Young Offenders’ Emotion Recognition Dysfunction Across Emotion Intensities: Explaining Variation Using Psychopathic Traits,Conduct Disorder and Offense Severity

Antisocial individuals have problems recognizing negative emotions (e.g. Marsh & Blair in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 32:454–465, 2009); however, due to issues with sampling and different methods used, previous findings have been varied. Sixty-three male young offenders and 37 age-, IQ- and socio-economic status-matched male controls completed a facial emotion recognition task, which measures recognition of happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, and surprise and neutral expressions across 4 emotional intensities. Conduct disorder (YSR), and psychopathic and callous/unemotional traits (YPI) were measured, and offenders’ offense data were taken from the Youth Offending Service’s case files. Relative to controls, offenders were significantly worse at identifying sadness, low intensity disgust and high intensity fear. A significant interaction for anger was also observed, with offenders showing reduced low- but increased high-intensity anger recognition in comparison with controls. Within the young offenders levels of conduct disorder and psychopathic traits explained variation in sadness and disgust recognition, whereas offense severity explained variation in anger recognition. These results suggest that antisocial youths show specific problems in recognizing negative emotions and support the use of targeted emotion recognition interventions for problematic behavior.     

Psychopathy and Functions of Aggression in Emerging Adulthood: Moderation by Anger Rumination and Gender

Psychopathy has been previously identified as a risk factor for aggression (Porter and Woodworth 2006). However, few studies have considered specific relationships with functional subtypes of aggression, or how gender and anger rumination affect these relationships in emerging adulthood. We hypothesized that primary psychopathy would be uniquely related to proactive aggression (PA) and secondary psychopathy to reactive aggression (RA), and that these relationships would be amplified by anger rumination, and potentially influenced further by gender. Undergraduate students (N = 610; 73.3 % female) ages 18–20 completed self-report measures of anger rumination, psychopathy, and aggression, and hypotheses were tested using hierarchical regression. As predicted, anger rumination enhanced the association between secondary psychopathy and RA. It also amplified the relationship between primary psychopathy and PA, but only at very high levels of anger rumination. Gender moderated interactions between primary and secondary psychopathy on aggression. For men, primary psychopathy attenuated the secondary psychopathy – RA relationship, but not for women. These findings fill an important gap in the literature by demonstrating how tendencies to ruminate on anger and psychopathic traits interact to influence functional subtypes of aggression in young men versus women.     

Psychopathy traits and the processing of emotion words: Results of a lexical decision task

Research has indicated that individuals possessing psychopathic traits exhibit a deficit in the processing of emotional stimuli. Lexical decision task studies found that psychopathic individuals do not demonstrate affective facilitation in processing emotional words relative to nonpsychopathic individuals. However, these investigations have not examined processing of discrete affective categories and their relation to the callous/unemotional (F1) and impulse control/antisocial (F2) factors of psychopathy. Sixty undergraduate men completed a self-report measure of psychopathy traits and a lexical decision task assessing response latencies to anger, sadness, fear, and happiness words. Results reflected an association between F2 and a heightened experience of anger, whereas F1 was associated with a diminished experience of sadness. Findings are discussed in terms of the relation to existing research using alternative methods of processing affect.     

A Selective Impairment in the Processing of Sad and Fearful Expressions in Children with Psychopathic Tendencies

The processing of emotional expressions is fundamental for normal socialisation and interaction. Reduced responsiveness to the expressions of sadness and fear has been implicated in the development of psychopathy (R. J. R. Blair, 1995). The current study investigates the sensitivity of children with psychopathic tendencies to facial expressions. Children with psychopathic tendencies and a comparison group, as defined by the Psychopathy Screening Device (PSD; P. J. Frick & R. D. Hare, in press), were presented with a cinematic display of a standardised set of facial expressions that depicted sadness, happiness, anger, disgust, fear, and surprise. Participants observed as these facial expressions slowly evolved through 20 successive frames of increasing intensity. The children with psychopathic tendencies presented with selective impairments; they needed significantly more stages before they could successfully recognise the sad expressions and even when the fearful expressions were at full intensity were significantly more likely to mistake them for another expression. These results are interpreted with reference to an amygdala and empathy impairment explanation of psychopathy.     

