Psychopathy and Cognitive Control – Examining Event Related Potentials of Psychopathy in a Go/No-Go Task

Previous studies have shown mixed results regarding the association between neural processes and psychopathic personality traits. Specifically, event related potentials (ERP) associated with cognitive processes reflecting conflict monitoring, impulsivity, and error processing are inconsistently associated with measurements of psychopathic constructs. These ERP may be related to activity in the anterior cingulate cortex of the brain, which is also associated with motivation and behavioral monitoring. Using a Go/No-Go task, this study investigated the relationship between psychopathic traits and cognitive processes at the neural level using a psychopathic trait self-report measure (i.e., the Short Dark Tetrad questionnaire) and ERP measures of conflict monitoring (N2), response inhibition (P3), and error monitoring (ERN/Pe). We hypothesized that N2, P3, ERN, and Pe amplitudes would be inversely associated with psychopathic traits, suggesting deficient neural activity related to monitoring task-relevant information or behavior, inhibiting impulsive responses, and processing errors to improve task related performance are associated with increased psychopathic traits. However, we found no evidence of a relationship between psychopathic traits and Go/No-Go task performance or related neural activity. These findings indicate that traits of psychopathy may not be associated with these neurocognitive processes in a simple executive task such as the Go/No-Go task. Future research investigating the relationship between these processes and psychopathic traits utilizing more complex cognitive tasks may be more effective in capturing differences in neural activity by requiring engagement of multiple cognitive processes simultaneously.