Psychopathy and semantic processing: An examination of the N400

Accumulating evidence suggests that psychopathy is associated with behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) abnormalities during semantic language tasks. Psychopaths’ ERP abnormalities are most prominent in the 300–500 ms post-stimulus time window. It is unclear whether these ERP differences are related to neurocognitive processes associated with the P300 (i.e., poor attention/orienting/working memory) or N400 (i.e., aberrant semantic processes). To address this issue, the present study employed a canonical semantic sentence processing paradigm known to selectively elicit the N400. Fifty incarcerated participants were divided into psychopathic (n = 25) or nonpsychopathic (n = 25) groups based on scores from the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised. The N400 and P600 components elicited by terminal words of sentences either congruent or incongruent with the previous sentence context were examined. No differences were observed between groups in the behavioral or ERP data. These data do not support the hypothesis that the semantic processes, and underlying neural systems, associated with the generation of the N400 during sentence processing tasks are abnormal in psychopathy.