Facial affect recognition in college students with psychopathic traits: A comparison using tests matched in discriminating power

Research has provided inconsistent evidence for the relationship between psychopathy and facial affect recognition. We examined whether some of the previous findings could reflect a psychometric artifact in which deficits are more easily detected with very discriminating measures than with less discriminating measures, an issue not addressed in prior psychopathy studies. We developed measures of facial affect recognition matched in discriminating power and administered these measures to 194 college students who had also completed the Psychopathic Personality Inventory. Results indicate that high levels of Coldheartedness were associated with poorer recognition of the specific emotion of disgust. These findings demonstrate that some affective processing deficits associated with psychopathic traits cannot be attributed to psychometric artifacts.     

An inter-hemispheric imbalance in the psychopath’s brain

Psychopathy is associated with two extremities. On the one hand, psychopathic individuals lack any concern for social norms and they are severely poor in maintaining healthy social relationships. In addition, the ability of individuals with psychopathy to feel certain emotions such as empathy, guilt or fear is seriously compromised. In contrast to these deficits, some behaviors and tendencies are exaggerated in psychopathy. For instance, psychopathic individuals display higher than normal impulsivity, stimulation-seeking, aggression and risk-taking. There are indications in the literature that pro-social behavior, as well as the feelings of empathy, guilt and fear are mediated predominantly by regions within the right hemisphere (RH), whereas impulsivity, stimulation-seeking, aggression and risk-taking are linked primarily with left hemisphere (LH) activity. From a neurobiological perspective, it seems that psychopathy may be associated with an altered and imbalanced inter-hemispheric dynamics; a relatively hyperfunctioning LH and/or a hypofunctioning RH. Furthermore, within the psychopathic population, the RH hypofunctioning is more characteristic of primary psychopathy with its affective and interpersonal deficits, while the LH hyperfunctioning is most typical of the secondary psychopathy which is marked by impulsivity and antisocial style.     

Turning a deaf ear to fear: impaired recognition of vocal affect in psychopathic individuals

The processing of emotional expressions is fundamental for normal socialization and interaction. Reduced responsiveness to the expressions of sadness and fear has been implicated in the development of psychopathy (R. J. R. Blair, 1995). The current study investigates the ability of adult psychopathic individuals to process vocal affect. Psychopathic and nonpsychopathic adults, defined by the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R; R. D. Hare, 1991), were presented with neutral words spoken with intonations conveying happiness, disgust, anger, sadness, and fear and were asked to identify the emotion of the speaker on the basis of prosody. The results indicated that psychopathic inmates were particularly impaired in the recognition of fearful vocal affect. These results are interpreted with reference to the low-fear and violence inhibition mechanism models of psychopathy.     

Autismus oder „Psychopathy“?

According to the concept of Hare autism spectrum disorders and psychopathy are associated with a strong deficit in empathy. However, empathy deficits in patients suffering from autism spectrum disorders and empathy deficits in individuals with psychopathic personality traits appear to be different. Some authors described the comorbid occurrence of psychopathic personality traits/psychopathy in individuals with autism spectrum disorders. The following article aims to approach this differential diagnostic problem by a brief review of the literature on a casuistic basis. This article reports the case of a highly remarkable 17-year-old adolescent. The case will be discussed according to the construct of psychopathy with reference to the concept of Hare.     

精神病态的家庭风险因素

精神病态(psychopathy)是一种个体表现在人际关系、情感、生活方式和反社会特征等方面的人格障碍, 其特征为自我中心、欺骗、冲动、缺乏共情、缺乏罪恶感等。以往研究偏向于精神病态的生理机制, 认为精神病态具有高度的遗传性, 近期越来越多的研究发现家庭因素对精神病态的重要影响。这些因素包括：产前风险因素、破碎家庭、不良的教养方式、不安全的亲子依恋关系和童年期虐待等。未来的研究应探讨家庭因素对各个精神病态亚型的作用机制, 探索抑制精神病态表达的保护性环境因子, 并构建精神病态的生物心理社会模型等。     

