Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD) is understood as a difficult category to work with in various contemporary mental health settings. Additionally, to date, there is a dearth of research on this topic in Counselling Psychology. Therefore, the aim of this study is to explore how Counselling Psychologists (CoPs) and other Psychological Practitioners (PPs) discursively construct ASPD and to investigate any discursive power games that may be implicated in therapeutic practice accounts. Ten semi-structured interviews were conducted and a Foucauldian Discourse Analysis (FDA) was applied to the data. The findings of the analysis produced five distinct therapeutic subject-positions: “Dangerous to Know”, “Damaged Goods”, “The White Collar Psychopath”, “Resisting to Psychiatric Norms” and “Critical Questioning”. Overall this analysis argues that ASPD is a problematic construct as it is produced by these participants as multiple, power laden and opaque. Additionally, these therapeutic subject-positions highlight how ASPD is variously produced in specific therapeutic contexts, such as medium secure units and private practice/ corporate environments. Such findings may contribute to raising awareness among CoPs and other PPs by making visible the power relations and contextual influences implicated in particular ASPD therapeutic accounts. Finally, it is also proposed that this Foucauldian gaze may be applied in other practice areas, to enable critical thinking in relation to potential uses of psychological knowledge, practice and research.

Personality disorder is common amongst individuals accessing mental health services, with research into its aetiology and impact on services increasing in recent years. This thesis has two parts. The first is a systematic review of the neuropsychological functioning among forensic samples with diagnoses of psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder (ASPD). Five databases were searched for cross-sectional studies exploring cognitive functioning in psychopathy and ASPD. Twelve studies were reviewed and indicated that individuals with psychopathy and ASPD demonstrate deficits in executive functions, attention, and memory, and that there are some differences in neuropsychological performance between the two disorders. The second part is an empirical study exploring factors that may influence mental health staff attitudes towards individuals with personality disorder. The study found that staff personality traits, emotion regulation style, empathy and job satisfaction were related to attitudes to personality disorder. Empathy and job burnout predicted attitudes, with higher scores on empathy and lower levels of burnout being related to positive attitudes to personality disorder. Implications for the findings of the systematic review and empirical study are discussed. Further research is required in both areas.

The role that parenting plays in the development of antisocial behaviour has been, and is still widely researched. International studies on this topic are vast. In South Africa, however, very little has been researched within this area. This study aimed to systematically review literature on the role of parenting in the development of antisocial behaviour. International literature published between 2000 and 2013 was reviewed in order to gain a better idea of the current state of knowledge on this topic. All of the articles included in the review examined some aspect of parenting behaviour, parenting practices and/or parenting styles related to the development of antisocial behaviour, conduct disorder, and/or oppositional defiant disorder. The articles were systematically assessed, and eight themes emerged which include: effective parenting behaviours; the moderating effects of callous unemotional traits on parenting; parental warmth; parental discipline; parental knowledge and monitoring; parental psychopathology; parenting styles; and parenting during infancy.

The idea that psychopaths may be able to "beat" a standard polygraph ("lie detector") test remains a controversial issue. The one published study to date that has addressed this question directly (Raskin & Hare, 1978) has been challenged on the grounds that: 1) the polygraph testing situation lacked a 'realistic threat component, and 2) the examiner's decisions were not based on blind chart analyses (Lykken, 1978). The present study re-assessed the accuracy of the polygraph with psychopaths using a revised procedure, in response to Lykken's criticisms. Subjects were 24 psychopathic and 24 nonpsychopathic male prison inmates (aged 18-54) selected on the basis of psychopathy checklist scores (Hare, 1980) and DSM-III ratings within each diagnostic sample, equal groups of "guilty" and "innocent" subjects were tested regarding their involvement in a mock theft by experienced professional polygraphers using control question procedures. Methodological innovations included: a) a "group contingency threat" manipulation which produced a realistic motivational; atmosphere for the polygraph test, b) simultaneous recordings of physiological activity on field and laboratory polygraph instruments, and c) blind numerical analyses of the field polygraph charts. Consistent with Raskin and Hare's results, the guilty psychopaths in the present study were detected just as easily as the guilty nonpsychopaths, and the majority of guilty subjects (87%, excluding inconclusives ) were correctly identified, even when the decisions were based on blind chart analyses. However in contrast to Raskin and Hare's 91% accuracy figure for innocent subjects, the overall hit rate for innocent subjects in the present study was only 56%. Quantitative analyses of the laboratory polygraph recordings revealed few meaningful differences between psychopaths and nonpsychopaths, and the results for guilty and innocent subjects closely matched those obtained with the field polygraph. The findings were discussed in terms of their implications for the field validity of the control question test and the responsivity of psychopaths to threat. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate

