Learning-style bias and the development of psychopathy.
In accordance with a recently proposed account of amygdala function in psychopathy, it is hypothesized that people with high levels of psychopathic personality traits have a bias in learning style to encode the general valence, and neglect the specific-features, of an outcome. We present a novel learning task designed to operationalize these biases in learning style. The results from pilot samples of healthy adults and children and from a clinical sample of children with conduct problems provide support for the validity of the learning task as a measure of learning style and demonstrate a significant relationship between general-valence style learning and psychopathic personality traits. It is suggested that this relationship may be important for the aetiology of the social-cognitive deficits exhibited by psychopaths. These preliminary results suggest that this measure of learning style has the potential to be utilized as a research tool and may assist with the early identification, and treatment, of children with conduct problems and high levels of callous-unemotional traits.
School of Psychology, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia. cmoul@psy.unsw.edu.au
Caroline
C
Moul
Mark R
MR
Dadds
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000679:Amygdala / Q000503:physiopathology*; D000987:Antisocial Personality Disorder / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000503:physiopathology / Q000523:psychology*; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D019955:Conduct Disorder / Q000503:physiopathology / Q000523:psychology*; D004645:Empathy; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D010865:Pilot Projects