Abstract

This study investigated response inhibition and emotional recognition in psychopathic and nonpsychopathic inmates according to the scores of Psychopathy Checklist–Revised. Event-related potentials were collected as subjects performed three emotional Go/NoGo tasks that required participants to respond in Go condition and to inhibit response in NoGo condition. In all tasks, Go stimuli were neutral faces. NoGo stimuli of Task 1 were fearful faces and NoGo stimuli of Task 2 were sad faces and NoGo stimuli of Task 3 were happy faces. The psychopathic offenders showed greater P3 amplitude for fearful faces than for neutral faces at the frontocentral and central areas. For the nonpsychopathic offendoers, this effect was absent or the P3 amplitude was larger on neutral faces than on fearful faces. In Emotional Recognition Test, the psychopaths showed significantly lower accuracy than the nonpsychopaths. These results support that the neural processes involved in response inhibition are abnormal in psychopaths when emotional stimuli of facial expressions are presented.