Remembering details of emotional events: A comparison between psychopathic and nonpsychopathic offenders

Abstract

Recent research indicates that recall of the central details of a negative emotional event is better than is recall for peripheral details. We predicted that psychopaths—because of their difficulty in processing emotional information—would not show this narrowing of attention for negative events. Criminal psychopaths and nonpsychopaths, defined by the Hare Revised Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R; Hare, 1991), were shown a series of 15 color slides. The content of the eighth (critical) slide was either emotional or neutral; in each case the critical slide contained a central detail (the color of a woman's coat) and a peripheral detail (the color of a car in the background). There were no group differences in recall of the details of the neutral slide; in each case, the central and peripheral details were recalled equally well. The nonpsychopaths recalled the central detail of the emotional slide far better than they did the peripheral detail; that is, they showed the expected narrowing of attention with negative emotion. The psychopaths, on the other hand, failed to show this effect; their recall of the central and peripheral details was the same for the emotional slide as it was for the neutral slide. The results provide further support for the hypothesis that psychopaths have difficulty in processing emotional information.