Personality and Psychopathy: Shared Behavioral and Biological Traits

Abstract

(from the chapter) Psyhopathic personality describes a personality factor resembling the third major dimension of personality, variously labeled psychoticism, impulsive unsocialized sensation seeking, contrasting, and undercontrol. It involves traits of sensation seeking, impulsivity, aggression, asocialization, and lack of self-control and responsibility. Most of these traits show the same relationship to gender as age and does psychopathic personality: higher in men than women, peaking in late adolescence and early adult life and declining with age. Antisocial behavior first appearing in adolescents shows primarily effects of shared and non-shared environment, but life-course persistent criminality shows a moderate genetic influence. Non-genetic biological factors may also play a role in criminality, particularly violent offenses. The lack of behavioral inhibition in psychopathy may originate in deviant function of the prefrontal cortical and orbitofrontal-septohippocampal systems producing an insensitivity to signals of punishment. Another source of lack of behavioral regulation seems to lie in monoamine oxidase, monoamine, and testosterone levels. Animal models have been useful in more direct testing of the neuropharmacological hypotheses about these traits. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).