Abstract
Psychopathic individuals show selfish, manipulative, and antisocial behavior in addition to emotional detachment and reduced empathy. Their empathic deficits are thought to be associated with a reduced responsiveness to emotional stimuli. Immediate facial muscle responses to the emotional expressions of others reflect the expressive part of emotional responsiveness and are positively related to trait empathy. Empirical evidence for reduced facial muscle responses in adult psychopathic individuals to the emotional expressions of others is rare. In the present study, 261 male criminal offenders and non-offenders categorized dynamically presented facial emotion expressions (angry, happy, sad, and neutral) during facial electromyography recording of their corrugator muscle activity. We replicated a measurement model of facial muscle activity, which controls for general facial responsiveness to face stimuli, and modeled three correlated emotion-specific factors (i.e., anger, happiness, and sadness) representing emotion specific activity. In a multi-group confirmatory factor analysis, we compared the means of the anger, happiness, and sadness latent factors between three groups: 1) non-offenders, 2) low, and 3) high psychopathic offenders. There were no significant mean differences between groups. Our results challenge current theories that focus on deficits in emotional responsiveness as leading to the development of psychopathy and encourage further theoretical development on deviant emotional processes in psychopathic individuals.
Highlights
Individuals with high psychopathic trait levels come to about 1% of the general population [1, 2]
We focused on the activity of the corrugator muscle, because it is a reliable index of facial mimicry for happy, angry, and sad expressions [50], in contrast to the zygomaticus, the muscle pulling up the cheeks in smiling
We aimed to replicate a measurement model of facial muscle responses to emotional expressions [30] that controls for general facial responses to face stimuli and models emotionspecific facial response factors, which were significantly related to emotion perception ability
Summary
Individuals with high psychopathic trait levels (referred to throughout this manuscript as psychopaths) come to about 1% of the general population [1, 2]. Psychopaths are responsible for a disproportionate number of crimes. According to criminological cohort studies, persistent offenders [many of whom are psychopaths] are responsible for more than 50% of the officially recorded offenses [3]. Psychopathy is considered a primary risk factor for violent, serious, and repeat offending [4]. Psychopathy is characterized by emotional detachment [5, 6]. Psychopaths seem to have shallow emotional experiences, they appear indifferent towards the feelings of others, and remorseless with respect to their harmful actions against others [7]
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