Psychopathic Personality Traits and Iowa Gambling Task Performance in Incarcerated Offenders

There is a paucity of research on how psychopathy relates to decision-making. In this study, we assessed the relationship between affective decision-making and psychopathic personality. A sample of prisoners (n D 49) was characterized in terms of psychopathic traits using the Psychopathic Checklist: Screening Version (PCL:SV). Decision-making was assessed using the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT). Higher levels of psychopathy related to more advantageous choices (p D .003). Also counter-intuitively, higher levels of antisocial traits (facet 4) predicted advantageous choices during the learning phase of the task (p D .004). Our findings suggest that some psychopathic facets may be more relevant to decisionmaking under risk, and highlight the importance of further investigations considering facet and trait-level relationships with decision-making

The Bangor Gambling Task: Characterising the performance of survivors of traumatic brain injury

The Bangor Gambling Task (BGT, Bowman & Turnbull, 2004) is a simple test of emotion-based decision-making, with contingencies varying across five blocks of 20 trials. This is the first study to characterise BGT performance in survivors of traumatic brain injury (TBI) relative to healthy controls. The study also aimed to explore sub-groups (cluster analysis), and identify predictors of task performance (multiple regression). Thirty survivors of TBI and 39 controls completed the BGT and measures of premorbid IQ, working memory, and executive function. Results showed that survivors of TBI made more gamble choices than controls (total BGT score), although the groups did not significantly differ when using a cut-off score for ‘impaired’ performance. Unexpectedly, the groups did not significantly differ in their performance across the blocks, however, the cluster analysis revealed three subgroups (with survivors of TBI and controls represented in each cluster). Findings also indicated that age and group were significant predictors of overall BGT performance, but not gender, premorbid IQ, or working memory and executive function. In conclusion, the study findings are consistent with an individual differences account of emotion-based decision-making, and a number of issues need to be addressed prior to recommending the clinical use of the BGT

THE IOWA GAMBLING TASK: REAL VERSUS FACSIMILE REWARDS AND PSYCHOPATHY

The Iowa Gambling Task (Bechara, Damasio, Damasio, & Anderson, 1994) has been the foundation of much of the recent research on adaptive decision making in humans. This task was first described by Bechara et al. in their research on patients with ventromedial (VM) lesions. These investigators have found impairments in the decision making processes of those with VM lesions. The Iowa Gambling Task was developed in an attempt to quantify those adaptive decision making deficits and has since been used to study adaptive decision making in those with antisocial and aggressive personalities(Blair, 2004; Blair, Colledge, & Mitchell, 200); substance abusers (Bolla et al., 2002);children and age differences (Garon & Moore, 2004; Kerr & Zelazo, 2004); as well as instrumental and reactive aggression (Berkowitz, 1993, Raine et al., 1998). However,much remains to be understood about this experimental decision making task,specifically, the type of reinforcement provided. Bowman and Turnbull (2003) recently demonstrated that groups receiving real contingencies did not differ from a group that received imagined contingencies. However, we know that antisocial and psychopathic traits are related to both Iowa Gambling Task performance and the perception of positive and negative contingencies. This study examined the differences between real and facsimile reinforcers, while taking the personality of the individual into account. Similar results were found in comparison to Bowman and Turnbull's study in that participants learned the task over trials, however no significant difference was found between real versus facsimile reinforcers. Furthermore, scores on the Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy Scale and the M5 domains of Neuroticism, Extroversion, Agreeableness,and Conscientiousness did not result in significant improvement of selections between the facsimile condition and the cash condition

Self-Deception as Affective Coping. An Empirical Perspective on Philosophical Issues

In the philosophical literature, self-deception is mainly approached through the analysis of paradoxes. Yet, it is agreed that self-deception is motivated by protection from distress. In this paper, we argue, with the help of findings from cognitive neuroscience and psychology, that self-deception is a type of affective coping. First, we criticize the main solutions to the paradoxes of self-deception. We then present a new approach to self-deception. Self-deception, we argue, involves three appraisals of the distressing evidence: (a) appraisal of the strength of evidence as uncertain, (b) low coping potential and (c) negative anticipation along the lines of Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis. At the same time, desire impacts the treatment of flattering evidence via dopamine. Our main proposal is that self-deception involves emotional mechanisms provoking a preference for immediate reward despite possible long-term negative repercussions. In the last part, we use this emotional model to revisit the philosophical paradoxes

