精神病态暴力犯执行功能的缺陷*

为了解精神病态罪犯可能存在的执行功能缺陷及其是否受冲动性影响,研究采用精神病态检核表（PCL-R）筛选出30名精神病态组被试和30名非精神病态组被试,通过爱荷华赌博任务（IGT）和河内塔任务（TOH）对两组被试执行功能的特点进行分析,并结合冲动性量表（BIS-11）对其冲动性进行测量。研究发现精神病态组的冲动性显著高于控制组;精神病态组选择高风险的不利牌显著多于对照组,即对惩罚不敏感;精神病态组在河内塔任务中的错误次数及所消耗时间都显著高于控制组;冲动性水平与两任务得分均无显著相关。结果表明,精神病态暴力犯在与前额叶相关的执行功能上存在缺陷,并与个体的高冲动性无关。     

Recognition of facial affect in psychopathic offenders

The authors examined the reliability of facial affect processing deficits found in psychopathic individuals (R. Blair et al., 2004) and whether they could be modified by attentional set. One hundred eleven offenders, classified using the Psychopathy Checklist--Revised (R. Hare, 2003) and Welsh Anxiety Scale (G. Welsh, 1956), performed a facial affect recognition task under 2 conditions. On the basis of research linking psychopathy, amygdala dysfunction, and deficits in facial affect recognition, the authors predicted that psychopathic offenders would display performance deficits when required to identify the emotional expression of particular faces. In addition, given evidence linking the affective processing deficits in psychopathy to focus of attention, the authors predicted that any deficits in facial affect processing would disappear when participants could anticipate which affective cues would be relevant on a given trial. Contrary to expectation, psychopathic offenders performed as well as controls in both conditions. The authors conclude that the conditions that reveal affective deficits in psychopathic individuals require further specification.     

Cognitive processing of moral and social judgements: A comparison of offenders,students, and control participants

Examining cognitive processes related to offenders’ moral and social judgements is important in order to better understand their criminal behaviour. In the present study, 30 offenders, 30 students, and 24 control participants were administered the moral-conventional judgements computer task, which requires responding under strict time constraints. Participants read scenarios and were asked to judge whether the act was acceptable or unacceptable when rules were either assumed or removed. Additionally, participants completed an executive function (EF) task in order to examine the relation between EF and moral and social judgements. The findings revealed that, as expected, controls and students had faster reaction times (RTs) and a higher percentage of normative judgements than offenders. Additionally, offenders had a low percentage of normative judgements, particularly in the conventional rule removed condition. Finally, RTs of moral and conventional judgements in most conditions were related to EF among students but not controls or offenders. We conclude that offenders, as compared to controls and students, may rely more on rule-oriented responding and may rely less on EF when making moral and social judgements.     

Reduced right hemisphere activation in severely abused violent offenders during a working memory task: An fMRI study

This study uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to address two important gaps in our knowledge of brain functioning and violence: (1) What are the brain correlates of adults in the community who have suffered severe physical abuse early in life and who go on to perpetrate serious violence in adulthood? (2) What characterizes those who experience severe physical abuse but who refrain from serious violence? Four groups of participants recruited from the community (controls, severe physical child abuse only, serious violence only, and severely abused, seriously violent offenders) underwent fMRI while performing a visual/verbal working memory task. Violent offenders who had suffered severe child abuse show reduced right hemisphere functioning, particularly in the right temporal cortex. Abused individuals who refrain from serious violence showed relatively lower left, but higher right, activation of the superior temporal gyrus. Abused individuals, irrespective of violence status, showed reduced cortical activation during the working memory task, especially in the left hemisphere. Brain deficits were independent of IQ, history of head injury, task performance, cognitive strategy, and mental activity during the control task. Findings constitute the first fMRI study of brain dysfunction in violent offenders, and indicate that initial right hemisphere dysfunction, when combined with the effects of severe early physical abuse, predisposes to serious violence but that relatively good right hemisphere functioning protects against violence in physically abused children. Aggr. Behav. 27:111–129, 2001. © 2001 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

Impaired Pavlovian conditioned inhibition in offenders with personality disorders

Certain types of violent offending are often accompanied by evidence of personality disorders (PDs), a range of heterogeneous conditions characterized by disinhibited behaviours that are generally described as impulsive. The tasks previously used to show impulsivity deficits experimentally (in borderline personality disorder, BPD) have required participants to inhibit previously rewarded responses. To date, no research has examined the inhibition of responding based on Pavlovian stimulus-stimulus contingencies, formally "conditioned inhibition" (CI), in PDs. The present study used a computer-based task to measure excitatory and inhibitory learning within the same CI procedure in offenders recruited from the "personality disorder" and the "dangerous and severe personality disorder" units of a high-security psychiatric hospital. These offenders showed a striking and statistically significant change in the expression of inhibitory learning in a highly controlled procedure: The contextual information provided by conditioned inhibitors had virtually no effect on their prepotent associations. Moreover, this difference was not obviously attributable to nonspecific cognitive or motivational factors. Impaired CI would reduce the ability to learn to control associative triggers and so could provide an explanation of some types of offending behaviour.     

