Stroop tasks associated with differential activation of anterior cingulate do not differentiate psychopathic and non-psychopathic offenders

Attentional models of psychopathy hold that psychopathic individuals fail to process information that conflicts with goal-directed behavior. However, they display normal interference on color-word Stroop tasks. To determine whether psychopathic individuals’ attention deficits are specific to conditions associated with the anterior cingulate (ACC) conflict monitoring system, we administered a Stroop task with a mostly-congruent condition associated with ACC activation, and a mostly-incongruent condition that is not, to 128 criminal offenders assessed for psychopathy using Hare’s (2003) PCL-R. Despite replicating previous condition effects associated with differential ACC activation (Carter et al., 2000), psychopathic offenders and controls performed very similarly in both conditions. Results do not support an association between ACC-related deficits in conflict monitoring and the attention deficits of psychopathic offenders.