Deficient Fear Conditioning in Psychopathy

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Abstract
Psychopathic behavior is characterized by an inability to have emotional involvement with others and by repeated violation of the rights of others.1 Psychopaths, who are part of a wider group of persons with antisocial personality disorder, seem to lack the ability to anticipate punishment and are deficient in autonomic responding, eg, skin conductance responses (SCRs), in anticipation of threatening events.2 High intelligence and high socioeconomic status may protect psychopaths from developing a criminal career and turn them into successful psychopaths who display a high incidence of reckless, risk-taking, and emotionally insensitive behavior patterns.3 Most psychopaths seem to lack the ability to predict impending harm from signals of threat and may thus show deficient fear conditioning where a formerly neutral stimulus (conditioned stimulus [CS]) comes to predict a fear-eliciting stimulus (unconditioned stimulus [US]) after they have been paired several times.4-6

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