Psychopathy and identification of facial expressions of emotion

Abstract

The authors examined the association between psychopathy and identification of facial expressions of emotion. Previous research in this area is scant and has produced contradictory findings (Blair et. al., 2001, 2004; Glass & Newman, 2006; Kosson et al., 2002). One hundred and forty-five male jail inmates, rated using the Hare Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version participated in a facial affect recognition task. Participants were shown faces containing one of five emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, anger, or shame) displayed at one of two different levels of intensity of expression (100% or 60%). The authors predicted that psychopathy would be associated with decreased affect recognition, particularly for sad and fearful emotional expressions, and decreased recognition of less intense displays of facial affect. Results were largely consistent with expectations in that psychopathy was negatively correlated with overall facial recognition of affect, sad facial affect, and recognition of less intense displays of affect. An unexpected negative correlation with recognition of happy facial affect was also found. These results suggest that psychopathy may be associated with a general deficit in affect recognition.

Initial development of an implicit and explicit approach to assess psychopathy

“…It suggests that within the current sample the affect elements were not associating as predicted and as expected by the literature (e.g. Blair et al, 2005;Dawel et al, 2012;Hastings et al, 2008). As predicted, the Lifestyle component of the ACL was positively associated with the Factor 2 (criminal history and lifestyle) component of the PCL-SV.…”

“…Affect is also noted as an important element of psychopathy (e.g. Cleckley, 1976;Cooke & Michie, 2001;Hastings et al, 2008;Dawel et al, 2012) although it may not have uniform application across samples.…”

“…poverty of major affective reactions including a lack of guilt/remorse and incapacity for affectional bonds (Cleckley, 1982); 2.) general affective deficits (Hastings et al, 2008;Dawel et al, 2012) including poor emotional recognition (Blair, 1995;Blair et al, 2005) which extends to reduced levels of anxiety/fear, sensitivity to punishment (Lykken, 1957;Newman, MacCoon, Vaughn & Sadeh, 2005) and a reduced ability to recognise some negative emotions, such as fear and sadness (Blair et al, 2004;Montagne et al, 2005). This also includes the misidentification of anger (Iria et al, 2012) and an absence of moral emotion (Blair et al 2005); 3.)…”

Psychopathic traits in adolescents and recognition of emotion in facial expressions

“…Hastings et al (2008) presented facial affective stimuli at two different levels of intensity, 60% and 100%. They found that psychopathy scores were associated with poorer recognition of facial affect at 60% but not at 100% intensity, suggesting the possibility that psychopathic individuals may have greater diffi culty in processing more diffi cult or more subtle emotional cues.…”

“…Secondary psychopathy, however, showed no connection to recognizing emotions. Hastings, Tangney, and Stuewig (2008), drawing on stimuli presenting different intensity levels of emotion in facial expressions, obtained data suggesting that psychopaths have a greater defi cit in recognizing information with affective content. The authors, however, did not acquire more signifi cant and specifi c evidence in terms of identifying fear.…”