Psychopathic Prisoners: Article Analysis

Posteromedial Region of the Default Mode Network Shows Attenuated Task-Induced Deactivation in Psychopathic Prisoners is an article authored by Scott M. Freeman, David V. Clewett, Craig M. Bennett, Kent A. Kiehl, Michael S. Gazzaniga and Michael B. Miller. The aspect of neuropsychological function that this article focuses on is psychopathy. As mentioned in the article, psychopathy is a personality disorder that includes symptoms such as lack of empathy, remorse, antisocial behavior, and excessive self-focus. This article acknowledges that there are neuroimaging studies that connects psychopathy to dysfunction in the default mode network (DMN), and that this network is known to remain functional in individuals with psychopathic tendencies during

Their degree of psychopathy was then quantified using the Psychopathy Checklist–Revised (PCL-R) scale which is regarded as the standard for the clinical diagnosis of psychopathy the scores range from 0 meaning low-psychopathy and 40 meaning extreme-psychopathy in this study the cut off for the PCL-R score was twenty-eight. The group whose scores met or surpassed that threshold was referred to as the high-psychopathy group. The control group consisted of what would represent typical prisoners who attained a score at or bellow 20 and this group is known as low-psychopathy. The experiment utilized a simple Go/NoGO task in this task either the letter X or K were shown in a rectangular box for 250ms in white text If it were the letter X was displayed the prisoner was instructed to press a button this represents the GO trial in contrast if the letter K was to appear the instructions were to do nothing representing NoGO trial. The ratio of Go/NoGO was 84:16 meaning they were shown X considerably more than

Compared with distinctive, low-psychopathy prisoners, psychopathic prisoners showed less deactivation in the posteromedial cortical region of the DMN during an outwardly focused task. These outcomes propose a possible mechanism underlying crucial clinical traits linked with psychopathy. We found that mPC dysfunction relates explicitly to Factor 1 scores, signifying that a failure to turn off this critical DMN node during an outwardly focused task may be specially connected to affective/interpersonal deficits