Young Offenders’ Emotion Recognition Dysfunction Across Emotion Intensities: Explaining Variation Using Psychopathic Traits,Conduct Disorder and Offense Severity

Antisocial individuals have problems recognizing negative emotions (e.g. Marsh & Blair in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 32:454–465, 2009); however, due to issues with sampling and different methods used, previous findings have been varied. Sixty-three male young offenders and 37 age-, IQ- and socio-economic status-matched male controls completed a facial emotion recognition task, which measures recognition of happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, and surprise and neutral expressions across 4 emotional intensities. Conduct disorder (YSR), and psychopathic and callous/unemotional traits (YPI) were measured, and offenders’ offense data were taken from the Youth Offending Service’s case files. Relative to controls, offenders were significantly worse at identifying sadness, low intensity disgust and high intensity fear. A significant interaction for anger was also observed, with offenders showing reduced low- but increased high-intensity anger recognition in comparison with controls. Within the young offenders levels of conduct disorder and psychopathic traits explained variation in sadness and disgust recognition, whereas offense severity explained variation in anger recognition. These results suggest that antisocial youths show specific problems in recognizing negative emotions and support the use of targeted emotion recognition interventions for problematic behavior.     

Brain damage,diagnosis, and substance abuse among violent offenders

Neuropsychological functioning, diagnoses, and substance abuse were compared among killers, nonhomicidal assaulters, and nonviolent offender controls. The Reitan and Luria-Nebraska Neuropsychological test batteries, the WAIS-R, CT scans, and EEGs were examined with a trend to more neuropathology found in killers and assaulters than in controls. There were no group differences in ICD-9 diagnosis nor on the MMPI, although considerable personality pathology was noted in all groups. Violent offenders scored higher on the Michigan Alcoholism Screening Test (MAST). The violent offenders were more likely to experience alcohol and drug-related mood dysphoria. The interaction of neuropsychological, personality, and substance abuse variables is discussed.     

Moral reasoning, executive function, and personality in violent and nonviolent adult offenders

To evaluate moral reasoning and personality, inmates from a maximum security jail were administered the Porteus Maze, the Defining Issues Test, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-168, and the Test of Nonverbal Intelligence. Scores of 20 violent and 19 nonviolent offenders were compared. The control group consisted of 20 university students who indicated they did not have criminal ords. All were over the age of 18. Analysis showed the violent offenders had mature moral reasoning and were more elevated on the Antiestablishment scale of the Defining Issues Test. Furthermore, inmates displayed significantly elevated scores on depression, Psychopathic Deviance, and Social Introversion relative to the control group.     

Impaired Pavlovian conditioned inhibition in offenders with personality disorders

Certain types of violent offending are often accompanied by evidence of personality disorders (PDs), a range of heterogeneous conditions characterized by disinhibited behaviours that are generally described as impulsive. The tasks previously used to show impulsivity deficits experimentally (in borderline personality disorder, BPD) have required participants to inhibit previously rewarded responses. To date, no research has examined the inhibition of responding based on Pavlovian stimulus–stimulus contingencies, formally “conditioned inhibition” (CI), in PDs. The present study used a computer-based task to measure excitatory and inhibitory learning within the same CI procedure in offenders recruited from the “personality disorder” and the “dangerous and severe personality disorder” units of a high-security psychiatric hospital. These offenders showed a striking and statistically significant change in the expression of inhibitory learning in a highly controlled procedure: The contextual information provided by conditioned inhibitors had virtually no effect on their prepotent associations. Moreover, this difference was not obviously attributable to nonspecific cognitive or motivational factors. Impaired CI would reduce the ability to learn to control associative triggers and so could provide an explanation of some types of offending behaviour.     

Patterns of recidivism and relapse among groups of mentally disordered offenders

The management and treatment of mentally disordered offenders is significantly hindered by our lack of detailed knowledge of this population. The present investigation attempted to identify five groups of male, mentally disordered offenders that are distinctive with respect to treatment needs: career criminals, chronic schizophrenics, violent psychotics, violent middleclass individuals, and intellectually handicapped subjects. It was hypothesized that patterns of recidivism and relapse would be different for each of these groups. A sample of 181 males previously judged unfit to stand trial or not guilty by reason of insanity were followed for an average of 6.1 years after discharge to the community. Factors relating to recidivism but not to relapse were found to distinguish the five groups.     

