Sylco S Hoppenbrouwers

Erasmus University Rotterdam | EUR · Clinical Psychology

It is well established that poor inhibitory control confers both a vulnerability to, and maintenance of, addictive behaviors across the substance and behavioral spectrums. By comparison, the role of compulsivity in addictive behaviors has received less research focus. The neurocognitive literature to date is vast, and it is unclear whether there ar...

Background In this study, we examined whether early-life trauma, psychopathy, and the testosterone/cortisol ratio predicted impulsive aggression problems in veterans. Method A sample of 49 male veterans with impulsive aggression problems and 51 nonaggressive veterans were included in the study. Logistic regression analysis was performed with early...

Objective: Two major etiological theories on psychopathy propose different mechanisms as to how emotional facial expressions are processed by individuals with elevated psychopathic traits. The Response Modulation Hypothesis (RMH) proposes that psychopathic individuals show emotional deficits as a consequence of atten-tional deployment, suggesting t...

In the current study, a gaze-cueing experiment (similar to Dawel et al. 2015) was conducted in which the predictivity of a gaze-cue was manipulated (non-predictive vs highly predictive). This was done to assess the degree to which individuals with elevated psychopathic traits can use contextual information (i.e., the predictivity of the cue). Psych...

Background: Psychopathy has repeatedly been linked to disturbed associative learning from aversive events (i.e., threat conditioning). Optimal threat conditioning requires the generation of internal representations of stimulus-outcome contingencies and the rate with which these may change. Because mental representations are imperfect, there will a...

Impairments in executive functioning give rise to reduced control of behavior and impulses, and are therefore a risk factor for violence and criminal behavior. However, the contribution of specific underlying processes remains unclear. A crucial element of executive functioning, and essential for cognitive control and goal-directed behavior, is vis...

Changes in pupil diameter can reflect high-level cognitive signals that depend on central neuromodulatory mechanisms. However, brain mechanisms that adjust pupil size are also exquisitely sensitive to changes in luminance and other events that would be considered a nuisance in cognitive experiments recording pupil size. We implemented a simple audi...

Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized by interpersonal manipulation and callousness, and reckless and impulsive antisocial behavior. It is often seen as a disorder in which profound emotional disturbances lead to antisocial behavior. A lack of fear in particular has been proposed as an etiologically salient factor. In this review, we...

Psychopathy is a severe personality disorder, the core of which pertains to callousness, an entitled and grandiose interpersonal style often accompanied by impulsive and reckless endangerment of oneself and others. The response modulation theory of psychopathy states that psychopathic individuals have difficulty modulating top-down attention to inc...

Psychopathic patients show a lack of affective reactivity in threatening situations. Previous research has shown that this lack of affective reactivity can be explained by diminished processing of goal-irrelevant information once psychopathic individuals initiate goal-directed behavior. Although the response modulation theory of psychopathy has cla...

The traditional distinction between exogenous and endogenous attentional control has recently been enriched with an additional mode of control, termed "selection history." Recent findings have indicated, for instance, that previously rewarded or punished stimuli capture more attention than their physical attributes would predict. As such, the value...

An influential neurobiological model of personality is the Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory, which postulates how basic motivational systems (behavioral activation system [BAS], behavioral inhibition system [BIS]) can help account for the development and expression of individual differences in personality. Earlier research has documented a link bet...

Evidence shows that repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) changes cortical inhibition (CI) and excitability and that these changes may relate to its therapeutic effects. This study aimed to investigate the effects of differing durations or 'doses' of rTMS on cortical inhibition and excitability in healthy subjects. Four different expe...

Psychopathic offenders show a persistent pattern of emotional unresponsivity to the often horrendous crimes they perpetrate. Recent studies have related psychopathy to alterations in white matter. Therefore, diffusion tensor imaging followed by tract-based spatial statistics (TBSS) analysis in 11 psychopathic offenders matched to 11 healthy control...

Background: Psychopathic offenders inevitably violate interpersonal norms and frequently resort to aggressive and criminal behaviour. The affective and cognitive deficits underlying these behaviours have been linked to abnormalities in functional interhemispheric connectivity. However, direct neurophysiological evidence for dysfunctional connectiv...

Application of magnetic or electrical stimulation to the motor cortex can result in a period of electromyography (EMG) silence in a tonically active peripheral muscle. This period of EMG silence is referred to as the silent period (SP). The duration of SP shows intersubject variability and reflects the integrity of cortical and corticospinal pathwa...

Often typified as cunning social predators, psychopathic offenders show a persistent pattern of impulsive and reckless behavior, the pathophysiology of which has been related to dysfunction in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). That is, the DLPFC is important for the regulatory control of impulses and emotion as well as working memory and...

Several lines of evidence suggest that obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is associated with an inability to inhibit unwanted intrusive thoughts. The neurophysiological mechanisms mediating such inhibitory deficits include abnormalities in cortical γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) inhibitory as well as N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor-mediated mecha...

Throughout the development of psychology the delineation of personality has played a central role. Together with the NEO-PI-R, a questionnaire derived from the Five Factor Model of Personality, and recent advances in research technology it is now possible to investigate the relationship between personality features and neurophysiological brain proc...

Alcohol has renowned behavioral disinhibitory properties which are suggested to involve reductions in frontal lobe functioning as a result of diminished interhemispheric connectivity. To examine sex differences in frontal interhemispheric connectivity in response to alcohol, 12 female and ten male healthy volunteers received a single administration...

Previous research has demonstrated that the cerebellum is involved in emotive and cognitive processes. Furthermore, recent findings suggest high-frequency repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to the cerebellum has mood-improving properties. We sought to further explore the effects of cerebellar high-frequency rTMS on implicit process...

The cerebellum has traditionally been looked upon as a brain area primarily involved in motor behaviour. The last decade has however heralded the cerebellum as a brain region of renewed interest for neuropsychiatric disorders. This renewed interest is fuelled by new insights obtained from neuroanatomical research, modern functional neuroimaging and...