Learning to Understand Ourselves (cont.)
Dr. Jennifer E. Vitale, Elliott Assistant Professor of Psychology
The Response Modulation Hypothesis
In 1993, Patterson and Newman proposed that the psychopaths’ behaviors emerged from a deficit in their ability to suspend a dominant response and enact a brief, concurrent shift of attention from the organization and implementation of goal-directed responding to the evaluation of response consequences. They argued that it is this shift that allows individuals to make adjustments to their responses, if needed, and that it is the absence of this shift that contributes to psychopaths’ impulsive, often antisocial behavior. In their proposal, Patterson and Newman (1993) set forth a sequence for response modulation. At the first step, a dominant response set is established. This set then guides the effortful allocation of attention to goal-relevant environmental stimuli and creates an expectation that reward is likely given the current response set. For example, if I was late for work, my dominant response might be to drive as fast as possible.
At the second step, an unexpected or aversive event violates the expectancy for reward. In my driving example, this event might be a sudden slowing down of all the vehicles on the road. At this step, the violated expectancy generates an automatic call for processing and results in an increase in general arousal.
At the third step, there are two possibilities. The first possibility is that the call for processing is answered and the dominant response is suppressed in order to allow for the effortful initiation of information-gathering. In such a case, the individual will be able to modulate his or her response in light of new contextual information. In my example, this effort would be my reflecting on
why all the vehicles have slowed and, deciding that there must be a reason, also slowing my car, just as the state trooper comes into view.
The second possibility, however, is that the call for processing fails to suppress behavior, in which case the arousal from stage 2 will facilitate ongoing behavior rather than information gathering. Thus, in this second case, there is a paradoxical increase in the intensity of the initial dominant response set. In this situation, I do not reflect on the other cars’ slowing, but continue at my accelerated pace and eventually receive the speeding ticket.
The psychopaths’ deficit occurs at this third stage, when they fail to answer to the automatic call for processing generated by the discrepancy between their dominant response and the consequences of that response. As a result, they fail to initiate information gathering, and this lack of reflection undermines the associative learning (i.e., between the response and the unanticipated outcome) that would then enable them to adapt their dominant response (Patterson & Newman 1993).
My own development as a psychopathy researcher is reflected back to me in my students' development in the classroom.
Jennifer E. Vitale
Elliott Assistant Professor of Psychology
Does the RMH Explain Psychopathic Violence?
My own research has focused on expanding the response modulation hypothesis (RMH) in two ways. First, I have attempted to use the RMH to explain psychopathic violence.Second, I have tested the generalizability of the RMH across populations.
In 2005 I published (with my colleagues Ralph Serin, Daniel Bolt, and Joseph Newman) “Hostile attributions in incarcerated adult male offenders: An exploration of two pathways” in the journal Aggressive Behavior. I presented my replication of the study, entitled “Hostile attributions and psychopathy: Replication and extension of a dual pathway model” this past spring at the annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Psychopathy. Both studies examined the relationship between psychopathy and crime in a sample of male offenders utilizing a model proposed by Crick & Dodge (1994) that highlights the role of hostile attribution biases in aggression. The Hostile Attribution Bias (HAB) is a tendency to interpret the ambiguous, provocative behavior of others as having hostile intent. It has been linked to Conduct Disorder in adolescents, and our results showed that psychopaths were also characterized by the HAB. That is, they were more likely than non-psychopaths to make hostile attributions when asked to explain another person’s ambiguous behavior.
What was most exciting to me about these data was the possibility that the HAB might be understood as the “dominant response” in the first stage of Patterson and Newman’s model. Like the person late for work who then will engage the behavior of accelerating through traffic, perhaps violent psychopaths were those who, when confronted with ambiguous situations, interpreted the situations as hostile and engaged in retaliatory behavior. Thus, the question that emerged from these data for me was: What if violent psychopathy emerges when a pre-existing tendency to view the world as a hostile and attacking place is crossed with a deficit in an individual’s ability to reflect on this bias and to adjust his response if the situational cues do not support this interpretation? Such a proposal is consistent with the RMH, and offers me an exciting
new direction to explore in the coming years.
Can RMH Be Generalized Across Groups?
My second line of research has addressed the generalizability of the RMH across groups. Initially, research on psychopathy was limited to samples of incarcerated males. It is only recently that researchers have begun to turn their attention to other samples. I have been fortunate to be at the forefront of this movement, authoring papers and book chapters testing the generalizability of psychopathy to female populations, and I continue to do most of my work in the area of psychopathy across gender. This has been an especially fascinating area of research, especially because what has emerged is a pattern of results that suggests that, although psychopathic females do not show many of the same behavioral deficits of psychopathic males (i.e., they are less impulsive in their behavioral responses and are more responsive to emotional stimuli), they nevertheless show the same deficits in response modulation as male psychopaths.
Thus, my work, most recently “Abnormal selective attention in psychopathic female offenders,” published with my co-authors Kristi Hiatt, Chad Brinkley, and Joe Newman, in the journal Neuropsychology, shows that psychopathic females do show a response modulation deficit, even if they appear different from male psychopaths in other ways.
A similar result emerged in my study of adolescent males and females assessed for psychopathy. As in the adults, the adolescent male and female psychopaths differed in their behavioral regulation, but did not differ in their expression of a response modulation deficit (Vitale, Newman, Bates, Goodnight, Dodge, & Pettit 2005). My future work in this area will focus on determining how the same deficit in response modulation comes to be expressed differently across males and females, and whether the deficit can be considered core to the psychopathy syndrome.
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