Abstract
AbstractCertain aspects of social deviance in psychopathy can be explained by deficits in recognizing facial expressions of emotion. Still, important questions remain unanswered regarding this relationship especially because literature still lacks: (a) a dimensional approach to psychopathy integrating the dominant models in the field; (b) multi-level data from behavioral ratings to physiological indicators; and (c) tasks providing high ecological validity by resorting into virtual reality (VR). This study aims to address these issues. The sample included 83 community-dwelling adult volunteers. Psychopathic dimensions of personality were measured with the Triarchic Measure of Psychopathy and Self-Report Psychopathy. Participants completed a VR task, which required them to identify avatars’ emotional facial expressions (happiness, sadness, fear, and neutral) under different eye-gaze conditions (eye contact 20% or 80% of the time). Behavioral ratings and eye-tracking data were collected. We hypothesized that fearlessness psychopathy traits would be related to increased deficits in fear recognition and less attention toward the eyes. No evidence was found however for emotion recognition deficits in psychopathy – although sadness was rated as a more positive-valenced emotion in individuals scoring higher in affective-psychopathic traits. Less attention toward the eyes was found uniquely in disinhibition traits. We discuss these results in light of their implications for how social information is processed and encoded in psychopathy.
Publisher
Research Square Platform LLC