Incentive salience & psychopathy: A bio-behavioral exploration

Not all individuals attribute incentive salience to conditional stimuli. For some, reward-cues are more motivating than are actual rewards. Individuals disproportionately attracted to reward-cues are referred to as sign-trackers whereas those attracted to actual rewards are referred to as goal-trackers. In nonhuman animals, sign-tracking is associated with addiction, impulsivity, behavioral persistence, and reinstatement of misbehavior, whereas goal-tracking is associated with intact inhibitory control, reward focus, and the ability to extinguish learned behaviors. In humans, psychopathy is a personality trait that exhibits many sign-tracking characteristics, leading to self- and other-destructive behaviors. Thus, incentive salience may be useful for defining patterns of antisocial behavior within psychopathy.