Empathy and altruistic behavior in antisocial violent offenders with psychopathic traits

Abstract

Deficiencies in empathic functioning are considered a core characteristic of violent behavior. Enhancing empathy in aggressive populations may thus represent a promising intervention target. Hence, the aims of the present work were two-fold: First, we wanted to thoroughly assess empathic competencies and second, we aimed to investigate effects of an empathy induction on experienced empathy levels and prosocial behavior in a sample of violent offenders relative to matched controls. Empathy was assessed using both self-report as well as objective measures. For the empathy induction, participants were presented with empathy inducing and control videos. To assess the effects of the empathy induction on behavior, participants played a dictator game indicative of prosocial behavior after every video. Violent offenders showed no systematic impairment in empathy measures. Despite lower shares in the dictator game across conditions, the empathy induction led to a substantial increase in prosocial behavior in both groups. Importantly, high psychopathy scores were distinctively associated with lower self-reported empathy levels, an attenuated affective responsiveness to the empathy induction, and less altruistic behavior. Treatment programs aiming to improve empathy should take individual characteristics into account and may be applied to distinctive subgroups rather than to violent offenders per se.

Relationships Between Alexithymia and Psychopathy in Heroin Dependent Individuals

“…Studies with offenders have reported inconsistent and mixed findings, with some studies not finding any relationship between alexithymia and psychopathy (Möller et al, 2014) whereas others identifying positive (Kroner and Forth, 1995; Louth et al, 1998; Mayer et al, 2018) or negative (Pham et al, 2010) correlations between the two constructs. These inconsistencies could be due to the heterogeneity in offender samples in these studies with regards to gender [male (Kroner and Forth, 1995; Pham et al, 2010; Möller et al, 2014; Mayer et al, 2018) vs. female (Louth et al, 1998)], type of crimes committed [violent (Kroner and Forth, 1995; Mayer et al, 2018) vs. non-violent, including drug-related crimes (Möller et al, 2014)], and comorbidity with psychiatric disorders (Pham et al, 2010). Studies examining the relationship between psychopathy and alexithymia among students consistently find positive correlations between the two constructs (Grieve and Mahar, 2010; Lander et al, 2012); however, these findings are not representative of the general population (Hanel and Vione, 2016).…”

“…In addition, the inconsistencies between studies could be due to differences in the way psychopathy was measured. Some studies have used interview-based measures such as the PCL-R or the PCL:SV (Kroner and Forth, 1995; Louth et al, 1998; Pham et al, 2010; Möller et al, 2014), while others have administered self-report measures of psychopathy (Grieve and Mahar, 2010; Lander et al, 2012; Mayer et al, 2018).…”

“…Recent studies of psychopathy have focused increasingly on the role of alexithymia and have reported pronounced difficulties in identifying emotions among violent offenders (Garofalo et al, 2017; Gillespie et al, 2018; Mayer et al, 2018). Thus, alexithymia appears to represent a common risk factor for both psychopathy and SUDs and can be considered a potential common underlying mechanism leading to their frequent co-occurrence.…”

The Role of Empathy and Compassion in Conflict Resolution

“…Conversely, another meta-analysis (Miller & Eisenberg, 1988) and other more recent studies (Björkqvist, Österman, & Kaukiainen, 2000) point to a negative association between empathy and aggressive behavior. In addition to correlational evidence, the induction of empathy by confronting participants with the suffering of others has been shown to motivate altruistic behavior (Batson, Duncan, Ackerman, Buckley, & Birch, 1981) or the transfer of monetary resources in economic interactions (Klimecki, Mayer, Jusyte, Scheeff, & Schönenberg, 2016; Mayer, Jusyte, Klimecki-Lenz, & Schönenberg, 2018). Interestingly, the more that participants experienced empathy, the more they helped others in need (Batson et al, 1981; Klimecki, Mayer, et al, 2016).…”

Fairness norm violations in anti-social psychopathic offenders in a repeated trust game

“…It is possible that the norm violations in our sample are related to deficits in spontaneous empathising abilities 39 . Research by Mayer et al 40 suggests that these abilities might be trainable, since violent offenders increased their monetary distributions in a dictator game after an empathy enhancement intervention. Future research should establish whether anti-social offenders would decrease their norm violations with a treatment programme that increases their empathic concerns.…”