This review summarizes empirical findings that have shown affective deficits of psychopathy. Previous studies have accounted for a failure of moral socialization in individuals with psychopathy in terms of low levels of fearfulness and empathy that may lead to an attenuated ability to inhibit deviant behaviors in response to punishments and distress cues from others. Both low-fear and low-empathy hypotheses have implied that a neural basis of psychopathy is a dysfunction of amygdala, a brain region of the center in affective processing. However, the affective dysfunction of psychopathy can also be associated with adaptive behaviors to maximize gains and minimize losses in some situations. Hence, we propose that psychopathy is one side of humans to shape a selfish strategy if necessary.

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Impulsivity is a multidimensional personality trait and a common symptom of various mental disorders. In this paper, we review multiple perspectives such as behavioral studies, neuroimaging studies, and genetic association studies about response inhibition, which is one aspect of impulsivity. In various studies, the stop-signal paradigm (SSP) has been used to investigate inhibitory mechanisms. In our study, first, the procedure and theory of SSP are introduced. Second, the neural mechanism during response inhibition is ascertained using functional neuroimaging machinery. In particular, the activation of the right ventro-lateral prefrontal cortex associated with the success in response inhibition is examined. A number of genetic association studies showed that specific gene phenotypes affect the accuracy of response inhibition. Thus, understanding the mechanism of response inhibition is linked to the fundamental resolution of impulsive control disorders or personality disorders.

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The Relationship among abusive home environment and dissociative tendency of body and mind, alexithymia tendency, and physical and mental health.
This study examines the relationship among abusive home environment, psychological dissociative tendencies, somatoform dissociation and alexithymia tendencies. A sample of 250 university students participated in a questionnaire survey. The results indicate, significantly positive correlations between each scale, with the exception of the subscale in alexithymia tendency as illustrated by previous research. However, when hierarchical multiple regression analysis was conducted as mental and physical symptoms as dependent variables, the effect of psychosomatic dissociation became non-significant. The results of cluster analysis indicate the followings; two groups of healthy (54.3%), three groups of slightly unhealthy (35.9%), and two groups of clearly unhealthy (9.8%), and the least healthy group shows an extremely high level of psychological dissociative tendencies and somatoform dissociation. It can also be noted that those who show highly psychological dissociative symptoms are unhealthy, regardless of the scores of other measures. Having a high score on scales regarding an abusive home environment or alexithymia tendency did not have any prominent signs of being unhealthy.

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Abnormal psychology provides a rationale for cognitive behavioral theory (CBT) for social anxiety disorder (SAD). We reviewed abnormal psychological research on SAD that focused on the following: (1) the relationship between negative interpretation of bodily sensations and state anxiety, (2) the safety behavior and effects of behavioral experiments, and (3) the relationship between attentional function and social anxiety symptoms. Clearly, the researchers and practitioners of CBT share a theoretical framework and their research addresses the variables directly related to clinical practice, which facilitates the understanding of concrete steps for clinical practice and communication among researchers and practitioners. As these researchers try to understand mental disorder from the perspective of normal psychological functions, basic research would improve our understanding of mental disorder and eliminate the need to discriminate between different disorders. Abnormal psychology is a research area that can be enriched by researchers from such fundamental psychology fields as emotional or cognitive psychology.

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The purposes of this study were to develop the Japanese-version Affective Control Scale (JACS) and to investigate the relationship between fear of emotions and stress responses. In study I, we had 517 undergraduates completed the JACS. Results indicated the JACS had high internal consistency. Also, the subscales of the JACS were substantially intercorrelated. In study II, we had 348 undergraduates completed the questionnaire that assessed fear of emotions, neuroticism, trait meta-mood, and avoidance of negative emotions. Construct validities of the JACS were confirmed based on the correlations of these variables. In Study III, we had 140 undergraduates completed the questionnaire that assessed fear of emotions, coping strategies, and stress responses. As a result, fear of emotions was positively correlated with avoidance and stress responses. Theses results indicate that fear of emotions seem to be the factor linking coping strategies and stress responses. The theoretical and clinical implications of these results were discussed.

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The aim of this article was to review the researches on abnormal psychology for depression, and to figure out how to develop the researches in the future. Recently, depression has become a major social problem. Especially, relapse prevention is the most important factor of the depression care. There, we reviewed the researches on abnormal psychology referring the relapse prevention of depression by focusing on the researchers who are active on this field. The main topics of the present article were below: the emotional processing theory by John D. Teasdale, the first person who has focused on the relapse prevention of depression, 2) the researches that substantiate the theory, and the distinguishing phenomenon related to the relapse, 3) the researches on the effect and mechanism of MBCT that is developed for the relapse prevention of depression, and 4) the research trend of Ed Watkins and Jutta Joormann who lead the recent growth of the abnormal psychology on the depression, and the relations between their theory and the MBCT. At the last, the future directions of the researches on the relapse prevention on depression were discussed. Furthermore, it was noted that the perspective which was necessary to understand the mindfulness was beneficial when think of emotion regulation too.

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Few systematic studies on the developmental change of eye blinks have been conducted, and the results of the research are somewhat inconsistent. Therefore, we have investigated the age and gender differences of children's endogenous eye blinks, by using a larger number of participants (801 participants ranging from 3-month to 16-year olds), delivering the same task to all age groups excluding 3-month babies to 3 year old children, and analyzing also other blink attributes such as closing, reopening and total blink duration. The results showed: (a) blink rates of the 3-month babies were 2–3 blinks per minute (bpm) and increased gradually to the peak blink rate for 9 year old children (23.9 bpm) whose rate was approximately the same as those of adults, (b) no gender difference was obtained throughout all age groups and (c) almost the same developmental curves of blink duration as that of blink rate was found in all age groups except in 1 and 3 year old children, whose durations were the shortest in all age groups.

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In this study, we investigated brain activity under social pressure using Solomon Asch's experimental paradigm. We replicated the group situation using the MORI technique and recorded the brain activity using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Eight Japanese healthy males in groups of four participated in this study. The Asch experiment can be replicated without using confederates using MORI technique. The subject assessed with fNIRS was seated in a fixed position and assigned to answer third. A multichannel fNIRS system was used to measure the changes in the concentrations of oxy-hemoglobin (oxy-Hb) and deoxy-hemoglobin (deoxy-Hb). Nine optodes consisting of 12 channels were placed over the prefrontal cortex (PFC) of each hemisphere. In the behavioral data, the error rate (%) for the judgment tasks increased to 39.7% under the group pressure conditions, while it was 3.2% under the control conditions. Comparing the group pressure and control conditions in the fNIRS data, a difference in the increasing rate of oxy-Hb in the frontal pole (ch02, 05, 13 & 15) was observed. Therefore, we found that the frontal pole was activated when the subject felt social pressure under group situations.

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