The effect of HD-tDCS on brain oscillations and frontal synchronicity during resting-state EEG in violent offenders with a substance dependence

Violence is a major problem in our society and therefore research into the neural underpinnings of aggression has grown exponentially. Although in the past decade the biological underpinnings of aggressive behavior have been examined, research on neural oscillations in violent offenders during resting-state electroencephalography (rsEEG) remains scarce. In this study we aimed to investigate the effect of high-definition transcranial direct current stimulation (HD-tDCS) on frontal theta, alpha and beta frequency power, asymmetrical frontal activity, and frontal synchronicity in violent offenders.Fifty male violent forensic patients diagnosed with a substance dependence were included in a double-blind sham-controlled randomized study. The patients received 20 minutes of HD-tDCS two times a day on five consecutive days. Before and after the intervention, the patients underwent a rsEEG task.Results showed no effect of HD-tDCS on the power in the different frequency bands. Also, no increase in asymmetrical activity was found. However, we found increased synchronicity in frontal regions in the alpha and beta frequency bands indicating enhanced connectivity in frontal brain regions as a result of the HD-tDCS-intervention.This study has enhanced our understanding of the neural underpinnings of aggression and violence, pointing to the importance of alpha and beta frequency bands and their connectivity in frontal brain regions. Although future studies should further investigate the complex neural underpinnings of aggression in different populations and using whole-brain connectivity, it can be suggested with caution, that HD-tDCS could be an innovative method to regain frontal synchronicity in neurorehabilitation.     

Ageing, remembering, and executive function

This study was designed to investigate the relationship between executive functions and the age-related decline in episodic memory through the states-of-awareness approach. Following the presentation of a word list, a group of younger adults and a group of older adults undertook a recognition test in which they classified their responses according to the Remember-Know-Guess procedure (Gardiner & Richardson-Klavehn, 2000). In order to operationalise the executive function hypothesis, we investigated three specific executive functions (updating, shifting, and inhibition of a prepotent response) described in Miyake et al.'s (2000) theoretical model, and a complex executive task. The results revealed that fewer "R" responses were made during the recognition test by the older than the younger group, whereas there was no difference between the groups in the number of "K" responses. In addition, correlations indicated that remembering depended on executive function measures, whereas knowing did not. The hierarchical regression analyses showed that controlling for executive function, and particularly for the 2-back test, largely removed the age-related variance in remembering. These findings support the notion that executive dysfunction, and specifically updating decline, plays a central role in age-related memory loss.     

Authoritarianism and social distance attitudes towards offenders released from prison

It was hypothesized that authoritarian individuals maintain attitudes of greater social distance towards (a) violent offenders, (b) violent young offenders, (c) non-violent offenders, and (d) non-violent young offenders released from prison. Correlations of scores on Boehm's Legal Attitudes Questionnaire for the offender groups supported the hypothesis. Subjects were 48 students in management science. Apparently high authoritarians would like to maintain attitudes of greater social distance from violent offenders than non-violent offenders released from prison.     

Fearlessness in juvenile offenders is associated with offending rate

Poor fear conditioning is a correlate of violent offending in adults, but there is no evidence concerning juvenile offenders. Our aim was to compare emotional learning in juvenile offenders and controls and establish whether crime rate is related to seriousness of emotional learning problems. To this end, emotional learning was assessed in 42 juvenile offenders by measuring skin conductance responding (SCR) during fear conditioning. Compared to controls, juvenile offenders showed lower conditioned SCRs to visual stimuli associated with a subsequent aversive stimulus and the magnitude of the SCR during fear acquisition was inversely associated with the number of their recorded offences. These findings suggest that juvenile offenders have impairments in the neural systems that subserve emotional learning. The implication is that using punitive measures to control persistent offenders is unlikely to be effective in an identifiable group of juvenile offenders.     

Neuropsychological executive functions of adolescent sex offenders and nonsex offenders

A growing body of research now suggests that a substantial number of criminal offenders display neuropsychological deficits, especially frontal-executive dysfunctions. The present study investigated the possibility of similar deficits by comparing the performance of 60 adolescent sex offenders court-ordered to a residential treatment facility with the performance of 60 nonsexual delinquent offenders matched on several pertinent sociodemographic characteristics and scores on four neuropsychological tests: (1) the Trail Making Test, (2) the Controlled Oral Word Association test of the Multilingual Aphasia Examination, (3) the Tower of London, and (4) the Wisconsin Card-sorting Test. Analysis indicated a pattern of frontal-executive dysfunction in a subset of both groups of offenders; this pattern has both theoretical and treatment implications.     

