Cognitive-Affective Interactions in Psychopathy: The Importance of Attention to Threat Cues in Fearless Dominance
Year: 2022
Type: preprint
Abstract: Fearlessness in psychopathy has been theorized to be an affective deficit, a cognitive deficit, and a mixture of both. The low-fear model of psychopathy entails overarching deficits in reactivity to aversive emotional stimuli, whereas the response modulation model considers fear-related deficits in psychopathy to result from cognitive mechanisms. The enlarged attention model of fear deficits in psychopathy proposes a cognitive-affective mechanism in which psychopathic deficits appear only appear in perceptually or attentionally complex situations. This registered report aims to replicate Dvorak-Bertsch and colleagues’ (2009) paradigm of cognitive-affective interactions in psychopathy as they relates to fear. University students will perform a task that involves attention to and away from a cue that threatens shock. We hypothesize that fear-potentiated startle will be found to be negatively correlated with fearless dominance only when attention is directed away from the threat cue. Additionally, we add a social support component to the paradigm and hypothesize that the presence of a friend will enhance postauricular reflex magnitude, and that this effect will be negatively correlated with impulsive antisociality.
Language: English
Subfield: Clinical Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4283782979