Different routes to limited empathy in the sexes: Examining the links between the Dark Triad and empathy

A fundamental observation regarding the Dark Triad traits (i.e., narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism) is that they are all associated with limited empathy. However, little is known about these relationships beyond some basics. In this study (N = 352), we asked three questions. What is the nature of the relationship between the Dark Triad traits and empathy? Does limited empathy account for sex differences in the Dark Triad? Are men and women low on empathy through different personality traits? The Dark Triad traits were all related to low levels of empathy even when controlling for the shared variance among the traits. Empathy rates mediated sex differences in different aspects of the Dark Triad but not others. Low empathy rates were related to narcissism in women but psychopathy in men, suggesting different routes to limited empathy for men and women high on the Dark Triad.     

Detection and recognition of emotional expressions: Effects of traits of personality disorder and gender

A problem in the processing of emotions has long been thought to be strongly associated with the aetiology and maintenance of personality disorders. Previous research has demonstrated a hyposensitivity to the faces expressing fear in those high on the traits of psychopathy, while patients with BPD have been shown to be hypersensitive to expressions in general. However, many previous studies could be explained by a bias in reporting particular expressions rather than a change in sensitivity to these expressions. Using two tasks, the present study examined both the detection and the recognition of four emotional expressions (anger, happy, sad, and fear) in a community sample of males and females. Measures of self-reported psychopathy and Borderline Personality traits were administered. The results showed marked gender differences. Psychopathy was negatively related to performance in both the detection and recognition of fear, but only for males. Borderline Personality traits were positively related to overall performance in the recognitions task, but only for females. The results suggest strong differences in the role that emotional processing might play between the genders.     

With or Without Empathy: Primary Psychopathy and Difficulty in Identifying Feelings Predict Utilitarian Judgment in Sacrificial Dilemmas

Drawing from research on moral judgment and affective dysfunction, we examined how trait psychopathy and alexithymia, which are characterized as empathic deficits, relate to utilitarian moral judgments in sacrificial dilemmas. As predicted, primary and secondary psychopathy traits and alexithymia were associated with reduced empathic concern. However, primary psychopathy and difficulty identifying feelings (one of three alexithymia traits), but not secondary psychopathy and other two alexithymia traits, were associated with utilitarian judgments. Moreover, hierarchical regression analysis showed that primary psychopathy, difficulty identifying feelings, and empathic concern made unique contributions to the prediction of direct harm on the victim, whereas alexithymia traits made weaker contributions. Although the lack of affective empathy is found in psychopathy and alexithymia, the process through which the two traits lead to utilitarian judgment in sacrificial dilemmas may be distinct. The present findings add to the growing literature, contributing to a fuller picture of the relationship between empathy, trait psychopathy, and alexithymia.     

Facial Affect Recognition and Psychopathy: A Signal Detection Theory Perspective

Though emotional processing deficits are often conceptualized as a core feature of psychopathy, the common assessment of these deficits using the percentage correct (or hit rate) on affect recognition tasks may not provide a full or accurate picture of facial affect recognition in psychopathic individuals. Signal detection theory (SDT) provides a more informative statistical approach by providing independent measures of perceptual sensitivity (d’) and willingness to report perceiving a signal or response criterion (c). The current study employed signal detection methods to test the predictions of the integrated emotion systems and hostile attribution bias perspectives, two theoretical perspectives that make specific predictions regarding facial affect recognition. These perspectives were tested in a sample of 280 adult male incarcerated offenders who were assessed for psychopathy using the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised and who completed a novel test of facial affect recognition presenting 324 digital morphs of faces reflecting systematic combinations of pixels from neutral and affective face images (displaying six different types of emotion) as expressed by four different actors. The findings were generally not consistent with either of these perspectives. Psychopathy was negatively associated with d` for anger. Results also indicated an effect of psychopathy on response criterion for fear and effects of psychopathy on response criterion for anger and surprise that were evident only for some actors. The implications of these findings are considered through the lenses of several theoretical perspectives, and theoretical and methodological limitations of the current study are considered.

