Semantic processing in psychopathic offenders

Clinical observation (Cleckley, 1976) and experimental research (Hare, 1998) suggest psychopaths have difficulty processing the semantic aspects of stimuli, especially in situations requiring significant semantic processing (Hare & Jutai, 1988). Interpreting this semantic deficit as a problem processing a word’s secondary connotations, we predicted that the performance of psychopathic individuals would be (1) less facilitated by the congruent connotations and (2) less disrupted by the incongruent connotations of secondary linguistic stimuli. To test this hypothesis, we administered two tasks to Caucasian male inmates from Wisconsin correctional facilities—a semantic priming task and a semantic Stroop task. Contrary to expectation, all participants demonstrated semantic priming regardless of psychopathy status, level of anxiety, or the time between primes and targets. Psychopathic individuals also showed comparable interference to controls on incongruent semantic Stroop trials.