A study of incarcerated men found that men with pronounced psychopathic traits were more likely to unconsciously divert their attention from sad faces when made to feel experimentally sad. In the same situation, attention to angry faces increased. The paper was published in. Journal of Experimental Psychopathology.
Psychopathy is a pattern of stable personality traits that includes low empathy, shallow emotions, and a tendency toward manipulative or antisocial behavior. Core characteristics of psychopathy include callousness, lack of guilt or remorse, superficial charm, and impulsivity.
Although psychopathy is associated with an increased risk of antisocial and criminal behavior, it does not necessarily lead to crime. As a trait, psychopathy can be present in both clinical and non-clinical populations, and at subclinical levels may be advantageous in competitive or high-risk environments.
People high in psychopathy tend to exhibit idiosyncrasies in emotional processing, particularly reduced responses to the distress of others. For decades, the dominant scientific theory has been the emotion-deficit perspective (EDP), which claims that psychopathic people are innately “insensitive” to emotions such as sadness and fear and do not respond to emotional cues.
However, an alternative theory, the Negative Acceptance Hypothesis (NPH), argues that although people with psychopathic traits do feel negative emotions, they have developed maladaptive coping mechanisms in which they unconsciously “tone off” or look away from things that make them feel vulnerable.
Study author Nastasia RE Reiser and colleagues designed an experiment to test these two competing theories. They aimed to examine how psychotic individuals’ attentional biases change when they are made to feel sad. If the “numbness” theory (EDP) were correct, participants’ attention would be unaffected by mood induction. If coping mechanism theory (NPH) is correct, their visual attention will actively shift away from sadness.
Study participants were 94 men recruited from prisons in the Midwest. They were required to be between 18 and 45 years old, have an estimated IQ of at least 70, and have no history of traumatic brain injury.
The researchers first assessed participants’ psychopathic traits using a semi-structured interview (revised version of the Psychopathy Checklist). Participants then completed an assessment of their current emotional state (positive and negative emotion schedule) before moving on to the emotional dot-probe task.
In the dot-probe task, participants were shown African American and European American male and female faces with either emotional expressions (sad, happy, angry) or neutral expressions. In each rapid trial, one neutral face and one emotional face flashed on the screen simultaneously. After just a few seconds, the faces disappeared and an asterisk appeared at the exact location where one of the faces had been. Participants had to press a button to report the asterisk as quickly as possible.
The premise of this task is that participants will respond faster to an asterisk that appears in a location they were already looking at. It measures subconscious “attentional biases” and reveals whether a person’s brain is naturally drawn to seeing emotional faces, or instead sees and actively avoids neutral faces.
After completing a baseline dot-probe task, the researchers induced a sad mood by asking participants to recall and verbally describe a time when they felt extremely sad. Immediately after this sadness induction, participants completed an emotional state rating and a dot-probe task a second time.
This result strongly supported the negative acceptance hypothesis. First, self-reported ratings have shown that men with more advanced psychopathic traits do indeed feel sad when provoked, contradicting the idea that they are completely insensitive to negative emotions.
Second, the dot probe task revealed dynamic changes in attention. Prior to the sadness induction, trait levels of psychopathy had no effect on male gaze. However, after inducing sadness, those with more pronounced psychopathic traits began to unconsciously divert their visual attention away from sad faces. Even more surprising, while they avoided sad faces, their attention to angry faces increased significantly.
“The present results suggest that under some conditions, appraisals of psychopathy are associated with dynamic attentional biases that are substantially influenced by the induction of sadness,” the study authors concluded. “Taken together, the current findings provide evidence that individuals high in psychopathy are responsive to some emotional triggers and suggest that they may be characterized by abnormal emotion regulation rather than a lack of stable emotional responses.”
In other words, psychopathy may not be characterized by an innate inability to feel sadness, but rather by automatic subconscious defense mechanisms that actively suppress sadness and instead hyper-focus on anger and threats.
This study significantly contributes to the scientific understanding of emotional functioning in psychopaths and may open new avenues for therapeutic intervention. However, this study was based on photos of emotional faces, not responses to real individuals actually showing emotion.
Also, the induction of sadness likely resulted in only mild sadness. Results may be different in situations where people are exposed to more substantive expressions of emotion. Finally, this study was limited to incarcerated men, so it is unclear whether these results generalize to women or non-offender populations.
The paper, “Psychopathy and Emotion Regulation: Evidence for Dynamic Attentional Bias in Incarcerated Men,” was authored by Nastassia RE Riser, Courtney N. Beussink, Steven A. Miller, and David S. Kosson.