     

Empathy,morality and psychopathic traits in women

Empathic and moral processing correlates of psychopathic personality have seldom been studied in women. In this study, we experimentally tested associations between psychopathic personality traits and empathic and moral processing in a female sample, and further directly compared them to results from a male sample. We found that high levels of affective-interpersonal traits were associated with diminished affective response to sad and fearful emotions in others; lower propensity to feel moral emotions; higher endorsement of utilitarian solutions to moral dilemmas involving direct harm; and less self-reported difficulty when performing moral decision making. Overall, our findings strengthen the view that the two dimensions of psychopathy make distinct contributions to emotional and moral processing; and demonstrate that, in women, psychopathic personality traits are associated with a similar pattern of empathic and moral processing biases as the one that has been previously reported in men.     

The influence of gender,social roles,and facial appearance on perceived emotionality

One of the most pervasive gender stereotypes in Western culture concerns expectations regarding men's and women's emotionality. Whereas men are expected to be anger prone, women are expected to smile more. At the same time, men are generally perceived as more facially dominant and facially dominant individuals are expected to show more anger. That is, both facial appearance and social role expectations would lead observers to expect men to show more anger. The present research had the goal to disentangle the unique contribution of these two factors. As it is impossible in our society to fully untangle the influence of these factors since they are highly confounded, we created an alien society where these factors could be unconfounded. In this alien world, Deluvia, child rearing is exclusively assumed by a third gender, the caregiver, whereas men and women share the same social roles. The facial appearance of the Deluvians was varied along the dominance continuum. The results showed that facially dominant Deluvians, regardless of gender, were expected to show more anger, disgust, and contempt and less happiness, fear, sadness, and surprise. Also, the nurturing caregivers were expected to show less anger, contempt, and disgust as well as more fear, sadness, and surprise, regardless of facial appearance. No effect of gender per se on perceived emotionality was found. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Attachment-Related Mentalization Moderates the Relationship Between Psychopathic Traits and Proactive Aggression in Adolescence

The lack of affective responsiveness to others’ mental states – one of the hallmarks of psychopathy – is thought to give rise to increased interpersonal aggression. Recent models of psychopathy highlight deficits in attachment security that may, in turn, impede the development of relating to others in terms of mental states (mentalization). Here, we aimed to assess whether mentalization linked to attachment relationships may serve as a moderator for the relationship between interpersonal aggression and psychopathic traits in an adolescent community sample. Data from 104 males and females with a mean age of 16.4 years were collected on mentalization capacities using the Reflective Functioning Scale on the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI). Psychopathic traits and aggressive behavior were measured via self-report. Deficits in mentalization were significantly associated with both psychopathic traits and proactive aggression. As predicted, mentalization played a moderating role, such that individuals with increased psychopathic tendencies did not display increased proactive aggression when they had higher mentalizing capacities. Effects of mentalization on reactive aggression were fully accounted for by its shared variance with proactive aggression. Psychopathic traits alone only partially explain aggression in adolescence. Mentalization may serve as a protective factor to prevent the emergence of proactive aggression in spite of psychopathic traits and may provide a crucial target for intervention.     

Differentiating emotional processing and attention in psychopathy with functional neuroimaging

Individuals with psychopathy are often characterized by emotional processing deficits, and recent research has examined the specific contexts and cognitive mechanisms that underlie these abnormalities. Some evidence suggests that abnormal features of attention are fundamental to emotional deficits in persons with psychopathy, but few studies have demonstrated the neural underpinnings responsible for such effects. Here, we use functional neuroimaging to examine attention–emotion interactions among incarcerated individuals (n = 120) evaluated for psychopathic traits using the Hare Psychopathy Checklist–Revised (PCL-R). Using a task designed to manipulate attention to emotional features of visual stimuli, we demonstrate effects representing implicit emotional processing, explicit emotional processing, attention-facilitated emotional processing, and vigilance for emotional content. Results confirm the importance of considering mechanisms of attention when evaluating emotional processing differences related to psychopathic traits. The affective-interpersonal features of psychopathy (PCL-R Factor 1) were associated with relatively lower emotion-dependent augmentation of activity in visual processing areas during implicit emotional processing, while antisocial-lifestyle features (PCL-R Factor 2) were associated with elevated activity in the amygdala and related salience network regions. During explicit emotional processing, psychopathic traits were associated with upregulation in the medial prefrontal cortex, insula, and superior frontal regions. Isolating the impact of explicit attention to emotional content, only Factor 1 was related to upregulation of activity in the visual processing stream, which was accompanied by increased activity in the angular gyrus. These effects highlight some important mechanisms underlying abnormal features of attention and emotional processing that accompany psychopathic traits.     

