Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Seara-Cardoso, Ana
• Neumann, Craig
• Roiser, Jonathan
• McCrory, Eamon
• Viding, Essi

Titel

Investigating associations between empathy, morality and psychopathic personality traits in the general population

Ist Teil von

• Personality and individual differences, 2012, Vol.52 (1), p.67-71

Ort / Verlag

Kidlington: Elsevier Ltd

Erscheinungsjahr

2012

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Applied Social Sciences Index & Abstracts (ASSIA)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• ► Atypical moral and empathic processing are important features of psychopathy. ► These features also appear to be associated with psychopathic traits in the community. ► Common variance of psychopathic traits might drive some features. ► Other features might be uniquely associated with core affective-interpersonal traits. Although atypical moral and empathy processing are considered core features of psychopathic personality, little is known about how these constructs are associated with psychopathic traits in the general population. One-hundred and twenty-four adult males from the community were administered the Self-Report Psychopathy Scale 4 Short Form, as well as a wide battery of affect, empathy and morality tasks and questionnaires. Our findings indicate that both core affective-interpersonal, as well as lifestyle-antisocial features of psychopathy are associated with weaker empathic responses to fearful faces. However, only the unique variance of the affective-interpersonal features is associated with weaker empathic response to happy stories, lower propensity to feel empathic concern and less difficulty in making decisions on moral dilemmas. In contrast, the unique variance of the lifestyle-antisocial features is associated with greater propensity to feel empathic concern. These preliminary findings extend previous research and suggest that, while the joint variance between affective-interpersonal and lifestyle-antisocial features might drive some ‘deficits’ associated with psychopathy, there also appears also to be unique ‘deficits’ associated with the core affective-interpersonal features, particularly in relation to affective aspects of moral processing.