition but not for the other two tasks (i.e. thematic and combined conditions). The comparison across three conditions revealed that the performance of those children varied between the conditions. Further, on pair-wise comparison, there was a significant difference for both combined-thematic and combined-taxonomic conditions but not for taxonomic and thematic conditions.The study supports the phenomenon of “thematic to taxonomic shift”, which is found to be emerging in pre-school children. This occurs differently among male and female children. The preferences of thematic relation as opposed to taxonomic relation is highlighted in the present study.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marja E. Anton ◽  
Arielle Baskin–Sommers ◽  
Jennifer E. Vitale ◽  
John Joseph Curtin ◽  
Joseph P. Newman

Psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder (APD) have long been considered important risk factors for criminal behavior and incarceration. However, little is known about the psychobiological underpinnings that give rise to the disinhibited behavior of female offenders. Using an instructed fear-conditioning paradigm and a sample of incarcerated female offenders, we manipulated attentional focus and cognitive load to characterize and differentiate between the dysfunctional cognitive and affective processes associated with these syndromes. We used fear-potentiated startle (FPS) and event-related potentials as measures of affective and cognitive processing, respectively. After controlling for APD symptoms, psychopathic women displayed greater FPS while attending directly to threat-relevant stimuli and displayed less FPS while performing a demanding task that directed attention to threat-irrelevant information. Conversely, controlling for psychopathy, women with high APD symptoms displayed less overall FPS, especially when instructed to focus on threat-relevant stimuli. However, as the demands on cognitive resources increased, they displayed greater FPS. For both psychopathy and APD, analysis of the event-related potentials qualified these findings and further specified the abnormal cognitive processes associated with these two syndromes. Overall, simultaneous analysis of psychopathy and APD revealed distinct patterns of cognitive processing and fear reactivity.


2017 ◽  
Vol 76 (2) ◽  
pp. 71-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hélène Maire ◽  
Renaud Brochard ◽  
Jean-Luc Kop ◽  
Vivien Dioux ◽  
Daniel Zagar

Abstract. This study measured the effect of emotional states on lexical decision task performance and investigated which underlying components (physiological, attentional orienting, executive, lexical, and/or strategic) are affected. We did this by assessing participants’ performance on a lexical decision task, which they completed before and after an emotional state induction task. The sequence effect, usually produced when participants repeat a task, was significantly smaller in participants who had received one of the three emotion inductions (happiness, sadness, embarrassment) than in control group participants (neutral induction). Using the diffusion model ( Ratcliff, 1978 ) to resolve the data into meaningful parameters that correspond to specific psychological components, we found that emotion induction only modulated the parameter reflecting the physiological and/or attentional orienting components, whereas the executive, lexical, and strategic components were not altered. These results suggest that emotional states have an impact on the low-level mechanisms underlying mental chronometric tasks.


Author(s):  
Xu Xu ◽  
Chunyan Kang ◽  
Kaia Sword ◽  
Taomei Guo

Abstract. The ability to identify and communicate emotions is essential to psychological well-being. Yet research focusing exclusively on emotion concepts has been limited. This study examined nouns that represent emotions (e.g., pleasure, guilt) in comparison to nouns that represent abstract (e.g., wisdom, failure) and concrete entities (e.g., flower, coffin). Twenty-five healthy participants completed a lexical decision task. Event-related potential (ERP) data showed that emotion nouns elicited less pronounced N400 than both abstract and concrete nouns. Further, N400 amplitude differences between emotion and concrete nouns were evident in both hemispheres, whereas the differences between emotion and abstract nouns had a left-lateralized distribution. These findings suggest representational distinctions, possibly in both verbal and imagery systems, between emotion concepts versus other concepts, implications of which for theories of affect representations and for research on affect disorders merit further investigation.


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