Unpacking the relationship between Big Five personality traits and experimental pain: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

Pain is essential for survival, but individual responses to painful stimuli vary, representing a complex interplay between sensory, cognitive, and affective factors. Individual differences in personality traits and in pain perception covary but it is unclear which traits play the most significant role in understanding the pain experience and whether this depends on pain modality. A systematic search identified 1534 records (CINAHL, MEDLINE, PsycInfo, PubMed and Web of Science), of which 22 were retained and included in a systematic review. Only studies from the pressure pain domain (n=6) could be compared in a formal meta-analysis to evaluate the relationship between Big Five traits and experimental pain. Pressure pain tolerance correlated positively with Extraversion and negatively with Neuroticism with a trivial effect size (<0.1). While these findings suggest personality might be only weakly related to pain in healthy individuals, we emphasize the need to consider standardization, biases, and adequate sample sizes in future research, as well as additional factors that might affect experimental pain sensitivity.

Social economic decision-making and psychopathy: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

Psychopathy is a personality construct that encompasses a constellation of traits reflecting emotional dysfunction and antisocial behavior. This constellation has consistently been linked to poor decision-making, often focused on personal and monetary gains at the others' expense. However, there remains a lack of a systematic examination of how psychopathy is related to the prospect of obtaining monetary gains as a function of social context. Therefore, we conducted a series of meta-analyses to elucidate these relationships. Our findings indicated that elevated levels of psychopathy are related to a reduced tendency to cooperate with others, and no difference in the extent to which knowledge of others' retaliation possibilities informs decision-making. However, the type of social economic decision-making game employed moderated the association between psychopathic traits and total gain obtained, suggesting that context plays a key role in moderating the link between psychopathic features and decision-making. These findings advance our understanding of psychopathy and open new avenues for research on adaptive and maladaptive social behavior in individuals with high levels of psychopathic traits.

The Relationship Between Treatment Alliance, Social Climate, and Treatment Readiness in Long-Term Forensic Psychiatric Care: An Explorative Study.

For patients in long-term forensic psychiatric care (LFPC), a continuous search for treatment possibilities remains important. An alternative viewpoint to these patients as being untreatable is considering them having low treatment readiness. Treatment readiness incorporates internal client-specific factors as well as factors in the therapeutic situation. In the therapeutic situation both social climate and therapeutic alliance are of positive influence on treatment outcome. In this explorative study of 38 male patients in Dutch LFPC, we found correlations with strong (Bayesian) evidence between internal factors of treatment readiness, treatment alliance, and "Therapeutic Hold," which is a subscale of social climate. In a Bayesian linear regression analysis, however, therapeutic hold seemed to be the only strong predictor of internal treatment readiness. These results give way to further research into the factors specifically contributing to the found correlations, in order to create opportunities to enlarge treatment readiness for patients in forensic care.

Classification and treatment of antisocial individuals: From behavior to biocognition.

Antisocial behavior is a heterogeneous construct that can be divided into subtypes, such as antisocial personality and psychopathy. The adverse consequences of antisocial behavior produce great burden for the perpetrators, victims, family members, and for society at-large. The pervasiveness of antisocial behavior highlights the importance of precisely characterizing subtypes of antisocial individuals and identifying specific factors that are etiologically related to such behaviors to inform the development of targeted treatments. The goals of the current review are (1) to briefly summarize research on the operationalization and assessment of antisocial personality and psychopathy; (2) to provide an overview of several existing treatments with the potential to influence antisocial personality and psychopathy; and (3) to present an approach that integrates and uses biological and cognitive measures as starting points to more precisely characterize and treat these individuals. A focus on integrating factors at multiple levels of analysis can uncover person-specific characteristics and highlight potential targets for treatment to alleviate the burden caused by antisocial behavior.

Neural correlates of error-related learning deficits in individuals with psychopathy.

BACKGROUND: Psychopathy (PP) is associated with a performance deficit in a variety of stimulus-response and stimulus-reinforcement learning paradigms. We tested the hypothesis that failures in error monitoring underlie these learning deficits. METHOD: We measured electrophysiological correlates of error monitoring [error-related negativity (ERN)] during a probabilistic learning task in individuals with PP (n=13) and healthy matched control subjects (n=18). The task consisted of three graded learning conditions in which the amount of learning was manipulated by varying the degree to which the response was predictive of the value of the feedback (50, 80 and 100%). RESULTS: Behaviourally, we found impaired learning and diminished accuracy in the group of individuals with PP. Amplitudes of the response ERN (rERN) were reduced. No differences in the feedback ERN (fERN) were found. CONCLUSIONS: The results are interpreted in terms of a deficit in initial rule learning and subsequent generalization of these rules to new stimuli. Negative feedback is adequately processed at a neural level but this information is not used to improve behaviour on subsequent trials. As learning is degraded, the process of error detection at the moment of the actual response is diminished. Therefore, the current study demonstrates that disturbed error-monitoring processes play a central role in the often reported learning deficits in individuals with PP.