Abstract
Antisocial behaviours and psychopathic traits place an individual at risk for criminality, mental illness, substance dependence, and psychosocial dysfunction. Social cognition deficits appear to be associated with psychopathic traits and are believed to contribute to interpersonal dysfunction. Most research investigating the relationship of these traits with social cognition has been conducted either in children or adult forensic settings. We investigated whether psychopathic traits were associated with social cognition in 91 young people presenting for mental healthcare (aged between 15 and 25 years). Participants completed symptom severity measures, neuropsychological tests, the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test of social cognition (RMET), and the Antisocial Process Screening Device (APSD) to assess psychopathic personality traits. Correlation analyses showed poorer social cognition was associated with greater psychopathic traits (r = −.36, p = .01). Interestingly, social cognition performance predicted unique variance in concurrent psychopathic personality traits above gender, IQ sustained attention, and working memory performance. These findings suggest that social cognitive impairments are associated with psychopathic tendencies in young people presenting for community mental healthcare. Research is needed to establish the directionality of this relationship and to determine whether social cognition training is an effective treatment amongst young people with psychopathic tendencies.
Highlights
Antisocial behaviors involve physical or psychological harm to others and include cheating, stealing, verbal or physical aggression, lying, overt or covert hostility, and other forms of criminality
The current study assessed the relationship between psychopathic traits and social cognition performance in a sample of young adults seeking mental health treatment
This study firstly shows that psychopathic traits were associated with an increase in risky drinking as assessed by the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT)
Summary
Antisocial behaviors involve physical or psychological harm to others and include cheating, stealing, verbal or physical aggression, lying, overt or covert hostility, and other forms of criminality. Antisocial behavior and psychopathic personality traits are associated with numerous comorbid mental health problems, including substance dependence [2,3,4,5], problem gambling [6], suicidality [7], and anxiety disorders [5,8,9,10] They are associated with social dysfunction in the form of interpersonal problems, unemployment, criminality, and aggression and violence towards others [5,11]. According to Moffitt [12,13], the development of life-course-persistent antisocial behaviour (as opposed to the more common short-term juvenile delinquency) reflects an ongoing interaction between the developmental environment and underlying abnormalities in neuropsychological, emotional, and personality factors Individuals on this trajectory tend to engage in antisocial behaviours from childhood right through to later life, rather than in the form of juvenile delinquent behaviours during adolescence. Individuals who are insensitive to emotional expressions of fear and distress are unlikely to undergo the normal process of aversive conditioning to such cues during key periods of moral development
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