Fearlessness related to psychopathy
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Exploring the role of fearlessness and fear labelling in prisoners with and without psychopathic traits
IRAS ID
184962
Contact name
Luna Centifanti
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Durham
Duration of Study in the UK
3 years, 0 months, 1 days
Research summary
The PI will test whether an attention training - rooted in recent neurobiological insights of amygdala functioning - has the potential to normalize deficient fear processing in psychopathy. While relatively uncommon, psychopathy is disproportionally related to (vicious) aggression. Psychopathy offers a challenge for clinicians and lacks an effective treatment. Psychopathy is characterized by deficits in fear processing and amygdala hypoactivation to threat. The aberrant fear processing in psychopathy may be due to reduced shifting of attention towards the eyes (most diagnostic for reading fear) and may be underlied by deficient own fear experience. Adapting an established
task developed by colleagues in Germany, we will test whether an improvement in fear recognition can be brought about in psychopathic adults by training attention towards the eye region. We will assess whether the training normalizes the reflexive saccadic activity towards fearful eyes (near-transfer), and the perception of social scenes involving crime victims displaying fear (far-transfer), immediately after the training and several months later. The main objective of this research is to examine the experiences of fear in people with uncaring and unemotional traits (psychopathic traits) and to link their own fear experiences to their ability to read fear in other people's faces. The first objective is to see if people with psychopathy have an atypical anchor (lacking own emotion) in understanding fear in others. The second aim is to see if we can improve the ability to understand fear by directing their attention to the eyes.REC name
South East Scotland REC 02
REC reference
15/SS/0137
Date of REC Opinion
4 Sep 2015
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion