New research published in biological psychology reported that individuals with heightened psychopathic traits may experience fear in fundamentally different ways than others and may interpret physiological arousal in fearful situations as positive rather than negative. This finding supports the emerging fear-enjoyment hypothesis, which holds that psychopathology is characterized by atypical emotional interpretations of fear-related arousal, rather than the absence of fear.
Previously, the dominant view in psychology was that psychopathy involved profound deficits in fear processing. Early models, originating from David Ricken’s famous “low fear index theory” in 1957, suggested that individuals with psychopathic traits exhibit blunted physiological responses to threat, impairing their ability to learn from punishment, and contributing to antisocial behavior.
However, subsequent studies have yielded inconsistent results, with some studies reporting decreased reactivity and others reporting normal or enhanced cardiovascular responses to threat. These contradictions have led researchers to reconsider the nature of emotional processing in psychopathy.
The fear-enjoyment hypothesis offers an alternative perspective. This suggests that, rather than assuming that psychopaths do not experience fear, they do experience the physiological arousal that accompanies fear, but may interpret it as excitement or pleasure.
To investigate this hypothesis, German researchers Miriam J. Hoffmann, Andreas Moklos, and Sabrina Schneider from the University of Hagen recruited 119 adults (69% female, average age 35 years) with varying levels of psychopathic traits.
Participants watched a series of first-person video clips designed to evoke fear, excitement, or neutral emotions while continuously monitoring their heart rate using an electrocardiogram (ECG) sensor. After each clip, participants rated their emotional responses and described how fear usually feels.
The results revealed a consistent pattern. People with high levels of the “core” traits of psychopathy (such as callousness, lack of empathy, and manipulative personality) rated fear-inducing videos as more positive, rather than negative, than people with lower psychopathy scores. They also used more positive descriptors when describing their subjective fear experiences.
Physiological data provided further surprising insights. During the fear-evoking videos, participants with heightened psychopathic traits actually showed increased heart rate responses. Remarkably, the researchers found that their autonomic nervous systems responded even more strongly to fear-inducing clips than to arousal-inducing clips.
Importantly, this physiological arousal predicts different emotional ratings depending on the participant’s personality. Among individuals high in “primary” psychopathic traits, higher heart rate significantly predicted higher positive ratings of scary videos. Conversely, the data showed the opposite trend for individuals low in psychopathic traits, where heart pounding was associated with negative and distressing appraisals. In other words, the same physiological response of increased heart rate was interpreted as pleasurable by some people and aversive by others.
These findings support the notion that psychopathy may involve atypical interpretations of emotions rather than simple deficits. The authors suggest that this reinterpretation of arousal may contribute to reduced sensation-seeking behavior and risk aversion in individuals with psychopathic traits.
Hoffman et al. concluded that “fear is certainly experienced by psychopaths, but it is perceived in a different, more positive way when core traits of psychopathy are high.”
This study has some limitations. For example, the sample consisted primarily of women and non-clinical participants. In supplementary analyses, men scored significantly higher on core psychopathic traits than women, so the overrepresentation of women may have lowered the overall level of psychopathy in the sample, limiting generalizability to forensic and prison populations. Additionally, heart rate measures arousal but not specific emotions (valence), so researchers had to rely on self-report to determine exactly how participants were feeling.
The study, “Does the psychopath’s heart beat for fear? A psychophysiological investigation of fear experiences in psychopaths,” was authored by Miriam J. Hoffmann, Andreas Mokros, and Sabrina Schneider.
