When made to feel sad, men with psychopathic traits shift their visual focus to anger

A study involving incarcerated men found that those with pronounced psychopathic traits tend to subconsciously divert their attention away from sad faces when they are experimentally induced to feel sad. In the same situation, their attention toward angry faces increased. The paper was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychopathology.

Psychopathy is a stable pattern of personality characteristics involving low empathy, shallow emotions, and a tendency toward manipulative or antisocial behavior. Core features of psychopathy include callousness, lack of guilt or remorse, superficial charm, and impulsivity.

While psychopathy is associated with an increased risk of antisocial and criminal behavior, it does not inevitably lead to criminality. As a trait, psychopathy can be present in both clinical and non-clinical populations, with subclinical levels sometimes providing advantages in competitive or high-risk environments.

Individuals high in psychopathy tend to show specificities in emotional processing, particularly a reduced responsiveness to others’ distress. For decades, the dominant scientific theory has been the Emotion Deficit Perspective (EDP), which posits that people with psychopathy are simply born “numb” to emotions like sadness or fear, making them unresponsive to emotional cues.

However, an alternative theory, the Negative Preception Hypothesis (NPH), argues that people with psychopathic traits do feel negative emotions, but they have developed a maladaptive coping mechanism to subconsciously “tune out” or look away from things that make them feel vulnerable.

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Study author Nastassia R. E. Riser and her colleagues designed an experiment to test these two competing theories. They aimed to examine how the attentional bias of psychopathic individuals changes when they are induced to feel sad. If the “numbness” theory (EDP) was correct, the participants’ attention would be unaffected by the mood induction. If the coping mechanism theory (NPH) was correct, their visual attention would actively shift away from the sadness.

Study participants were 94 men recruited from a jail in the mid-western United States. They were required to be between 18 and 45 years of age, with an estimated IQ of at least 70, and with no history of traumatic brain injury.

Researchers first assessed the participants’ psychopathic traits using a semi-structured interview (the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised). Participants then completed an assessment of their current emotional state (the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule) before moving on to an affective dot-probe task.

In the dot-probe task, participants were shown faces of African American and European American men and women with emotional (sad, happy, angry) or neutral expressions. In each rapid trial, one neutral face and one emotional face flashed on the screen simultaneously. A fraction of a second later, the faces disappeared, and an asterisk appeared in the exact location where one of the faces had been. Participants had to report the asterisk as quickly as possible by pressing a button.

The premise of the task is that participants will react faster to an asterisk that appears in the location they were already looking at. This measures subconscious “attentional bias”—revealing whether a person’s brain naturally gravitates toward looking at an emotional face or actively avoids it by looking at the neutral face instead.

After completing the baseline dot-probe task, the researchers induced a sad mood by instructing the participants to recall and verbally describe a time they had felt very sad. Immediately following this sadness induction, participants completed the emotional state assessment and the dot-probe task a second time.

The results strongly supported the Negative Preception Hypothesis. First, the self-reported assessments proved that the men with higher psychopathic traits did feel sadness when provoked, contradicting the idea that they are entirely numb to negative emotion.

Second, the dot-probe task revealed a dynamic shift in attention. Before the sadness induction, psychopathic trait levels did not affect where the men looked. However, after the sadness induction, individuals with more pronounced psychopathic traits subconsciously directed their visual attention away from the sad faces. Even more surprisingly, while they avoided the sad faces, their attention toward the angry faces significantly increased.

“Current results suggest that, under some conditions, psychopathy ratings are related to dynamic attentional biases that are substantially impacted by a sadness induction,” the study authors concluded. “Taken together, current findings provide evidence that individuals high in psychopathy are responsive to some emotion inductions and suggest they may be better characterized by anomalous emotion regulation than by a stable lack of emotional response.”

In other words, psychopathy may not be characterized by an innate inability to feel sadness, but rather by an automatic, subconscious defense mechanism that actively suppresses sadness and hyper-focuses on anger or threats instead.

The study contributes heavily to the scientific understanding of the emotional functioning of psychopathic individuals, potentially opening new avenues for therapeutic intervention. However, the study was based on pictures of emotional faces, not on reactions to real individuals actually displaying emotions.

Also, the sadness induction likely resulted in only mild sadness; in situations where people are exposed to more substantial displays of emotion, the results might differ. Finally, the study was limited to incarcerated men, so it is unknown if these results generalize to women or non-criminal populations.

The paper, “Psychopathy and Emotion Regulation: Evidence for Dynamic Attentional Biases in Incarcerated Men,” was authored by Nastassia R. E. Riser, Courtney N. Beussink, Steven A. Miller, and David S. Kosson.