General Emotional Deficit Analysis
The essence of psychopathy is characterized as a personality disorder that affects the normal cognition and the prospective features of the brain. This abnormality has been shown to produce: lack of empathy (including guilt), shallow affect, consistent manipulation of others in addition to premeditated violent antisocial behaviour (Brook, Brieman, & Kosson, 2013; Ly et al., 2012; Viding, McCrory, & Seara-Cardoso, 2014). Psychopaths are unpredictable; their inability to anticipate or comprehend the consequences of their actions can be frightening while albeit simultaneously fascinating. The mechanisms that govern regular individuals are evidently deficient and/or absent in psychopaths. Consequently, the issue of psychopathy has been an area
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There are several divides in the research and treatment of psychopathy that are still controversial. First, there is a dichotomy in theoretical prospective of how psychopathy manifests (Brook et al., 2013). There is the General Emotional Deficit (GED) perspective which focuses on the reduction of the global capacity for emotion and the processing of highly charged emotions on a spectrum. Moreover, there is also the Specific Emotion Deficit (SED) perspective which revolves around specific abnormalities with a select set of emotions that psychopaths demonstrate in addition to decreased regional brain activity (Brook et al., 2013). In their research, they reviewed the current literature and compared the differences between psychopathic and non-psychopathic participants. What they found was that there was no significant finding that made either perspective (GED or SED) more plausible than the other. Both perspectives had evidence to support their respective hypotheses which resulted in inconsistent findings with which perspective was more representative of psychopathy assessment (Brook et al., 2013). Furthermore, Brook et al. (2013) proposed that instead of defining psychopathy between two different perspectives, to instead focus on moderators of emotion processing between psychopathic and non-psychopathic participants. Ly et al. (2012) constituted an initiation of these perspectives by assessing accelerated cortical thinning in psychopaths that would first produce specific deficits and eventually give rise to global deficits. Their reasoning behind this was the lack of neurological evidence behind psychopathy. They observed neurological scans of psychopathic against non-psychopathic brains and found significant cortical thinning in the former. Consequently, they further want to explain the neurobiological basis of the abnormalities in psychopathy. Ly et al. (2012) found that the left insula
There are several divides in the research and treatment of psychopathy that are still controversial. First, there is a dichotomy in theoretical prospective of how psychopathy manifests (Brook et al., 2013). There is the General Emotional Deficit (GED) perspective which focuses on the reduction of the global capacity for emotion and the processing of highly charged emotions on a spectrum. Moreover, there is also the Specific Emotion Deficit (SED) perspective which revolves around specific abnormalities with a select set of emotions that psychopaths demonstrate in addition to decreased regional brain activity (Brook et al., 2013). In their research, they reviewed the current literature and compared the differences between psychopathic and non-psychopathic participants. What they found was that there was no significant finding that made either perspective (GED or SED) more plausible than the other. Both perspectives had evidence to support their respective hypotheses which resulted in inconsistent findings with which perspective was more representative of psychopathy assessment (Brook et al., 2013). Furthermore, Brook et al. (2013) proposed that instead of defining psychopathy between two different perspectives, to instead focus on moderators of emotion processing between psychopathic and non-psychopathic participants. Ly et al. (2012) constituted an initiation of these perspectives by assessing accelerated cortical thinning in psychopaths that would first produce specific deficits and eventually give rise to global deficits. Their reasoning behind this was the lack of neurological evidence behind psychopathy. They observed neurological scans of psychopathic against non-psychopathic brains and found significant cortical thinning in the former. Consequently, they further want to explain the neurobiological basis of the abnormalities in psychopathy. Ly et al. (2012) found that the left insula