Role of psychopathic personality traits on the micro-structure of free-operant responding: impacts on goal-directed but not stimulus-drive responses in extinction,☆☆,☆☆☆

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2020.110055Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The study explored effects of psychopathic personality on free-operant responding.

  • Responding was higher on an RR than on an RI schedule.

  • Extinction reduced responding after an initial response burst.

  • Meanness prolonged extinction and promoted an initial response burst.

  • Meanness is associated with aggression and potentiates frustrative non-reward.

Abstract

The current study explored effects of psychopathic personality traits on micro-structure of free-operant responding. Non-clinical participants were recruited, and responded on a multiple random-ratio (RR) random-interval (RI) schedule for points, prior to being placed into extinction. They completed the TriPM to measure psychopathic personality, and were divided into those scoring lower and higher on the sub-scales of the TriPM (meanness, boldness, disinhibition). Responding was higher on RR than RI schedules, with no difference between rates of bout-initiation, but higher rates of within-bout responding the RR schedule. Extinction reduced responding after an initial response burst. No personality traits impacted acquisition of overall free-operant responding, nor its microstructure. However, meanness retarded the course of extinction after promoting an initial response burst. The results suggest psychotics are more goal-directed, consistent with meanness being associated with aggression and low tolerance to frustration, potentiating frustrative non-reward effects.

Introduction

Psychopathy may be regarded as a continuous dimension of personality (Cleckley, 1941; Wilkowski & Robinson, 2008), but its effect on learned behaviour is unclear (Morgan, Gray, & Snowden, 2011). Schedule-controlled behaviour is taken to comprise both ‘bout-initiation’ and ‘within-bout’ responses. ‘Bout-initiation’ responses are controlled by rates of reinforcement (Shull, 2011), through contextual conditioning (Reed, Smale, Owens, & Freegard, 2018), and to be automatic or habitual (Reed, 2020). ‘Within-bout’ responses are controlled by the relationship of behaviour to the reinforcer (Killeen, Hall, Reilly, & Kettle, 2002), and are conscious and goal-directed (Reed, 2020). The current study investigated the impact of psychopathy on the micro-structure of free-operant responding (Killeen et al., 2002; Shull, 2011) during acquisition and extinction to illuminate the effects of psychopathy on learned behaviour.

Psychopaths exhibit aggression, impulsivity, disinhibition, reward-value overestimation, unrealistic-goals (Hosking et al., 2017). These characteristics suggest there should be impacts on behaviour and decision-making, especially in weighing consequences of actions, such as might be expected in the control of free-operant instrumentally-conditioned behaviour (Balleine & Dickinson, 1998; Reed, 2001). Gendreau and Suboski (1971) noted no overall effect of psychopathy on classical conditioning, but suggested different learning mechanisms for those with lower- and higher-psychopathy levels. Those with higher-psychopathy have been suggested to display greater passive avoidance (withholding responding to avoid punishment), and are not modulated by punishment levels; interpreted as an emotional-learning impairment (Blair et al., 2004). Poor modulation of dominant responses also has implicated in psychopaths (Howland, Kosson, Patterson, & Newman, 1993). However, there is little direct evidence about the impact of such traits or processes on instrumental leaning, and none regarding it microstructure.

These above considerations suggest that relationships between psychopathy and schedule-performance may not be straightforward. The suggestion of increased subjective-value for any given stimulus might imply increase operant responding; although, no such effect was observed by Bryan and Kapche (1967). However, as noted by Morgan et al. (2011), there are many dimensions to psychopathological-personality (e.g., meanness, boldness, disinhibition; Patrick, 2010), and not all traits may exhibit an effect on all conditioning tasks.

