IS `FEAR IMAGE PROCESSING DEFECTIVE IN PSYCHOPATHS?
You’re climbing into bed when you see a huge spider on the covers. You’re taking a shower alone when you hear someone breaking into your house. You’re in the dentist’s office, waiting for a root canal. Just reading those sentences causes your heart rate, skin conductance levels, and facial expression to change subtly. But a recent study found that psychopathic criminals-those who act impulsively without regard for consequences, and without empathy for their victims-react very differently. Christopher Patrick et al. assigned 54 prisoners to low- and high-psychopathology groups based on a psychopathology checklist. They then recorded their skin, cardiac and facial responses to “fear imagery” sentences, like those above, and to neutral sentences. The psychopaths, the researchers found, showed much smaller heart-rate and skin-conductance changes in response to the fear-provoking sentences than non-psychopathic subjects-indicating that the normal processes in which words prompt emotions is
