Socio-Emotional Abilities and Empathy in Psychopaths

• Applicant: Dr. Sally Olderbak
• Subject Area: Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology
• Term: from 2017 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 365266458

Socio-emotional abilities (SEAs) are basic cognitive capacities involved in social interactions. SEAs include such diverse aspects as perceiving and recognizing faces, decoding emotional information from other persons' facial expression, and responding emotionally to the inner states of other people. Research shows that SEAs are dysfunctional in individuals with psychopathy, a variant of antisocial personality disorder. More specifically, psychopaths are considered good at conning or defrauding others while showing deficits in reading other people's emotional states, at least with regard to negative emotions.Given the disproportionate amount of violent crime committed by psychopaths, solving the question of emotional detachment in psychopathy will likely have profound implications for treatment, risk assessment, and public safety. In terms of fundamental research the description of the interplay between various aspects of SEAs in persons with corresponding deficits (i.e., psychopaths) will further our understanding of the cognitive processes involved in decoding and responding to the emotional states of others.Despite the groundbreaking and insightful quality of much of the earlier research on the topic, virtually all of the studies conducted in the area so far suffer from a limitation of scope. Extant studies either focused on particular emotions, specific valence qualities, or more frequently on single experimental tasks, thus yielding a scattered picture of the processes that may underlie differential processing of emotional information in psychopaths. Consequently, it is unclear whether some observed deficits truly reflect a dysfunction in, say, emotion recognition, or may rather be influenced by potential confounds like face perception or general mental ability.Therefore, the research project proposed herein relies on a multi-variable/multiple-task strategy, with the sample of participants comprising both criminal offenders (some of whom with very high levels of psychopathic traits) and individuals recruited from the general population (most of whom have low levels of psychopathic traits). Furthermore, the analytic strategy is guided by structural equation modeling with the advantage that the true associations between latent constructs, such as face perception and emotion recognition can be estimated, with individual task performances serving as observable indicators.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Professor Dr. Oliver Wilhelm