Cotard Delusion in the Context of Schizophrenia: A Case Report and Review of the Literature.

Background: The Cotard delusion (CD) is one of a variety of narrowly defined monothematic delusions characterized by nihilistic beliefs about the body's existence or life itself. The presence of CD within the context of schizophrenia is rare (<1%), and remains understudied.

Case: 'Mr.

Feature-based attention and conflict monitoring in criminal offenders: interactive relations of psychopathy with anxiety and externalizing.

As predicted by the response modulation model, psychopathic offenders are insensitive to potentially important inhibitory information when it is peripheral to their primary focus of attention. To date, the clearest tests of this hypothesis have manipulated spatial attention to cue the location of goal-relevant versus inhibitory information. However, the theory predicts a more general abnormality in selective attention.

Cognitive control deficits associated with antisocial personality disorder and psychopathy.

Antisociality has been linked to a variety of executive functioning deficits, including poor cognitive control. Surprisingly, cognitive control deficits are rarely found in psychopathic individuals, despite their notoriously severe and persistent antisocial behavior. In fact, primary (low-anxious) psychopathic individuals display superior performance on cognitive control-type tasks under certain circumstances.

Reduced susceptibility to the attentional blink in psychopathic offenders: implications for the attention bottleneck hypothesis.

Objective: Newman and Baskin-Sommers (in press) have proposed that psychopathy reflects an attention bottleneck that interferes with processing contextual information, including the timely processing of affective and inhibitory cues that initiate self-regulation. Despite a wealth of evidence that attention moderates the affective, inhibitory, and self-regulation deficits of psychopathic offenders, to date there is little or no evidence that psychopathic offenders perform abnormally on a canonical measure of selective attention. In this study, we address this gap in the literature and clarify the attention-related abnormality in psychopathy.

Both self-report and interview-based measures of psychopathy predict attention abnormalities in criminal offenders.

Historically, psychopathy has been viewed as a clinical syndrome with a unitary etiology, assessed via clinical interview. However, factor analytic studies suggest that psychopathy may also be understood as a combination of two subfactors consisting of (a) interpersonal-affective and (b) lifestyle-antisocial traits. Furthermore, evidence supports the use of self-report measures to assess psychopathy and these subfactors.

Utilitarian moral judgment in psychopathy.

Psychopathic behavior is characteristically amoral, but to date research studies have largely failed to identify any systematic differences in moral judgment capability between psychopaths and non-psychopaths. In this study, we investigate whether significant differences in moral judgment emerge when taking into account the phenotypic heterogeneity of the disorder through a well-validated distinction between psychopathic subtypes. Three groups of incarcerated participants [low-anxious psychopaths (n = 12), high-anxious psychopaths (n = 12) and non-psychopaths (n = 24)] completed a moral judgment test involving hypothetical dilemmas.

Self-reported attentional control differentiates the major factors of psychopathy.

The dual-deficit model identifies unique correlates of the two major factors associated with psychopathy (Patrick, 2007). Factor 1 is associated with deficits in amygdala-mediated emotion, while Factor 2 is related to deficits in higher-order cognitive processes. Research suggests that attention to environmental and contextual cues is critical for emotion and cognition (Ochsner & Gross, 2005).

Attention moderates the processing of inhibitory information in primary psychopathy.

Primary psychopathic individuals are less apt to reevaluate or change their behavior in response to stimuli outside of their current focus of attention. According to the response modulation hypothesis, this tendency reflects a lack of responsivity to important peripheral information and undermines adaptive self-regulation. To evaluate this hypothesis, the authors administered a response competition (flanker-type) task and manipulated focus of visual attention.