Psychopathy and sensitivity to the emotional polarity of metaphorical statements

Abstract

Abstract Clinical and research evidence indicates that psychopathy is associated with anomalies in processing and using the emotional components of language. However, most research on the topic has involved simple verbal stimuli, thereby telling us little about how psychopaths process and use emotional material that is part of a more complex linguistic process. We administered an “Emotional Metaphor Q-Sort” task to 35 male inmates assessed for psychopathy with the Hare Psychopathy Checklist–Revised (PCL–R; Hare, 1991). The task consisted of metaphorical statements that had to be sorted along a continuum according to the direction and degree of their emotional valence, ranging from very negative to very positive. Although psychopaths and nonpsychopaths did not differ in their literal understanding of the metaphors, psychopaths made significantly more sorting errors than did nonpsychopaths, particularly with what should have been emotionally unambiguous metaphors. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that incarcerated psychopaths do not understand or make effective use of the emotional content of language.