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Abstract

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.

Psychopathic traits in adolescents and recognition of emotion in facial expressions

“…A signifi cant proportion of these studies have presented stimuli for three seconds (Blair & Cipolotti, 2000;Blair & Coles, 2000;Blair, Colledge, Murray, & Mitchell, 2001;Blair et al, 2004;Mitchell, Avny, & Blair, 2006). Other studies utilized periods longer than three seconds (McCown, Johnson, & Austin, 1986;Pham & Philippot, 2010;Walz & Benson, 1996).…”

Attention to emotion through a go/no-go task in children with oppositionality and callous–unemotional traits

“…On the one hand, Blair et al [22] put forward a specific deficit for identifying emotions that reflect distress, such as fear and sadness. Typically, developing individuals interpret fear and sadness in others as aversive and when an aggressive act is carried out and an expression of fear or sadness observed, in classical conditioning this act is perceived to be aversive and is inhibited.…”

Brain Processing of Fearful Facial Expression in Mentally Disordered Offenders

“…Psychopathic subjects often present a good, though superficial, ability to understand social signals [17]. Despite this, it has been shown that these subjects often have specific impairments in recognizing sad and fearful facial expressions [18,19], as well as more global impairment in identifying facial expressions [6]. Regardless of the fact that both groups (ASD and PSY) demonstrate impairment in recognizing emotional facial expressions, the different clinical symptoms shown in these two groups could possible correspond to recruitment of different brain networks when processing various facial expressions.…”