Psychopathy and Cognition: Deficits in contextual information processing Van Malderen, S. 1 , Rinaldi, R. 1 , Vicenzutto, A. 1 , Lefebvre, L. 1 , Pham, T. H. 1,2 1 UMONS, Belgium ; 2 Centre de Recherche en Défense Sociale, Belgium Eposter : Topin 5 n° 75 Belgian Brain Congress : 8 october 2016

Contextual processing Definitions Psychopathy Personality Disorder Assess by the Psychopathy Checklist Revised (PCL-R) developed by Hare (2003) Items PCL-R : Manipulative, lack of empathy, emotional shallow, impulsivity, … Attention Cognitive function Defined and subdivided in differents ways Selective attention = select relevant information vs. irrelevant Use in common language Contextual processing Ability to extract and use the information from environment in other to guide goal oriented behavior and facilitating the detection of relevant stimuli

Contextual information processing and attention in psychopathy Psychopaths are insensitive to contextual information that are secondary to their primary focus of attention (Newman, Schmitt & Voss, 1997) Response modulation deficit hypothesis : attention deficit limitating the context processing Ability to suspend goal oriented behavior in order to focus attention to contextual information (Newman, 1998) Study of Pham & Ducro (2004) : Psychopaths (N = 12) vs. Non Psychopaths (N = 12) No deficit in vigilance and sustained attention Reaction consistency Titre : contextual information processing Do psychopathic participants presents difficulties in contextual processing ? Do psychopathic participants presents attention deficits ?

Length of stay in hospital Participants 8 participants without any medication Cormorbidity between Axes I and II DSM-IV : 78,6% (N = 22) Age IQ Length of stay in hospital Participants N = 28 M SD 41,30 12,06 71,96 17,18 7,15 5,62 PCL-R Facets scores M SD Min Max Interpersonal (1) 2,44 2,21 8 Affective (2) 4,18 2,60 Life Style (3) 4,48 2,24 Antisocial (4) 4,70 2,71 10

Measures Continuous Performance Test (CPT-III ; Conners 2014) 4 attentional components Protocole de Traitement du Contexte (PTC ; Rinaldi, 2015) Implicit Explicit Part Predictive Non predictive Sequence ISI TPS Variable

Results and Discussion Inattention tendency deficits for the all sample Interpretation of performance need to consider the response style No attention deficit in relation with psychopathy Maybe explained by inattention tendency ? Task maybe to complicated ? Elevation of the reaction time for the explicit part Context processing deficit in the all sample No deficit in relation with psychopathy among Forensic patients Psychopathy is composed of subtle deficit (Hallé, Hodgins & Roussy, 2000) Need to be considered for the treatment Paradoxical results among psychopathic patients (Rice, Harris & Cormier, 1992)