Learning Bayes-optimal dendritic opinion pooling

Pooling different opinions and weighting them according to their reliability is conducive to making good decisions. We demonstrate that single cortical neurons, through the biophysics of conductance-based coupling, perform such complex probabilistic computations via their natural dynamics. While the effective computation can be described as a feedforward process, the implementation critically relies on the bidirectional current flow along the dendritic tree. We suggest that dendritic membrane potentials and conductances encode opinions and their associated reliabilities, on which the soma acts as a decision maker. Furthermore, we derive gradient-based plasticity rules, allowing neurons to learn to represent desired target distributions and to weight afferents according to their reliability. Our theory shows how neurons perform Bayes-optimal cue integration. It also explains various experimental findings, both on the system and on the single-cell level, and makes new, testable predictions for intracortical neuron and synapse dynamics

Taking Turing by Surprise? Designing Digital Computers for morally-loaded contexts

There is much to learn from what Turing hastily dismissed as Lady Lovelace s objection. Digital computers can indeed surprise us. Just like a piece of art, algorithms can be designed in such a way as to lead us to question our understanding of the world, or our place within it. Some humans do lose the capacity to be surprised in that way. It might be fear, or it might be the comfort of ideological certainties. As lazy normative animals, we do need to be able to rely on authorities to simplify our reasoning: that is ok. Yet the growing sophistication of systems designed to free us from the constraints of normative engagement may take us past a point of no-return. What if, through lack of normative exercise, our moral muscles became so atrophied as to leave us unable to question our social practices? This paper makes two distinct normative claims: 1. Decision-support systems should be designed with a view to regularly jolting us out of our moral torpor. 2. Without the depth of habit to somatically anchor model certainty, a computer s experience of something new is very different from that which in humans gives rise to non-trivial surprises. This asymmetry has key repercussions when it comes to the shape of ethical agency in artificial moral agents. The worry is not just that they would be likely to leap morally ahead of us, unencumbered by habits. The main reason to doubt that the moral trajectories of humans v. autonomous systems might remain compatible stems from the asymmetry in the mechanisms underlying moral change. Whereas in humans surprises will continue to play an important role in waking us to the need for moral change, cognitive processes will rule when it comes to machines. This asymmetry will translate into increasingly different moral outlooks, to the point of likely unintelligibility. The latter prospect is enough to doubt the desirability of autonomous moral agents

Emotion-based learning: Insights from the Iowa Gambling Task.

Interest in the cognitive and/or emotional basis of complex decision-making, and the related phenomenon of emotion-based learning, has been heavily influenced by the Iowa Gambling Task. A number of psychological variables have been investigated as potentially important in understanding emotion-based learning. This paper reviews the extent to which humans are explicitly aware of how we make such decisions; the biasing influence of pre-existing emotional labels; and the extent to which emotion-based systems are anatomically and functionally independent of episodic memory. Review of literature suggests that (i) an aspect of conscious awareness does appear to be readily achieved during the IGT, but as a relatively unfocused emotion-based “gut-feeling,” akin to intuition; (ii) Several studies have manipulated the affective pre-loading of IGT tasks, and make it clear that such labeling has a substantial influence on performance, an experimental manipulation similar to the phenomenon of prejudice. (iii) Finally, it appears that complex emotion-based learning can remain intact despite profound amnesia, at least in some neurological patients, a finding with a range of potentially important clinical implications: in the management of dementia; in explaining infantile amnesia; and in understanding of the possible mechanisms of psychotherapy

Current understanding in climbing psychophysiology research

The sport of rock climbing places a significant physiological and psychological load on participants. Psychophysiological analysis provides a unique insight into affective states arising from the demands of climbing, and the impact that they have on performance. This review provides an overview of climbing psychophysiology research completed to date. To summarise, an on-sight lead ascent of a route elicits the greatest psychophysiological response in climbers; whilst, a red-point top-rope ascent produces the least. The affects of climbing stimuli on an individual’s performance appear to be conditional on their experience. In general, experienced climbers show superior performance and are less anxious than their less practiced counterparts, with significantly lower cognitive and somatic anxiety, increased self-confidence and lower values of the steroid stress hormone cortisol. It is likely that the experience-stressor-performance relationship is due to advanced climbers’ greater understanding of the risks associated with the sport, their habituation to the stressors gained through practice and their ability to perform well with higher levels of anxiety. This review outlines pertinent psychological climbing stimuli, summarise current methodologies and presents a detailed review of climbing psychophysiology research. It also concludes with suggestions for improving the depth and breadth of future research, including the need for the refinement of existing measures