Individual differences in psychoticism predict attention for emotional faces

Abstract

Psychoticism is a personality trait characterized by disregard for social conventions, coldness, and lack of empathy. We examined whether individual differences in psychoticism predicted attention biases to pictures of happy and angry faces presumed to elicit social approach and social withdrawal behaviors, respectively. Our analyses revealed that high levels of psychoticism were related to reduced attentional capture by angry faces. There were also within-group attention bias differences such that individuals low in psychoticism exhibited cognitive vigilance for both happy and angry faces relative to neutral, while those high in psychoticism did not show preferential processing of emotional expressions. These findings suggest that individual differences in psychoticism are related to alterations in the cognitive processing of socially relevant signals.