Psychopathy and alexithymia are disorders with many conceptual similarities. For example, Factor 1 of the Psychopathy Checklist - Revised (PCL-R; Hare, 1991) contains items like shallow affect and lack of empathy, which seem to map on to the construct of alexithymia. Additionally, both psychopaths and alexithymics display striking differences from others in their use of language, especially affective language. The two areas of interest in the present study were (a) occurrence and co—occurrence of psychopathy and alexithymia in a sample of female inmates, and (b) the relationship between affective language and these two disorders. Psychopathy and alexithymia were assessed in 37 women offenders incarcerated in a Burnaby Correctional Centre, using the PCL-R and the Toronto Alexithymia Scale ( TAS; Taylor, Ryan & Bagby, 1985). Each subject was presented with a short written scenario designed to elicit an emotional response, and asked to describe the feelings of the characters in the story. Their taped responses were analyzed for measures of affect. Base rates of both disorders were comparable to those in similar samples, ( 30% of the inmates were diagnosed as psychopathic; 33% as alexithymic) but the coxnorbidity rate was only 8%. There was a significant correlation between alexithymia scores and PCL—R Factor 2 scores — the factor assessing antisocial behaviour. Multiple regression analysis revealed that the TAS and PCL-R were both predictive of violence. This relationship between the PCL-R and violence is well substantiated; that the TAS also predicts violence is a newer finding. Alexithymics spoke more slowly, used fewer total words overall and fewer affective words, and displayed less emotion in their voices than did nonalexithymics. Psychopaths could not be identified by any vocal measures except a slight tendency to speak faster than nonpsychopaths. Although both disorders are characterized’ by affective impoverishment, the verbal expressions of affect were very different in psychopaths and alexithymics. The psychopaths were adept at convincing raters of an emotional investment they did not feel; alexithymics could not disguise their lack of appropriate emotional response. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate

Psychopathy is a complex personality disorder denned by a constellation of affective and behavioral characteristics. There is accumulating behavioral evidence suggesting that the condition is associated with impairments in affective, cognitive, and language functions. However, relatively little is known regarding the neural systems underlying these abnormalities. The present thesis is comprised of five experiments designed to elucidate and characterize the abnormal functional architecture underlying these abnormalities in psychopathic criminals. In Experiments 1 and 2, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to elucidate the neural systems underling abnormal semantic and affective processes in these individuals. In Experiments 3, 4 and 5, event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to characterize the temporal features of cognitive and language functions in psychopaths. The results from Experiment 1 revealed that compared to control participants, psychopaths performed more poorly and failed to showed the appropriate neural differentiation between abstract and concrete stimuli during a lexical decision task. These deficits were located in the right anterior superior temporal gyrus. The results from Experiment 2 indicated that psychopaths, relative to control participants, showed less activation for processing affective stimuli than for neutral stimuli in several neural regions, including the right amygdala/hippocampal formation, left parahippocampal gyrus, ventral striatum, and in the anterior and posterior cingulate. Psychopaths did show greater activation for processing affective than for neutral stimuli in regions located outside the limbic system, including bilateral inferior frontal gyrus. These latter data suggesting that psychopaths used different neural systems than did controls for performing the task. The results from Experiments 3 and 4 indicated that psychopathy is associated with abnormalities in the P3 ERP component elicited by target stimuli during visual and auditory oddball tasks. In addition, the psychopaths' ERPs to visual and auditory target stimuli were characterized by large fronto-central negativities in the 350-600 millisecond time window. These fronto-central ERP negativities are similar to those observed for patients with temporal lobe damage. In Experiment 5, using a standard sentence processing paradigm, no group differences were observed between psychopaths and nonpsychopaths in the amplitude of the N400 potential elicited by terminal words of sentences that were either congruent or incongruent with the previous sentence context. These results indicate that the abnormal fronto-central ERP negativities observed in previous studies of language function in psychopaths are not related to processes involved in the generation of the N400. Taken together, these data suggest that one of the cardinal abnormalities in psychopathy is abnormal semantic processing of conceptually abstract information and affective information and that these abnormalities are related to the function of neural circuits in the anterior temporal lobes and lateral frontal cortex. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate

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Very few studies have investigated how psychopathic traits might contribute to our understanding of prejudicial attitudes. Moreover, previous studies involve a number of limitations which cloud interpretation of their findings. The current study examined the relationship between prejudice and a number of its predictors (e.g., social dominance orientation (SDO) and right-wing authoritarianism (RWA)), while also including psychopathic traits and an innovative new measure of empathy using an online sample. A path analytic framework was employed to comprehensively model relations among psychopathic traits, SDO, RWA, and affective empathy domains in the prediction of generalized prejudice. Overall, there was support for certain psychopathic traits being modest predictors of racial prejudice, although more proximal measures were much stronger predictors. The results revealed a number of novel relationships that may help in further understanding the links between psychopathic propensities, empathy, and social-cognitive variables predictive of racial prejudice.

Diss. (sammanfattning) Stockholm : Karol. inst., 2006. / Härtill 4 uppsatser.