Psychopathic tendency in violent offenders is associated with reduced aversive Pavlovian inhibition of behavior and associated striatal BOLD signal.

Background: Violent offenders with psychopathic tendencies are characterized by instrumental, i.e., planned, callous, and unemotional (aggressive) behavior and have been shown to exhibit abnormal aversive processing.

See think act scale: Validation of the Dutch version of a measure of relational security in high secure forensic psychiatric care.

Relational security is considered an essential form of security in forensic psychiatric care. Research on relational security is important, but is hampered by the lack of instruments to assess and monitor this concept in clinical practice. Within this current study the psychometric properties of the Dutch version of the See Think Act (STA) scale, an instrument designed to measure relational security as perceived by forensic staff members within secure settings, was studied.

Dutch Forensic Flexible Assertive Community Treatment: Operating on the Interface Between General Mental Health Care and Forensic Psychiatric Care.

In the Netherlands, (ForFACT) is used as a specialized form of outpatient intensive treatment. This outreaching type of treatment is aimed at patients with severe and long lasting psychiatric problems that are at risk of engaging in criminal behavior. In addition, these patients often suffer from addiction and experience problems in different areas of their life (e.

Staff's perception of Patients' affiliation and control in a Highly Secure Psychiatric Setting.

Effective interactions between patients and staff have been associated with positive ward climate and therapeutic effects, but also pose a challenge in high secure forensic psychiatric settings. The goal of this study was to gain more insight into i) the characteristics that play a role in how staff members perceive the interpersonal style of patients, and ii) whether these perceptions are related to patients' evaluation of ward climate and satisfaction with daily staff. Staff members (n = 69), rated the interpersonal style of 102 male patients.

Ward Climate Within a High Secure Forensic Psychiatric Hospital: Perceptions of Patients and Nursing Staff and the Role of Patient Characteristics.

Within this study the relationship between patient characteristics (age, length of stay, risk, psychopathy) and individual perceived ward climate (n=83), and differences between staff's and patient perceptions of climate (n=185) was investigated within a high secure forensic hospital. Results show that therapeutic hold was rated higher among staff compared to patients, while patients held a more favorable view on patient cohesion and experienced safety. Furthermore, patient characteristics (age, risk and psychopathy) were found to be related with individual ratings of ward climate.

Neural connectivity during reward expectation dissociates psychopathic criminals from non-criminal individuals with high impulsive/antisocial psychopathic traits.

Criminal behaviour poses a big challenge for society. A thorough understanding of the neurobiological mechanisms underlying criminality could optimize its prevention and management. Specifically,elucidating the neural mechanisms underpinning reward expectation might be pivotal to understanding criminal behaviour.

Testosterone Modulates Altered Prefrontal Control of Emotional Actions in Psychopathic Offenders(1,2,3).

Psychopathic individuals are notorious for their controlled goal-directed aggressive behavior. Yet, during social challenges, they often show uncontrolled emotional behavior. Healthy individuals can control their social emotional behavior through anterior prefrontal cortex (aPFC) downregulation of neural activity in the amygdala, with testosterone modulating aPFC-amygdala coupling.

Parsing fear: A reassessment of the evidence for fear deficits in psychopathy.

Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized by interpersonal manipulation and callousness, and reckless and impulsive antisocial behavior. It is often seen as a disorder in which profound emotional disturbances lead to antisocial behavior. A lack of fear in particular has been proposed as an etiologically salient factor.

Quality of life in long-term forensic psychiatric care: comparison of self-report and proxy assessments.

Objective: To compare quality of life (QoL) ratings of long term forensic psychiatric care patients with the ratings of psychiatric nurses, in which the nurses indicate how they think the patient would answer.

Methods: Agreement on QoL-scores according to the Forensic inpatient Quality of Life Questionnaire (FQL) was investigated for seventy- seven pairs of patients and psychiatric nurses from two forensic psychiatric long-care facilities where QoL is seen as an important treatment goal. This study also examined whether the amount of agreement was related to specific patient characteristics and characteristics of the patient- psychiatric nurse relationship.

Psychopathy-related traits and the use of reward and social information: a computational approach.

Psychopathy is often linked to disturbed reinforcement-guided adaptation of behavior in both clinical and non-clinical populations. Recent work suggests that these disturbances might be due to a deficit in actively using information to guide changes in behavior. However, how much information is actually used to guide behavior is difficult to observe directly.

Unfair offers, unfair offenders? Fairness considerations in incarcerated individuals with and without psychopathy.

Offenders with psychopathy have often committed crimes violating social norms, which may suggest a biased moral reasoning in psychopathy. Yet, as findings on utilitarian decisions remain conflicting, the current study investigated different aspects of fairness considerations in offenders with psychopathy, offenders without psychopathy and healthy individuals (N = 18/14/18, respectively). Unfair offers in a modified Ultimatum Game (UG) were paired with different unselected alternatives, thereby establishing the context of a proposal, and made under opposing intentionality constraints (intentional vs.

Reversal deficits in individuals with psychopathy in explicit but not implicit learning conditions.

Background: Psychopathy is a severe personality disorder that has been linked to impaired behavioural adaptation during reinforcement learning. Recent electrophysiological studies have suggested that psychopathy is related to impairments in intentionally using information relevant for adapting behaviour, whereas these impairments remain absent for behaviour relying on automatic use of information. We sought to investigate whether previously found impairments in response reversal in individuals with psychopathy also follow this dichotomy.

Differentiating psychopathy from general antisociality using the P3 as a psychophysiological correlate of attentional allocation.

Recent studies have shown that while psychopathy and non-psychopathic antisociality overlap, they differ in the extent to which cognitive impairments are present. Specifically, psychopathy has been related to abnormal allocation of attention, a function that is traditionally believed to be indexed by event-related potentials (ERPs) of the P3-family. Previous research examining psychophysiological correlates of attention in psychopathic individuals has mainly focused on the parietally distributed P3b component to rare targets.

Psychopaths lack the automatic avoidance of social threat: relation to instrumental aggression.

Psychopathy (PP) is associated with marked abnormalities in social emotional behaviour, such as high instrumental aggression (IA). A crucial but largely ignored question is whether automatic social approach-avoidance tendencies may underlie this condition. We tested whether offenders with PP show lack of automatic avoidance tendencies, usually activated when (healthy) individuals are confronted with social threat stimuli (angry faces).

A neurophysiological dissociation between monitoring one's own and others' actions in psychopathy.

Background: Psychopathy is a severe personality disorder often leading to violent and disruptive antisocial behavior. Efficient and proper social behavior crucially relies on monitoring of one's own as well as others' actions, but the link between antisocial behavior in psychopathy and action monitoring in a social context has never been investigated.

Methods: Event-related potentials were used to disentangle monitoring of one's own and others' correct and incorrect actions in psychopathic subjects (n = 18) and matched healthy control subjects (n = 18).

Early and late components of error monitoring in violent offenders with psychopathy.

Background: One of the most recognizable features of psychopathy is the reduced ability to successfully learn and adapt overt behavior. This might be due to deficient processing of error information indicating the need to adapt controlled behavior.

Methods: Event-related potentials (ERPs) and behavioral components of error-monitoring processes were investigated in 16 individuals with psychopathy and in 18 healthy subjects.