Individuals with psychopathy are often characterized by emotional processing deficits, and recent research has examined the specific contexts and cognitive mechanisms that underlie these abnormalities. Some evidence suggests that abnormal features of attention are fundamental to emotional deficits in persons with psychopathy, but few studies have demonstrated the neural underpinnings responsible for such effects. Here, we use functional neuroimaging to examine attention–emotion interactions among incarcerated individuals (n = 120) evaluated for psychopathic traits using the Hare Psychopathy Checklist–Revised (PCL-R). Using a task designed to manipulate attention to emotional features of visual stimuli, we demonstrate effects representing implicit emotional processing, explicit emotional processing, attention-facilitated emotional processing, and vigilance for emotional content. Results confirm the importance of considering mechanisms of attention when evaluating emotional processing differences related to psychopathic traits. The affective-interpersonal features of psychopathy (PCL-R Factor 1) were associated with relatively lower emotion-dependent augmentation of activity in visual processing areas during implicit emotional processing, while antisocial-lifestyle features (PCL-R Factor 2) were associated with elevated activity in the amygdala and related salience network regions. During explicit emotional processing, psychopathic traits were associated with upregulation in the medial prefrontal cortex, insula, and superior frontal regions. Isolating the impact of explicit attention to emotional content, only Factor 1 was related to upregulation of activity in the visual processing stream, which was accompanied by increased activity in the angular gyrus. These effects highlight some important mechanisms underlying abnormal features of attention and emotional processing that accompany psychopathic traits.

The causes of psychopathy, a condition characterized by interpersonal (e.g., superficial charm), affective (e.g., lack of empathy), and behavioral (e.g., impulsive actions) features, remain contested. The present review examines 1 of the most influential etiological models of psychopathy, the response modulation hypothesis (RMH), which proposes that psychopathic individuals exhibit difficulties in adjusting their behavior in the presence of a dominant response set. We conduct a meta-analysis and narrative literature review to examine the RMH quantitatively and qualitatively, estimate the statistical effects of response modulation (RM) deficits in psychopathic individuals, and ascertain the boundary conditions of the RMH. Ninety-four samples from published and unpublished studies involving 7,340 participants were identified for inclusion. Overall results provided some support for the RMH, revealing a small to medium relationship between psychopathy and RM deficits (r = .20, p < .001, d = .41) that extended to both psychopathy dimensions. Moreover, as predicted by the RMH, RM deficits were observed for both affectively neutral and affectively laden tasks. A number of moderators, such as anxiety, laboratory task, dependent measure, psychopathy measure, and race, contributed to significant variability in effect sizes; we also found evidence for potential publication bias using 2 methods, raising questions concerning the robustness of RM findings. An ancillary narrative review revealed that the RMH is inconsistent with a number of replicated findings in the psychopathy literature, suggesting that the RMH, at least in its present form, is unlikely to provide a comprehensive etiological account of psychopathy. Nevertheless, more recent attentional versions of the RMH may hold promise with respect to intervention. Further fruitful directions for research on the RMH, including the use of multiple dependent measures of RM and latent variable approaches, are delineated.

Investigations into the neurobiology of moral cognition are often done by examining clinical populations characterized by diminished moral emotions and a proclivity toward immoral behavior. Psychopathy is the most common disorder studied for this purpose. Although cocaine abuse is highly co-morbid with psychopathy and cocaine-dependent individuals exhibit many of the same abnormalities in socio-affective processing as psychopaths, this population has received relatively little attention in moral psychology. To address this issue, the authors used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to record hemodynamic activity in 306 incarcerated male adults, stratified into regular cocaine users (n = 87) and a matched sample of non-cocaine users (n = 87), while viewing pictures that did or did not depict immoral actions and determining whether each depicted scenario occurred indoors or outdoors. Consistent with expectations, cocaine users showed abnormal neural activity in several frontostriatial regions during implicit moral picture processing compared to their non-cocaine using peers. This included reduced moral/non-moral picture discrimination in the vACC, vmPFC, lOFC, and left vSTR. Additionally, psychopathy was negatively correlated with activity in an overlapping region of the ACC and right lateralized vSTR. These results suggest that regular cocaine abuse may be associated with affective deficits which can impact relatively high-level processes like moral cognition.

ABSTRACT Psychopathy in women has gained the attention of the scientific community, but research on the emotional processing in individuals with psychopathic traits and its role in criminal behavior is still scarce. The present systematic review aims to aggregate existing literature that analyze emotional processing in women with psychopathy traits. The search terms, conducted in six databases, identified 13 relevant studies, meeting the following criteria: women, 18 years or older, prison or community contexts, and written in English, Spanish, or Portuguese. Studies pointed to a compromise in the understanding, management, and categorization of emotions, especially those with negative valence, and the presence of alexithymia in women with higher scores of psychopathic traits. Some studies revealed that women with psychopathy had reduced limbic activation, cortical deficits in emotional processing, and an absence of aversive startle response when exposed to aversive stimuli. Significant relationships between psychopathic traits, heart rate, and skin conductance response were documented. Additionally, the interpersonal-affective facet of psychopathy was linked to emotion management difficulties, while the antisocial-impulsive dimension seems linked to alexithymia and deficits in the processing of negatively valenced emotions. These findings carry practical implications for interventions with psychopathic women.

Humans can recognize emotions from vocalisations of various animal species. Our study examined whether human psychological differences in dark personality traits (as measured by SD3) and musician experience affect the decoding of emotions in animal calls. Respondents assessed the situation and the valence and intensity of emotion experienced by the animal in calls of piglets recorded in three social and one painful situation. With increasing psychopathy scores, individuals made more misclassification errors between social and painful calls and also perceived the social calls as more negative. Higher Machiavellianism scores were associated with a more positively perceived valence of social and painful calls. Furthermore, respondents with musician experience and using Czech (as opposed to English) positively shifted the perceived valence of social calls. These findings indicate that humans with higher psychopathic traits may possess mechanisms that blunt the difference between distressing and positive vocal signals, thus making it easier to exploit or manipulate others. Furthermore, interindividual personality differences and musical experiences influence how humans perceive emotions in vocal signals devoid of verbal cues. The implications are made for human-animal interaction, the general dark triad theory, and the perception of emotions in nonverbal human infant calls.