Faces and facets: The variability of emotion recognition in psychopathy reflects its affective and antisocial features.

Abstract

Psychopathy consists of a constellation of affective-interpersonal features including lack of empathy, callousness, manipulativeness and interpersonal charm, impulsiveness and irresponsibility. Despite its theoretical and predictive value in forensic contexts, the relationships between the psychometric dimensions of psychopathy, including its antisocial features, and the construct's neuropsychological characteristics remain uncertain. In this study, 685 personality-disordered prisoners with histories of serious violent or sexual offenses were assessed for psychopathy before completing a computerized and well-validated assessment of the ability to recognize emotional expressions in the face. Prisoners with more of the affective features of psychopathy, and prisoners with more of its antisocial manifestations, showed relatively poor recognition accuracy of fearfulness and disgust. These relationships were independent and modest but were still evident following correction for demographic features (e.g., ethnicity and socioeconomic status), mental illness (e.g., substance and alcohol misuse), personality disorders (other than antisocial personality disorder) and treatment status. By contrast, the associations between these dimensions of psychopathy and emotion recognition were diminished by controlling for cognitive ability. These findings demonstrate that variability in the ability of high-risk personality-disordered prisoners to recognize emotional expressions in the face-in particular, fear and disgust-reflects both the affective and antisocial aspects of psychopathy, and is moderated by cognitive ability. (PsycINFO Database Record

Relationship between psychopathic traits and performance on the Mini Social Cognition and Emotional Assessment in incarcerated males

“…This was significant in zero-order correlations, but not when controlling for age and IQ. This positive trend is contrary to hypotheses and inconsistent with prior findings (e.g., Igoumenou, Harmer, Yang, Coid, & Rogers, 2017). However, with a different task of OFC functioning, the Iowa Gambling Task, Hughes et al (2015) found psychopathy, and the antisocial facet specifically, to be positively associated with performance.…”

Pupil reactivity to emotional faces among convicted violent offenders: The role of psychopathic traits.

“…However, support for these theories is tempered by an unexpected, positive relationship of callousness, controlling for Boldness and Disinhibition, with accuracy for sad expressions. Although others have reported positive relationships of both interpersonal and antisocial features of psychopathy with accuracy in offender samples (Dargis et al, 2018;Igoumenou et al, 2017), a This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.…”

“…Although several prominent accounts of psychopathy emphasize difficulties in emotional expression recognition (Blair et al, 2014; Moul, Killcross, & Dadds, 2012), there is some debate as to whether these deficits are particular to emotions signaling another’s distress, most notably fear and sadness, or are more generalized across the emotional spectrum, including, for example, anger, disgust, and happy (Brook & Kosson, 2013; Dawel et al, 2012). The callousness dimension in particular appears to be linked with difficulties recognizing others’ distress from their emotional expressions (Brislin et al, 2018; Dargis, Wolf, & Koenigs, 2018; Gillespie, Mitchell, Satherley, Beech, & Rotshtein, 2015; Igoumenou, Harmer, Yang, Coid, & Rogers, 2017) and is associated with amygdala hypoactivity to fearful facial expressions (Jones, Laurens, Herba, Barker, & Viding, 2009; Viding et al, 2012; White et al, 2012). In contrast, the interpersonal dimension is associated with a pattern of reduced attention to the eyes that is generalized across different emotional expressions (Dargis et al, 2018; Gillespie, Rotshtein, Beech, & Mitchell, 2017; Gillespie, Rotshtein, Wells, Beech, & Mitchell, 2015).…”

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