Genetic and Environmental Relations of Executive Functions to Antisocial Personality Disorder Symptoms and Psychopathy

Executive functions (EFs) are high-level cognitive abilities that help regulate thoughts and actions during goal-directed behavior. EF deficits, measured with laboratory cognitive or neuropsychological tasks, have been... [ view full abstract ]

Executive functions (EFs) are high-level cognitive abilities that help regulate thoughts and actions during goal-directed behavior. EF deficits, measured with laboratory cognitive or neuropsychological tasks, have been associated with multiple types of psychopathology, including internalizing and externalizing disorders. With respect to externalizing, meta-analytic findings suggest that antisocial behavior, broadly defined, and psychopathy are associated with lower performance on a range of EF tasks. The generality of the findings suggest that these behaviors may relate to a Common EF factor that captures covariance across multiple correlated but separable EFs and is thought to capture differences in goal implementation abilities. However, it is unclear whether this common factor accounts for all of the EF variance in antisocial behavior and psychopathy, or if they also relate to factors that capture abilities specific to particular EFs, such as updating working memory and shifting mental sets. Moreover, findings that antisocial behavior and lower cognitive ability are particularly associated with the psychopathy dimension reflecting social deviance and impulsivity (i.e., secondary psychopathy), compared to the dimension reflecting emotional-interpersonal functioning (i.e., primary psychopathy), raise the possibility that EF relates primarily to secondary psychopathy. We examined these possibilities with data from the Colorado Longitudinal Twin Study. At age 23, this sample (N=765) completed measures of psychopathy, antisocial personality disorder symptoms (ASPDsx), and nine laboratory tasks tapping multiple EF latent variables -- a Common EF factor, which is isomorphic with individual differences in response inhibition, as well as factors specific to updating working memory (Updating-Specific) and shifting mental sets (Shifting-Specific). Phenotypically, higher ASPDsx and secondary psychopathy, but not primary psychopathy, were associated with lower Common EF. Moreover, both primary and secondary psychopathy negatively correlated with Updating-Specific ability, which was unrelated to ASPDsx. Twin models indicated that the association between secondary psychopathy and ASPDsx was due to both genetic and nonshared environmental influences; however, Common EF’s association with ASPDsx was primarily genetic, whereas its association with secondary psychopathy was primarily environmental. These results indicate that the interrelations among EFs, psychopathy, and ASPD symptoms are multifaceted and may reflect different etiological pathways.