A new study published in Biological Psychology reports that individuals with elevated psychopathic traits may experience fear in a fundamentally different way from others, interpreting physiological arousal during frightening situations as positive rather than negative. The findings lend support to the emerging Fear Enjoyment Hypothesis, which proposes that psychopathy is characterized not by an absence of fear, but by an atypical emotional interpretation of fear-related arousal.
Previously, the dominant view in psychology held that psychopathy involved a profound deficit in fear processing. Originating with David Lykken’s famous “low fear quotient theory” in 1957, early models 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 produced inconsistent results, with some reporting reduced reactivity and others finding normal or even heightened cardiovascular responses to threat. These discrepancies have prompted researchers to reconsider the nature of emotional processing in psychopathy.
The Fear Enjoyment Hypothesis offers an alternative perspective. Rather than assuming that psychopathic individuals fail to experience fear, it suggests that they may experience the physiological arousal associated with fear but interpret it as excitement or pleasure.
To investigate this hypothesis, German researchers Miriam J. Hofmann, Andreas Mokros, and Sabrina Schneider from the University of Hagen recruited 119 adults (69% female, average age 35 years old) with varying levels of psychopathic traits.
Participants viewed a series of first-person video clips designed to evoke fear, excitement, or neutral emotions while their heart rate was continuously monitored using an electrocardiogram (ECG) sensor. After each clip, participants rated their emotional responses and provided descriptions of how fear typically feels to them.
The results revealed a consistent pattern. Individuals with higher levels of “core” psychopathy traits—those involving callousness, lack of empathy, and manipulativeness—rated fear-inducing videos as less negative and more positive than individuals with lower psychopathy scores. They also used more positive descriptors when describing their subjective experience of fear.
Physiological data provided further, surprising insights. During fear-evoking videos, participants with elevated psychopathy traits actually exhibited increased heart rate responses. Notably, the researchers found that their autonomic nervous systems responded even more strongly to the fear-evoking clips than to the excitement-evoking clips.
Crucially, this physiological arousal predicted different emotional appraisals depending on the participant’s personality. In individuals with elevated “primary” psychopathy traits, a higher heart rate significantly predicted more positive evaluations of the scary videos. Conversely, the data showed an inverse trend for individuals with low psychopathy traits, where a racing heart was associated with negative, distressing appraisals. In other words, the same physiological response of an accelerated heart rate was interpreted as pleasurable by some and aversive by others.
These findings support the notion that psychopathy may involve an atypical emotional interpretation rather than a simple deficit. The authors suggest that this reinterpretation of arousal could contribute to sensation-seeking behavior and reduced avoidance of danger among individuals with psychopathic traits.
Hofmann and colleagues concluded, “fear is indeed experienced by psychopaths but is perceived in a different, more positive manner when core psychopathy traits are high.”
The study has several limitations. For instance, the sample consisted primarily of women and non-clinical participants. Because supplementary analyses showed that men scored significantly higher on core psychopathy traits than women, the overrepresentation of females likely reduced the overall psychopathy levels in the sample, limiting generalizability to forensic or prison populations. Additionally, because heart rate measures arousal but not specific emotions (valence), researchers had to rely on self-reports to determine exactly how the participants felt.
The study, “Is the psychopathic heart beating for fear? A psychophysiological investigation of fear experience in psychopathy,” was authored by Miriam J. Hofmann, Andreas Mokros, and Sabrina Schneider.
