期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2016
卷号：113
期号：50
页码：14438-14443
DOI：10.1073/pnas.1609985113
语种：English
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：SignificancePsychopathic individuals display a chronic and flagrant disregard for social norms through their callous behavior and lack of regret for its consequences. Although psychopathy research largely attributes this to deficits in affective responsiveness, recent proposals suggest that value-based decision making may also contribute to the maladaptive behavior of psychopathic individuals. Using a counterfactual decision-making paradigm, we found that higher scores on psychopathy were associated with higher levels of retrospective regret. Despite this, however, individuals higher on psychopathy made riskier choices and were less influenced by prospective regret when making decisions. These findings support the idea that the maladaptive behavior of psychopathic individuals is related to deficits in domain-general cognitive processes, such as counterfactual decision making, rather than a primary affective deficit. Psychopathy is associated with persistent antisocial behavior and a striking lack of regret for the consequences of that behavior. Although explanatory models for psychopathy have largely focused on deficits in affective responsiveness, recent work indicates that aberrant value-based decision making may also play a role. On that basis, some have suggested that psychopathic individuals may be unable to effectively use prospective simulations to update action value estimates during cost-benefit decision making. However, the specific mechanisms linking valuation, affective deficits, and maladaptive decision making in psychopathy remain unclear. Using a counterfactual decision-making paradigm, we found that individuals who scored high on a measure of psychopathy were as or more likely than individuals low on psychopathy to report negative affect in response to regret-inducing counterfactual outcomes. However, despite exhibiting intact affective regret sensitivity, they did not use prospective regret signals to guide choice behavior. In turn, diminished behavioral regret sensitivity predicted a higher number of prior incarcerations, and moderated the relationship between psychopathy and incarceration history. These findings raise the possibility that maladaptive decision making in psychopathic individuals is not a consequence of their inability to generate or experience negative emotions. Rather, antisocial behavior in psychopathy may be driven by a deficit in the generation of forward models that integrate information about rules, costs, and goals with stimulus value representations to promote adaptive behavior.
