Emotion facilitation and passive avoidance learning in psychopathic female offenders

Research on psychopathy among incarcerated, Caucasian males has consistently demonstrated deficits in emotion processing and response inhibition. Using the PCL-R to classify participants as psychopathic or non-psychopathic, this study examined the performance of incarcerated, Caucasian females on two laboratory tasks: A lexical decision task used to assess emotion processing and a passive avoidance task used to assess response inhibition. Contrary to prediction, deficits in performance typically exhibited by psychopathic males were not exhibited by psychopathic females in this sample. Implications of these findings are discussed and an interpretation of the results in the context of the Response Modulation Hypothesis is presented. Psychopathic individuals are marked by their callous, unemotional interpersonal style and their impulsive, often antisocial behaviors (Cleckley, 1976; Hare, 1996; Lykken, 1995). These characteristics encompass two domains of functioning, affective processing and behavioral regulation. Decades of research on the deficits associated with psychopathy have focused primarily on these domains, which appear central to the psychopathy construct. Abnormalities in emotional and behavioral functioning inform our current clinical and empirical conceptualizations of the psychopathy syndrome; However, these conceptualizations were established initially and primarily using research conducted with incarcerated, Caucasian males. Thus, it is an assumption that abnormalities in these domains characterize psychopathy in other populations. It has been crucial, therefore, for researchers to investigate the generalizability of these characteristics across contexts, age cohorts, cultural groups, and gender, preferably by using methodology similar to that employed in previous research with incarcerated Caucasian males. Recent attempts to generalize psychopathy across gender have adopted this approach (e.g., Jackson, Rogers, Neumann, &amp