ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Psychopathic individuals exhibit but do not avoid regret during counterfactual decision making.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 62 citations in OpenAlex.
- Neural correlates of aggression in personality disorders from the perspective of DSM-5 maladaptive traits: a systematic review.Translational psychiatry · 2023Pooled it
- Negative Contextual Valence Unmasks Altered Counterfactual Decision-Making in Major Depressive Disorder.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- Exploring when to exploit: the cognitive underpinnings of foraging-type decisions in relation to psychopathy.Translational psychiatry · 2025Article
- Psychopathic Traits and Romantic Attachment: The Mediating Role of Emotion Dysregulation.Clinical neuropsychiatry · 2024Article
- Dissociated deficits of anticipated and experienced regret in at-risk suicidal individuals.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2023Article
- Emotional Context Sculpts Action Goal Representations in the Lateral Frontal Pole.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2022Article
- Rational, emotional, or both? Subcomponents of psychopathy predict opposing moral decisions.Behavioral sciences & the law · 2021Article
- Psychopathy is associated with an exaggerated attention bottleneck: EEG and behavioral evidence from a dual-task paradigm.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2021Article
- Article
- Counterfactual Thinking-Related Emotional Responses in Patients With Major Depressive Disorder.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2020Article
- Cognitive Training for Very High Risk Incarcerated Adolescent Males.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2020Article
- Neurocognitive assessment in obsessive compulsive disorder patients: Adherence to behavioral decision models.PloS one · 2019Article
- The Effect of Reduced Learning Ability on Avoidance in Psychopathy: A Computational Approach.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
- Psychopathy is associated with shifts in the organization of neural networks in a large incarcerated male sample.NeuroImage. Clinical · 2019Article
- To Brake or Not to Brake? Personality Traits Predict Decision-Making in an Accident Situation.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
- Using Neuroscience to Make Sense of Psychopathy.Biological psychiatry · 2018Article
- Predicting Violent Behavior: What Can Neuroscience Add?Trends in cognitive sciences · 2018Review
- Norms and the Flexibility of Moral Action.Personality neuroscience · 2018Review
- The neuroscience of morality and social decision-making.Psychology, crime & law : PC & L · 2018Article
- White matter correlates of psychopathic traits in a female community sample.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Psychopathy is associated with persistent antisocial behavior and a striking lack of regret for the consequences of that behavior. Although explanatory models for psychopathy have largely focused on deficits in affective responsiveness, recent work indicates that aberrant value-based decision making may also play a role. On that basis, some have suggested that psychopathic individuals may be unable to effectively use prospective simulations to update action value estimates during cost-benefit decision making. However, the specific mechanisms linking valuation, affective deficits, and maladaptive decision making in psychopathy remain unclear. Using a counterfactual decision-making paradigm, we found that individuals who scored high on a measure of psychopathy were as or more likely than individuals low on psychopathy to report negative affect in response to regret-inducing counterfactual outcomes. However, despite exhibiting intact affective regret sensitivity, they did not use prospective regret signals to guide choice behavior. In turn, diminished behavioral regret sensitivity predicted a higher number of prior incarcerations, and moderated the relationship between psychopathy and incarceration history. These findings raise the possibility that maladaptive decision making in psychopathic individuals is not a consequence of their inability to generate or experience negative emotions. Rather, antisocial behavior in psychopathy may be driven by a deficit in the generation of forward models that integrate information about rules, costs, and goals with stimulus value representations to promote adaptive behavior.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.