PASSIVE-AVOIDANCE IN PSYCHOPATHS - THE EFFECTS OF REWARD

Psychopaths perform as well as controls on passive avoidance tasks involving monetary punishments, but display passive avoidance deficits on tasks involving monetary rewards as well as punishments. Three experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that availability of reward disrupts passive avoidance learning in psychopaths by inducing a state of behavioral activation that hampers their ability to modulate a dominant response set for reward. Results for Experiment 1 were consistent with this hypothesis: when pausing to process punishment feedback required interruption of a dominant response set for reward, psychopaths paused less and displayed poorer passive avoidance learning than controls. However, results from Experiments 2 and 3 provided no evidence that availability of reward per se induced excessive behavioral activation or interfered with response modulation in psychopaths. The results complement previous research demonstrating that psychopaths perseverate response sets for reward and highlight a potential link between response perseveration and processing cues for punishment. However, they raise doubts about theoretical explanations that posit overactivation by reward as the psychological process underlying psychopaths' disinhibited behavior. We propose that psychopaths' poor self-regulation may reflect difficulty switching attention to process 'nondominant' information that is important for guiding ongoing behavior. © 1990.