| Abstract/Results: | ABSTRACT:
Psychopathy is a personality disorder that includes a set of distinct particularities in the affective, interpersonal and behavioural aspects, for instance, the absence of affective bonds, lack of feelings of remorse or empathy, impulsivity, disregard for the other, tendency for the individual in achieving what is desired without an emotional filter regarding the disturbance, and the ability to remain calm during high pressure situations. The literature on the subject connects psychopathy to deficit in the processing of emotional faces and to deficit in emotional reactivity, and more and more studies begin to analyse the facets of psychopathy using community samples, accepting the assumption that psychopathy represents a continuous property and divided by dimensions rather than a categorical property. The present study examined the contribution of the phenotypic dimensions Boldness, Meanness and Disinhibition, resulting from the triarchic conceptualization of psychopathy (Patrick, Fowles & Krueger, 2009) regarding emotional categorization and attribution of Activation, Valence and Intensity; for a set of facial expressions of Fear, Anger, Joy and neutral, in a 28 individuals community sample. Predicting a exclusive effect of Boldness on emotional categorization and emotional assignments, and no connection between Meanness / Disinhibition and our measures, we have developed three hypotheses: (1) Greater Boldness would be associated with greater errors in emotional category assignment; (2) Greater Boldness would be associated with valence levels closer to neutral in responses and with lower levels of activation and intensity in responses; (3) Meanness and Disinhibition would not be associated with participants' emotional responses. The results suggested that: higher scores on the Boldness subscale are not associated with deficit in emotional categorization, but are associated with Valence assignments closer to the neutral value, and with lower value assignments in the Intensity and Activation dimensions, which may suggest a relationship between Boldness and emotional hypo-responsiveness. Regarding the Meanness and Disinhibition dimensions, the results suggested that these two phenotypes are associated with the participants' emotional responses, and that subjects with higher levels in the Disinhibition subscale may show the presence of reactive aggression to emotional stimuli.
|