To examine these effects, psychopathological-traits were measured using the Triarchic Psychopathy Measure (TriPM; Patrick, 2010), and their relationship to free-operant behaviour controlled by random ratio (RR) and random interval (RI) schedules assessed (see Randell, Ranjith-Kumar, Gupta, & Reed, 2009). Assessing the degree to which psychopathological-traits impact stimulus-driven and goal-directed responses can be accomplished by studying the micro-structure of this free-operant responding (Reed, 2020). Cornell et al. (1996) and Glenn and Raine (2009) suggested psychopaths are highly driven ‘instrumentally’ (are strongly directed to a valued goal), rather than being ‘reactive’. This implies a greater sensitivity to goal-directed control, rather than stimulus-driven control (Hosking et al., 2017), suggesting an effect on ‘within-bout’, but not ‘bout-initiation’, responding.

Irrespective of the impact of psychopathic-traits on acquisition, psychopathy may also impact extinction. There are stronger theoretical reasons for suspecting this to be the case; failure to modulate dominant responses implies an impact of psychopathy on extinction (Howland et al., 1993). Increased resistance to extinction would also be predicted by the view that reactive aggression in psychopaths relates to an increased frustration (Blair, 2010), which can drive levels of extinction-responding (Gallup, 1965). However, given the heightened goal-directedness of psychopaths (Cornell et al., 1996), this may be more apparent in extinction of goal-directed within-bout responding, rather than stimulus-driven bout-initiation responding (Hosking et al., 2017). Such an effect may also be especially apparent at times of increased frustration, such as at commencement of extinction (Amsel, 1992).

The present experiment evaluates the effects of psychoticism on human schedule performance in acquisition and extinction, in terms of overall levels of responding, and the micro-structure of that responding. While it was unclear whether there would be impacts of psychoticism during acquisition, it was hypothesised that psychoticism would be related to extinction, especially to within-bout responding during the early stages of extinction.

Section snippets

Participants

75 volunteers (41 males, 34 females) were recruited at a Chinese University (mean age = 18.69 ± 0.64 SD). Participants received no finical payment. There were no explicit inclusion/exclusion criteria. Participants were asked if they had a history of mental illnesses (depression, anxiety, autism spectrum disorder, schizophrenia), they were also prompted to report any other disorders, and/or any current psychoactive medications. None of the sample reported such a history. There have been no

Acquisition

The mean overall response rate (per min) for the sample, on the last trial of conditioning, for the RR schedule was 189.70 ± 9.61 responses per min, and for the RI was 94.27 ± 9.22 responses per min. A repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed a significant effect of schedule, F(1,74) = 67.20, p < .001, η2p = 0.480[95% CI:0.308–0.594], H1/D = 0.999.

A log survivor method was adopted to determine the micro-structure of responding (Shull, 2011). This turns into logs the percentage of

Discussion

The aim of the current study was to document the effects of psychopathic personality traits on free-operant responding order to further understand the influences of personality on human instrumental learning. With respect to the effect of psychopathological traits of meanness, boldness, and disinhibition, as measured by the TriPM scale (Patrick, 2010), none of these traits strongly impacted acquisition of free-operant responding (see also Bryan & Kapche, 1967), nor did they show an impact on

Funding

This research received no funding.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Xioasheng Chen:Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Formal analysis, Investigation, Data curation, Writing - original draft.Lisa A. Osborne:Conceptualization, Resources, Writing - review & editing.Phil Reed:Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Data curation, Writing - review & editing, Supervision, Project administration.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

References (30)

  • H. Cleckley

    The mask of sanity

    (1941)
  • D.G. Cornell et al.

    Psychopathy in instrumental and reactive violent offenders

    Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology

    (1996)
  • M. Domjan et al.

    The principles of learning and behavior

    (1982)
  • G.G. Gallup

    Aggression in rats as a function of frustrative nonreward in a straight alley

    Psychonomic Science

    (1965)
  • P. Gendreau et al.

    Classical discrimination eyelid conditioning in primary psychopaths

    Journal of Abnormal Psychology

    (1971)
  • Cited by (3)

    The reported studies were not pre-registered.

    ☆☆

    Materials, code, and data, are available on request.

    ☆☆☆

    All authors contribution to the study design, data collection, data analysis, manuscript and writing.

    View full text