Psychopathy, attention and emotion

Psychopathy is a developmental disorder marked by emotional hypo-responsiveness and an increased risk for antisocial behavior. Influential attention-based accounts of psychopathy have long been made; however, these accounts have made relatively little reference to general models of attention in healthy individuals. This review has three aims: (1) to summarize current cognitive neuroscience data on differing attentional systems; (2) to examine the functional integrity of these attentional systems in individuals with psychopathy; and (3) to consider the implications of these data for attention and emotion dysfunction accounts of psychopathy.