70 The task used in this study required participants to view and categorize letter stimuli that could also be used to predict the administration of electric shocks. Instructions engaged either a goal-directed focus on threat-relevant information (ie, the color that predicted electric shocks) or an alternative, threat-irrelevant dimension of the letter stimuli (ie, upper/lower case of the letter or its match/mismatch Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical in a 2-back task). The results provided no evidence of a psychopathy-related deficit in FPS under

conditions that focused attention on the threat-relevant dimension. However, psychopathy scores were significantly and inversely related to FPS under conditions that required participants to focus on a threat-irrelevant dimension Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical of stimuli (ie, when threat cues were peripheral). In a follow-up study, Baskin-Sommers and colleagues59 specified this attentional-mediated abnormality in a new sample of offenders by measuring FPS in four conditions that CP-868596 chemical structure crossed attentional focus (threat versus

alternative Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical focus) with early versus late presentation of goal-relevant cues. First, the authors replicated the key findings reported by Newman et al60: that psychopaths’ deficit in FPS was virtually nonexistent under conditions that focused attention on the threat-relevant dimension of the experimental

stimuli (ie, threat-focus conditions), but was pronounced when threat-relevant cues were peripheral to their primary focus of attention (ie, alternative-focus conditions). More specifically, the psychopathic deficit in FPS was only Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical apparent in the early alternative focus condition, in which threat cues were presented after the alternative goal-directed focus was already established. These results confirm the idea that attention moderates the fearlessness of psychopathic individuals and, moreover, implicate an early attention bottleneck as a proximal mechanism for deficient response Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical modulation in psychopathy (see ref 71 for discussion of the bottleneck). Additionally, Larson and colleagues (unpublished data) recently completed an imaging study using this paradigm with an independent sample of inmates. Results indicated found that decreased amygdala activation in psychopathic offenders occurred only during the early alternative focus condition. Under this condition, psychopaths also exhibited greater activation in selective attention regions of the lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) than nonpsychopaths, and this increased LPFC activation was associated with decreased amygdala activation. In contrast, when explicitly attending to threat, amygdala activation in psychopaths did not differ from nonpsychopaths.