“But not the music”: psychopathic traits and difficulties recognising and resonating with the emotion in music

Abstract

Recognising and responding appropriately to emotions is critical to adaptive psychological functioning. Psychopathic traits (e.g. callous, manipulative, impulsive, antisocial) are related to differences in recognition and response when emotion is conveyed through facial expressions and language. Use of emotional music stimuli represents a promising approach to improve our understanding of the specific emotion processing difficulties underlying psychopathic traits because it decouples recognition of emotion from cues directly conveyed by other people (e.g. facial signals). In Experiment 1, participants listened to clips of emotional music and identified the emotional content (Sample 1,N = 196) or reported on their feelings elicited by the music (Sample 2,N = 197). Participants accurately recognised (t(195) = 32.78, p