Psychopathic traits,gender, and motivations for sex: Putative paths to sexual coercion

Evidence suggests that both men and women perpetrate sexual coercion. Psychological factors, including psychopathic traits and power motivations, have been proposed to characterize male-perpetrated sexual coercion; however, it is unclear whether these factors play a similar role in female-perpetrated coercion or whether other motivations (e.g., intimacy, affect regulation) should be considered. To improve our understanding in this area, the current study first examined relationships between psychopathic traits and sexual coercion in a sample of 1199 undergraduate students (756 women), with gender as a potential moderator of these relationships. Second, the role of motivations for sex (e.g., power, affect regulation) in accounting for the psychopathy-coercion relationship was examined in men and women. Data were collected using an online survey and analyzed using multigroup path analysis. Results implicated impulsive-antisocial traits as particularly important to male-perpetrated verbal (e.g., manipulative) and nonverbal (e.g., physical) coercion, and that this relationship was partially explained by motives for sex involving power. In contrast, psychopathic traits did not appear to play a major role in female perpetrated coercion; instead, emotional value (i.e., intimacy-related) motivations for sex were associated with verbal (e.g., manipulation) coercion in women. In sum, our results support a conceptual model of male perpetration where men who are high in impulsive-antisocial traits may engage in sexual coercion in an attempt to feel powerful. Further, the findings in the female sample suggest that factors other than psychopathy, such as gender role beliefs in regard to sexual encounters, may be particularly important to female perpetrated sexually coercive behavior.     

Recognition of facial expressions of different emotional intensities in patients with frontotemporal lobar degeneration

Behavioural problems are a key feature of frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD). Also, FTLD patients show impairments in emotion processing. Specifically, the perception of negative emotional facial expressions is affected. Generally, however, negative emotional expressions are regarded as more difficult to recognize than positive ones, which thus may have been a confounding factor in previous studies. Also, ceiling effects are often present on emotion recognition tasks using full-blown emotional facial expressions. In the present study with FTLD patients, we examined the perception of sadness, anger, fear, happiness, surprise and disgust at different emotional intensities on morphed facial expressions to take task difficulty into account. Results showed that our FTLD patients were specifically impaired at the recognition of the emotion anger. Also, the patients performed worse than the controls on recognition of surprise, but performed at control levels on disgust, happiness, sadness and fear. These findings corroborate and extend previous results showing deficits in emotion perception in FTLD.     

Secondary psychopathy,but not primary psychopathy,is associated with risky decision-making in noninstitutionalized young adults

Although risky decision-making has been posited to contribute to the maladaptive behavior of individuals with psychopathic tendencies, the performance of psychopathic groups on a common task of risky decision-making, the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT; Bechara, Damasio, Damasio, & Anderson, 1994), has been equivocal. Different aspects of psychopathy (personality traits, antisocial deviance) and/or moderating variables may help to explain these inconsistent findings. In a sample of college students (N = 129, age 18–27), we examined the relationship between primary and secondary psychopathic features and IGT performance. A measure of impulsivity was included to investigate its potential as a moderator. In a joint model including main effects and interactions between primary psychopathy, secondary psychopathy and impulsivity, only secondary psychopathy was significantly related to risky IGT performance, and this effect was not moderated by the other variables. This finding supports the growing literature suggesting that secondary psychopathy is a better predictor of decision-making problems than the primary psychopathic personality traits of lack of empathy and remorselessness.