Psychopathic traits and men’s anger response to interpersonal conflict: A pilot study

Psychopathy is associated with emotional dysfunction that impedes the experience of emotions such as fear and sadness and has been purported to facilitate violent behavior. However, findings relative to the association between psychopathy and anger have not been reliably substantiated. Theorists have proposed that psychopathy predisposes one to experience greater frustration and anger, whereas other experts have suggested that there is no convincing evidence for this assertion. In the present study, we tested the relationship between psychopathy subfactors and anger subsequent to conflict or non-conflict interactions. Sixty-eight collegiate-men completed the Self-Report Psychopathy Scale and read vignettes depicting either a conflict or non-conflict scenario and were asked to imagine themselves in the situation. Following presentation of the vignettes, participants completed a lexical-decision-task assessing affective states. Results indicated that the psychopathy subfactors demonstrated strong differential associations, where Factor 1 showed negative and Factor 2 showed positive association with anger activation in response to interpersonal conflict. Findings are discussed in terms of the importance of anger as a facilitator of violence in some psychopathic individuals.     

Probability of Criminal Acts of Violence: A Test of Jury Predictive Accuracy

The ability of capital juries to accurately predict future prison violence at the sentencing phase of aggravated murder trials was examined through retrospective review of the disciplinary records of 115 male inmates sentenced to either life (n = 65) or death (n = 50) in Oregon from 1985 through 2008, with a mean post‐conviction time at risk of 15.3 years. Violent prison behavior was completely unrelated to predictions made by capital jurors, with bidirectional accuracy simply reflecting the base rate of assaultive misconduct in the group. Rejection of the special issue predicting future violence enjoyed 90% accuracy. Conversely, predictions that future violence was probable had 90% error rates. More than 90% of the assaultive rule violations committed by these offenders resulted in no harm or only minor injuries. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Psychopathy traits and the processing of emotion words: Results of a lexical decision task

Research has indicated that individuals possessing psychopathic traits exhibit a deficit in the processing of emotional stimuli. Lexical decision task studies found that psychopathic individuals do not demonstrate affective facilitation in processing emotional words relative to nonpsychopathic individuals. However, these investigations have not examined processing of discrete affective categories and their relation to the callous/unemotional (F1) and impulse control/antisocial (F2) factors of psychopathy. Sixty undergraduate men completed a self-report measure of psychopathy traits and a lexical decision task assessing response latencies to anger, sadness, fear, and happiness words. Results reflected an association between F2 and a heightened experience of anger, whereas F1 was associated with a diminished experience of sadness. Findings are discussed in terms of the relation to existing research using alternative methods of processing affect.     

Rawls's Wide View of Public Reason: Not Wide Enough

Res Publica - What sorts of reasons are i) required and ii) morally acceptable when citizens in a pluralist liberal democracy undertake to resolve pressing political issues? This paper presents and...     

A Just Global Economy: In Defense of Rawls

In The Law of Peoples, John Rawls does not discuss justice and the global economy at great length or in great detail. What he does say has not been well-received. The prevailing view seems to be that what Rawls says in The Law of Peoples regarding global economic justice is both inconsistent with and a betrayal of his own liberal egalitarian commitments, an unexpected and unacceptable defense of the status quo. This view is, I think, mistaken. Rawls’s position on global or international economic justice is richer, more nuanced, and generally more compelling than his critics have been willing to acknowledge. My aim in this essay is to sympathetically set out, and then defend against two common families of objection to, Rawls’s position on global or international economic justice. Objections of the first sort reject Rawls’s position as inadequately attentive to the material and economic interests of individual persons worldwide. Objections of the second sort reject it as inadequately attentive to the material and economic interests of well-ordered peoples. Throughout the paper I develop several arguments implicit in The Law of Peoples but not well-developed there as well as offer some additional arguments of my own consistent with the spirit of The Law of Peoples and Rawls’s work more generally. I conclude with some brief remarks expressing two worries I have about Rawls’s position – one concerning global public goods, the other concerning the formation of a morally adequate and effective political will within the international context under contemporary conditions. I wish to thank Alyssa Bernstein, Allen Buchanan, Samuel Freeman, John Hardwig, John Mandle, Rex Martin, Jim Nickel, Walter Riker, Kok-Chor Tan, and Leif Wenar for helpful comments or instructive conversation regarding earlier drafts of this paper.     

Examining the Relations Among Narcissism, Impulsivity, and Self-Defeating Behaviors

ABSTRACT A recent meta-analysis ( S. Vazire & D. C. Funder, 2006 ) suggested that narcissism and impulsivity are related and that impulsivity partially accounts for the relation between narcissism and self-defeating behaviors (SDB). This research examines these hypotheses in two studies and tests a competing hypothesis that Extraversion and Agreeableness account for this relation. In Study 1 , we examined the relations among narcissism, impulsivity, and aggression. Both narcissism and impulsivity predicted aggression, but impulsivity did not mediate the narcissism–aggression relation. In Study 2 , narcissism was related to a measure of SDB and manifested divergent relations with a range of impulsivity traits from three measures. None of the impulsivity models accounted for the narcissism–SDB relation, although there were unique mediating paths for traits related to sensation and fun seeking. The domains of Extraversion and low Agreeableness successfully mediated the entire narcissism–SDB relation. We address the discrepancy between the current and meta-analytic findings.     

The relationship between pain tolerance and trait aggression: effects of sex and gender role

The literature on pain and aggression has indicated that pain elicits aggression. However, research has generally examined pain as a situational variable and focused less on the dispositional ability of an individual to tolerate pain. The dearth of research on pain tolerance and aggression appears to contradict the existing theory on the aggression‐eliciting effect of pain, in that studies have found a positive relationship between pain tolerance and aggression. The purpose of this study was to determine whether the relationship between pain tolerance and aggression is moderated by sex and whether the positive relationship could be explained by masculine gender role conformity. A sample of 195 collegiate men and women completed trait measures and a laboratory assessment of pain tolerance. Results indicated that correlations between pain tolerance and trait aggression were significant and positive for men but not women. However, when men's conformity to masculine gender role was controlled for, the relationship between pain tolerance and trait aggression was nil and nonsignificant. Results are discussed in reference to socialization and maintenance of masculine status. Aggr. Behav. 35:422–429, 2009. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

Stability of the Millon Adolescent Personality Inventory in an incarcerated delinquent population

Clinical use of the Millon Adolescent Personality Inventory (MAPI) depends on computerized interpretation of the pattern of scale score elevations in the profile beyond certain cutoff scores rather than the elevations of single scales. There has been no reported work on the stability of the scale scores or the stability of the 2-point codes in a delinquent population. The MAPI was administered to 46 incarcerated male juvenile delinquents and was readministered after a period of 2 to 4 weeks. The test-retest correlations of the base-rate scale scores ranged from .33 to .89 with a mean of .74, which compare favorably to Millon's (1982) standardization sample. However, only 41% of the 2-point codes were judged to be congruent between administrations. The poor congruence of the 2-point codes across administrations raises doubts about interpretive statements based on these codes.