Emotional processing in psychopathic personality

Emotional-processing deficits may be one of the characteristic features of impaired affect in individuals with psychopathy. These include shallowness and profound lack of remorse or empathy. Performances on standardized emotion discrimination tasks and mood induction tasks were compared between 17 patients with antisocial personality disorder (DSM-IV) and 17 nonpsychopaths. Subjects with psychopathic personality demonstrated poorer performance on emotion-discrimination tasks compared with controls. However, higher scores on factor ‘‘emotional detachment’ ’ of the Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R) were associated with better discrimination ability. Subjective ratings were comparable between groups during mood induction. Although the findings support the hypothesis of a significant association between impaired emotional processing and psychopathy, they also suggest a relationship between emotional discrimination and the core personality features of psychopathy. Aggr. Behav