Altered Performance Monitoring in Psychopathy: A Review of Studies on Action Selection, Error, and Feedback Processing

Psychopathy is a serious personality disorder characterized by a range of affective and behavioral adaptation deficits. Behavioral adaptation and individual as well as social functioning require monitoring of one’s behavior, i.e., performance monitoring. Performance monitoring has been associated with specific neurophysiological processes, for instance, an astoundingly uniform sequence in the human EEG. In this review, I will present evidence for altered and likely deficient performance monitoring processes in psychopathy, which can explain a range of behavioral deficits. Previous research, however, is also characterized by inconsistent findings and possible reasons will be discussed. Among some proposals for advancement of the field, applying a multidimensional and not unitary construct perspective of psychopathy may allow detection of unique or differential effects of psychopathic traits and therefore represents a particularly useful approach for future research. Neural responses related to performance monitoring are well-validated units of measurement, and recent research also highlights their value as targets and tools of intervention. © 2016, Springer International Publishing AG.