Theory of mind in spina bifida: Relationship with intellectual and executive functioning

This article investigates emotion recognition ability, a central aspect of Theory of Mind (ToM), in a group of individuals with spina bifida myelomeningocele (SBM) experiencing executive function deficits, and examine associations between emotion recognition, and intellectual and executive functioning. A total of 38 adult subjects with SBM were included in this study, participating in a randomized controlled trial evaluating the effects of a cognitive rehabilitation intervention for executive dysfunction. Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET) was used as a measure of emotion recognition, and neuropsychological tests and questionnaires were utilized as executive function measures. One third of the participants performed poorer on the emotion recognition task compared to normative data. Emotion recognition may represent an area being affected in adults with SBM, and it is related to verbal IQ. Findings also suggest that executive functions and emotion recognition ability in adults with SBM are independent.     

Executive and visuospatial sketchpad resources in euthymic bipolar disorder: Implications for visuospatial working memory architecture

Visuospatial working memory theory is used to interpret the cognitive impairment in euthymic bipolar disorder. Such patients show deficits in the Corsi Blocks Test (CBT) and executive control. To understand these deficits, 20 euthymic bipolar patients and controls were administered the CBT, Visual Patterns Test (VPT), and a new visual memory task designed to make minimal demands on executive resources. Initial analyses validated the visual memory task and implicated executive involvement in the CBT and VPT. Subsequent analyses on a number of tests confirmed CBT and executive deficits while performance was normal on the VPT and visual memory test. ANCOVA indicated that impaired executive function underpinned patients' CBT performance. Implications for the interface between executive and slave systems of working memory are discussed.     

Memory and executive function impairments after frontal or posterior cortex lesions

Free recall and recognition, memory for temporal order, spatial memory and prospective memory were assessed in patients with frontal lobe lesions, patients with posterior cortex lesions and control subjects. Both patient groups showed equivalent memory deficits relative to control subjects on a range of free recall and recognition tasks, on memory for temporal order and on a prospective memory task. The patient groups also performed equivalently on the spatial memory task although only patients with frontal lobe lesions were significantly impaired. However, the patients with frontal lobe lesions showed an increased false alarm rate and made more intrusion errors relative not only to the control subjects, but also to the patients with poster or cortex lesions. These memory problems are discussed in relation to deficits in executive function and basic memory processes.     

Characterization of facial emotion recognition in bipolar disorder: Focus on emotion mislabelling and neutral expressions

Increasing evidence suggests that facial emotion recognition is impaired in bipolar disorder (BD). However, patient–control differences are small owing to ceiling effects on the tasks used to assess them. The extant literature is also limited by a relative absence of attention towards identifying patterns of emotion misattribution or understanding whether neutral faces are mislabelled in the same way as ones displaying emotion. We addressed these limitations by comparing facial emotion recognition performance in BD patients and healthy controls on a novel and challenging task. Thirty-four outpatients with BD I and 32 demographically matched healthy controls completed a facial emotion recognition task requiring the labelling of neutral and emotive faces displayed at low emotional intensities. Results indicated that BD patients were significantly less accurate at labelling faces than healthy controls, particularly if they displayed fear or neutral expressions. There were no between-group differences in response times or patterns of emotion mislabelling, with both groups confusing sad and neutral faces, although BD patients also mislabelled sad faces as angry. Task performance did not significantly correlate with mood symptom severity in the BD group. These findings suggest that facial emotion recognition impairments in BD extend to neutral face recognition. Emotion misattribution occurs in a similar, albeit exaggerated manner in patients with BD compared to healthy controls. Future behavioural and neuroimaging research should reconsider the use of neutral faces as baseline stimuli in their task designs.     

Driving aggression in forensic and non‐forensic populations: Relationships to self‐reported levels of aggression,anger and impulsivity

A series of four questionnaires — the Buss‐Perry Aggression Questionnaire (AQ), the Barratt Impulsivity Scale (BIS‐11), the Driving Anger Scale (DAS) and a Driving Violence Inventory (DVI) — were administered to a sample of 473 British drivers consisting of undergraduates (N=185), members of the public (N=106) and offenders (N=182) serving sentences in closed prisons in England (violent=82, non‐violent=100). Offenders consistently rated acts of driving aggression as less severe compared with other drivers. Offender attributions of driving violence differed to other drivers in that they were equally likely to perceive obscene gesturing as high or low intensity responses; they also viewed assault as a high intensity response whereas members of the public rated it more severely. Trait levels of anger and aggression were the predictors of driving violence in all groups but previous aggressive behaviour was only a predictor for the offenders. Gender and age were found to be predictors of aggressive driving in non‐offenders. Even with the effects of age controlled, offenders (and violent offenders in particular) scored higher on measures of driving anger and aggression. These data suggest that offenders differ in their perceptions of aggressive behaviours experienced in everyday driving and as a consequence are more likely to commit acts that other drivers perceive as violent. As offenders are known to display similar perceptual biases in other domains, identified as precursors to their aggressive behaviour, it seems likely that experience effects (as reflected in the trait measures) underpin differences in driving aggression between offenders and non‐offenders.