Pain processing and antisocial behavior: A multimodal investigation of the roles of boldness and meanness.

Abstract

Antisocial behavior has been linked to an increased tolerance of painful stimuli; however, there is evidence that pain behavior is multi-determined. The current study used pain measures from three different modalities (pain tolerance, pain ratings, electrocortical reactivity) and assessed triarchic traits of boldness and meanness to clarify the dispositional basis of associations between pain processing and antisocial behavior. High boldness was significantly associated with blunted early neural response to painful and nonpainful stimuli as well as increased pain tolerance. High meanness was associated with blunted elaborative processing of painful images, lower ratings of perceived pain for self and others, and increased pain tolerance. Meanness also accounted for variance shared between pain processing and antisocial behavior. Findings demonstrate that boldness and meanness contribute to pain processing in different ways and suggest that meanness may uniquely account for the association between blunted pain processing and antisocial behavior.

Attention‐affect interactions and triarchic psychopathy: New electrophysiological insights from the late positive potential

“…Notwithstanding these limitations, the present study provides new evidence for diminished elaborative processing of affective material (both positive and negative) in relation to trait meanness, particularly for task contexts in which affective material is task relevant. In light of recent findings which indicate that trait meanness relates to blunted elaborative processing—as indexed by reduced LPP amplitudes—of stimuli evoking emphatic sensitivity, such as fearful and sad facial expressions (Brislin & Patrick, 2019), aggressive situations (van Dongen et al, 2018), or painful scenarios (Brislin et al, 2022), the results from the current study further suggest that a more general blunted affective experience might also underlie this triarchic trait disposition. Thus, our results highlight the utility of the LPP response to further study the bottom‐up and top‐down dynamics of emotional attention to better understand the nature of the cognitive and affective processing deviations linked to the distinct facets of psychopathy, and highlight the utility of the triarchic model of psychopathy, and a multifaceted construct perspective, to further advance our understanding of this personality disorder in neurobehavioral terms (Patrick, 2022).…”

“…A third limitation of the current work is that we did not examine LPP responses to specific picture contents, and it is possible that some of the observed effects of trait meanness scores might be driven by stimuli of specific nature. For example, recent work suggests that trait meanness scores predict blunted LPP responses to pictures depicting violent situations (Van Dongen et al, 2018) and painful scenarios (Brislin et al, 2022), so it might be possible that picture contents involving victims were driving trait meanness associations with unpleasant‐neutral LPP amplitudes in the current study. Similarly, trait boldness might be more relevant to explain individual differences in psychophysiological responses to direct threatening scenarios (e.g., Esteller et al, 2016; Perkins et al, 2022).…”

“…Finally, trait meanness is posited to reflect the low pole of a neurobehavioral dimension of affiliative capacity (Palumbo et al, 2020), potentially involving widespread cortical and subcortical brain networks related to emotional empathy and pain processing (see Blair et al, 2018; Decety, 2011, for reviews). In this line, meanness‐related traits predict deficits in emotional face recognition (Brislin & Patrick, 2019; Brislin et al, 2018; Gillespie et al, 2019; Mowle et al, 2019), increased pain tolerance (Brislin et al, 2016, 2022; Miller et al, 2014), and lower ratings of perceived pain and elaborative processing of painful scenarios (Brislin et al, 2022) and aggressive situations (van Dongen et al, 2018).…”

“…Based on the foregoing evidence, and considering prior work conducted within the triarchic model framework linking reduced affective modulation of the LPP during passive viewing conditions to either boldness (Ellis et al, 2017) or meanness traits (Brislin et al, 2022; van Dongen et al, 2018), we hypothesized that a deficient affective modulation of the LPP would be preferentially related to trait boldness or meanness scores. We did not anticipate any specific hypothesis regarding trait disinhibition, given that this triarchic construct has been most consistently linked to processing impairments during cognitive tasks (Patrick, 2022).…”

Psychopathic callousness and perspective taking in pain processing: an ERP study

“…Therefore, responsiveness to others’ pain could serve as a valuable and ecologically valid indicator for empathic processing ( Lamm et al ., 2011 ). Paradigms involving pain experience have revealed higher pain tolerance in individuals exhibiting aggressive behavior ( Niel et al ., 2007 ) and psychopathic callousness traits ( Miller et al ., 2014 ; Brislin et al ., 2016 , 2022 ). These findings suggest that elevated pain thresholds may act as an underlying mechanism, which contributes to the underestimation of others’ pain experience and, consequently, insensitivity towards others’ distress.…”