ABSTRACT

Striking parallels are evident in the phenomena of psychopathic personality and acute alcohol intoxication. Both are characterized by disinhibited behavior (including heightened aggression, deviant sexual expression, thrillseeking, and irresponsibility) and a disregard for the potentially harmful consequences of such actions. Both are hypothesized to involve disruptions of normal affective and cognitive processes. There is also substantial evidence for a relationship between antisocial personality traits and alcoholism.

This chapter reviews startle-probe investigations of emotional processing in criminal psychopaths and in alcohol-intoxicated normals. Its essential themes are that (1) core affective deficits are associated not with the disinhibitory behavioral features of psychopathy, but with the classic personality symptoms, and (2) alcohol appears to suppress emotional responsiveness not at a primary level, but indirectly, through its effects on higher cognitive processes. We argue for the probable existence of a significant subgroup of antisocial offenders who are analogous to intoxicated normal individuals in their proneness to disinhibited behavior, but are distinct from “primary” psychopaths in that they do not exhibit emotional detachment. Alcohol intoxication (as well as other pharmacological state manipulations) may provide a valuable heuristic for analyzing cognitive-emotional processes underlying persistent antisociality not attributable to a primary deficit in affective response capacity.