1. 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

2. 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

3. 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 ?

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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)