Aftermath Radio: Cognitive Mechanisms in Psychopathy

Dr. Dave Kosson, Professor of Psychology at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science and co-author of the Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version, discusses scientific research about cognitive mechanisms thought to be associated with psychopathy.

The show opened with “Aftermath Q and A” questions about the prevalence of psychopathy in the general population (thought to be 1-4%), gender differences in the prevalence of psychopathy, and the possibility of IQ differences between successful and unsuccessful psychopaths. We also spoke with a caller named Dori who discussed her relationship with a psychopath.

According to Dr. Kosson, cognition refers to the general functions associated with the mind, such as perception, attention, thinking, reasoning, and memory. While it is a widespread view that psychopathy is essentially a disorder explained by emotional deficits, some psychopathic features appear to have little to do with emotion (such as poor judgment, failure to learn from experience, unreliability, inadequately motivated antisocial behavior, and a specific kind of lack of insight), and thus may be better explained by cognitive factors.

Research typically suggests that psychopathy is independent of intelligence; and contrary to popular belief, psychopaths commonly perform well on a variety of cognitive tests. There are currently three prominent perspectives among scientists on cognitive dysfunction in psychopaths. The traditional view is that there is something wrong with the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain behind the forehead) in psychopathic individuals. The second perspective is referred to as the response modulation hypothesis, which speaks to subtle difficulties psychopaths have in attending to peripheral cues in the surrounding environment while they are focused on performing tasks or on an immediate goal. The third view is known as the left hemisphere activation hypothesis, which proposes that psychopaths are often cognitively intact, and that deficits are specific to situations or tasks involving the left hemisphere of the brain. Dr. Kosson emphasizes that these cognitive deficits in psychopaths are subtle, and mostly state-dependent (that is to say, occurring some but not all of the time).