A study of verbally-mediated concept formation in psychopathy.
Item
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Title
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A study of verbally-mediated concept formation in psychopathy.
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Identifier
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AAI8821108
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identifier
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8821108
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Creator
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Miller, Laurence.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Louis J. Gerstman
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Date
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1988
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Psychology, Clinical | Psychology, Personality | Psychology, Psychobiology
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Abstract
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The psychopath's impulsive, nonreflective behavior and failure to learn from experience have prompted analogies between this clinical syndrome and that seen in patients with organic frontal lobe impairment. A review of the literature on psychopathy suggests that antisociality and behavioral dyscontrol frequently occur in the context of language disturbances. A model of psychopathic cognition, behavior and personality is elaborated, in which the failure to use language--particularly, inner speech--to guide behavior results in the attenuated development of a self-referential conceptual classification system and, consequently, a stunted sense of identity and autonomy. This in turn accounts for the absence of a stable personal point of reference from which to self-regulate thoughts, feelings and actions. It is this pattern that is hypothesized to characterize the psychopath's cognitive style.;A group of male psychiatric/substance abuse inpatient subjects, divided into High, Medium and Low Psychopathy groups, were administered a set of measures designed to discriminate verbal-conceptual from general-conceptual ability. It was hypothesized that level of psychopathy would correlate with impairment in verbal conceptualization, but not with general conceptualization. This hypothesis was not confirmed with regard to psychopathy. It therefore appears that the psychopaths in the present sample do not suffer a differential deficit in verbal-conceptual ability versus general-conceptual ability. At the same time, subjects at any level of psychopathy show performance that is superior to that of frontal lobe-lesioned patients previously studied with these measures, suggesting that "frontal lobe impairment," per se, cannot describe the neuropsychological pattern of psychopaths. Finally, the results strongly argue against a "narrow localizationistic" approach to psychiatric neuropsychology, and suggestions for increasing the power and utility of such measures in psychiatric settings are offered.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
