A recent study published in Personality and Individual Differences sheds light on the relationship between psychopathic traits and how individuals adjust their visual attention. Specifically, the research found that individuals with higher levels of antisocial tendencies, a key secondary psychopathic trait, tend to expand their attentional focus more quickly. This rapid shift suggests poorer attentional control or executive functioning.
Psychopathy is a personality construct characterized by distinct interpersonal, emotional, and behavioral traits. It is commonly divided into two subtypes: primary and secondary psychopathy, each associated with different patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving.
Primary psychopathy involves traits such as emotional detachment, a lack of empathy, and egocentricity. Individuals high in primary psychopathic traits tend to be manipulative, callous, and focused on achieving their goals with little regard for others’ emotions. Secondary psychopathy, on the other hand, is characterized by impulsivity, poor self-regulation, and antisocial behaviors such as rule-breaking or aggression. These traits are often linked to difficulties in controlling attention and other executive functions.
Visual attentional breadth refers to how narrowly or broadly a person focuses their attention at a given moment. A narrow attentional breadth concentrates on small details within a scene, while a broad attentional breadth takes in a wider view, integrating information from a larger area. These attentional states are flexible and can shift depending on task demands or cognitive control. Since visual attention influences how people perceive and interact with their environment, examining its relationship with psychopathy could shed light on how individuals with psychopathic traits process the world around them.
“There are multiple dimensions of psychopathic personality traits, including egocentricity, callousness, impulsivity, and antisocial behavior. There is substantial diversity in the degree to which people exhibit these traits. We are interested in understanding the psychological mechanisms and processes that underpin these individual differences,” explained study authors Stephanie Goodhew and Mark Edwards, both associate professors at The Australian National University who co-direct the Visual Cognition Lab.
The researchers hypothesized that primary psychopathic traits might be associated with a narrowed attentional focus, aligning with the intense goal-directed behavior often seen in individuals with these traits. In contrast, secondary psychopathic traits might correlate with broader and less stable attentional control. To examine these relationships, the researchers conducted two experiments.
The first experiment aimed to determine whether psychopathic traits are linked to a preference for narrow or broad attentional breadth. The researchers recruited 118 participants from a community sample through an online platform known as Testable Minds. Participants completed a psychopathy assessment using the Expanded Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy Scale. This scale measures three facets of psychopathy: egocentricity (a focus on self-interest), callousness (emotional detachment and lack of empathy), and antisociality (impulsivity and rule-breaking).
To measure attentional breadth, the participants completed a visual task using Navon stimuli—images where a larger “global” letter is composed of smaller “local” letters. In each trial, participants had to identify a target letter, which could appear at either the global or local level. Since participants were not directed to focus on a specific level, their responses were used to infer whether they naturally preferred a narrower attentional focus (favoring local details) or a broader one (favoring global shapes). Performance was measured by recording response times and accuracy for both levels.
The results showed no significant relationship between egocentricity or callousness (traits associated with primary psychopathy) and attentional breadth preference. However, those high in antisociality showed evidence of a weak preference for a broader attentional focus. These findings suggest that primary psychopathic traits are not strongly linked to attentional breadth, but secondary psychopathic traits might be.
In the second experiment, the researchers investigated how quickly individuals with different psychopathic traits could resize their attentional breadth. Resizing involves shifting attention between narrow and broad focus to meet changing demands, such as focusing on fine details in one moment and taking in a wider scene the next. This experiment used an adapted Navon task designed to measure how efficiently participants could contract or expand their attentional breadth.
A new group of 118 participants was recruited, and the same psychopathy assessment from Experiment 1 was used. Participants completed two blocks of trials with biased target probabilities. In one block, the majority of targets appeared at the global level (requiring broad focus), but a small proportion required participants to shift to a narrow focus to identify local targets. In another block, this setup was reversed, with the majority of targets at the local level and occasional global targets. The researchers recorded response times for the infrequent shifts, defining these as “contraction time” (broad to narrow) and “expansion time” (narrow to broad).
The results showed that individuals with higher levels of antisociality had faster expansion times, meaning they shifted from a narrow to broad attentional focus more quickly. This relationship was unique to antisociality and did not apply to egocentricity or callousness.
Interestingly, there was no significant link between antisociality and contraction time (broad to narrow). These findings suggest that antisociality, a secondary psychopathic trait, is associated with reduced attentional control, as quicker resizing may reflect less optimization of attentional focus for task demands.
“Our results indicate that people who demonstrate higher levels of impulsivity and antisocial behavior have difficulty regulating their focus of attention,” Goodhew and Edwards said.
Importantly, the finding that primary psychopathic traits, such as egocentricity and callousness, are not associated with a preference for a narrowed attentional breadth challenges the idea that attentional anomalies in individuals with these traits result from a naturally narrow focus of attention. Instead, this suggests that their difficulties with processing peripheral stimuli are more likely due to a bottleneck in cognitive processing capacity.
“Previous research has shown that people who demonstrate higher levels of egocentricity and callousness are more likely to process information that is relevant to their goals and not process goal-irrelevant information,” Goodhew and Edwards told PsyPost. “Initially, scientists thought that this might be because these people are particularly good at controlling their attention to focus on goals without succumbing to distraction.”
“But our research suggests that this is not the case, and instead our results are consistent with the alternative idea that higher egocentricity and callousness are associated with a reduced processing bandwidth. That is, these people are not processing distracting information because they do not have the capacity to do so, rather than because they are strategically filtering this out. In other words, all their capacity is consumed by processing the goal-relevant information.”
The study, like all research, has limitations. For example, the research relied on community samples rather than forensic populations, where extreme levels of psychopathy are more common. While this approach avoids potential biases linked to incarceration, it limits the range of psychopathic traits measured. Future studies could include participants from diverse populations to test whether these findings generalize to individuals with higher levels of primary psychopathic traits.
“As is common in psychological studies, these results describe patterns that emerge for the group as a whole,” the researchers noted. “This means that not every individual who scores high on the personality dimensions will exhibit these effects.”
Nevertheless, the findings contribute to a growing body of research exploring how cognitive mechanisms, such as attention, underpin psychopathic traits. Understanding the links between attention and psychopathy could inform interventions aimed at mitigating the negative consequences of these traits.
“Our lab’s research focus is on attentional control—how people can regulate their cognitive resources in goal-directed ways,” Goodhew and Edwards said. “We think that attentional control plays a pivotal role in people’s social and emotional dynamics. By elucidating this role, our aim is to find new ways to make people happier, healthier, and kinder.”
“We anticipate that improving our understanding of how attentional control is implicated in these psychopathic personality traits can inform interventions to reduce some of the negative consequences of these traits.”
The study, “On the relationship between psychopathic traits and visual attentional breadth,” was published online on October 2, 2024.