Psychopathy and Emotion Regulation: Evidence for Dynamic Attentional Biases in Incarcerated Men

Abstract

Psychopathy is a syndrome of personality pathology associated with callousness, manipulation, and persistent antisocial behavior. Whereas several contemporary perspectives emphasize innate emotional unresponsiveness as the core deficit in psychopathy, the negative preception hypothesis proposes that individuals with psychopathic traits experience negative emotions and disattend from some affective cues to attenuate negative emotional experiences. To examine whether psychopathy is associated with static attentional unresponsiveness to affect inductions and cues or with dynamic attentional biases away from affective cues, 94 incarcerated men assessed with the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised completed a dot-probe task before and after a sadness induction. Multilevel modeling indicated psychopathy predicted greater increases in self-reported negative affect due to a sadness induction. Moreover, the relation between psychopathic traits and attentional bias changed as a function of the induction. Psychopathy was independent of attentional bias regarding affective faces under baseline conditions but was associated with increasing attention away from sad faces following the sadness induction. In addition, psychopathy was associated with greater attention towards angry faces only following the sadness induction. These findings suggest individuals with psychopathic traits are responsive to some sadness inductions and exhibit anomalous attentional biases regarding emotion in some conditions, suggesting the utility of explanations that can explain maladaptive emotion regulation in individuals with psychopathic traits.