Socio-Emotional Abilities and Empathy in Psychopaths

• Applicant: Dr. Sally Olderbak
• Subject Area: Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology
• Term: from 2017 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 365266458

• Final Report Year: 2020

Final Report Abstract

With highly psychopathic individuals committing over 50% of all violent crimes, an understanding of the disorder, and potential paths for treatment, is imperative. However, psychopathy is a complex disorder with an "emotion paradox": How can individuals who lack compassion and empathy successfully manipulate others? With a large male sample comprising both criminal offenders and individuals recruited from the general population, we applied sophisticated research methodology and data analytic tools to investigate this question. We found men who were higher on psychopathy performed worse on most tasks relative to men who were lower on psychopathy. We found highly psychopathic men were worse at identifying facial features and worse and remembering faces. They were worse at labeling the emotions expressed by others and worse at remembering what emotions other people expressed. They were also worse at posing emotions on their face. We found they were worse at these skills overall, and not worse for specific emotions (e.g., fear or happiness). However, highly psychopathic men also had lower intelligence. Through statistical analysis, we found that psychopathy was not associated with unique deficits in social or emotional skills. In other words, their lower intelligence caused them to have poorer social and emotional skills. Thus, highly psychopathic men suffer from a general deficit in intelligence, and not deficits in social or emotional skills. In light of evidence that highly psychopathic men are more successful at lying and conning others, we conclude that this is not because they are more skilled in deception. Rather, highly psychopathic men are more successful because they, on average, are more likely to lie or try to con others. In support of this view, we also found highly psychopathic men said they had less empathy for other people, relative to non-psychopathic men. However, physiologically, it is not clear that they actually have less empathy. Our findings challenge the view of suave and witty psychopaths. Instead, we found the disorder is associated with general deficits in cognition. We recommend clinical treatment aimed at addressing psychopathy should focus on improving the social and emotional skills of these individuals.

Publications

• (2017). Emotion perception and empathy: An individual differences test of relations. Emotion, 17, 1092-1106
  Olderbak, S., & Wilhelm, O.
  
• (2018). Facial responsiveness of psychopaths to the emotional expressions of others. PLOS One. 13(1): e0190714
  Künecke, J., Mokros, A., Olderbak, S., & Wilhelm, O.
  
• (2018). It’s the deceiver, not the receiver: No individual differences when detecting deception in a foreign and a native language. PLOS One. 13(5), e0196384
  Law, M. K. H., Jackson, S. A., Aidman, E. V., Geiger, M., Olderbak, S., & Kleitman, S.
  
• (2018). Psychopathic men: Deficits in general mental ability, not emotion perception. Journal of Abnormal Psychology. 127, 294-304
  Olderbak, S., Mokros, A., Nitschke, J., Habermeyer, E., & Wilhelm, O.
  
• (2018). The ‘g’ in faking: Doublethink the validity of self-reports. Frontiers in Psychology. 9(2153), 1-15
  Geiger, M., Olderbak, S., Sauter, R., & Wilhelm, O.
  
• (2019). A call for revamping socio-emotional ability research in Autism. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 42, 38-39
  Olderbak, S., Geiger, M., & Wilhelm, O.
  
• (2019). Computerized Facial Emotion Expression Recognition. In H. Baumeister, & C. Montag (Eds.) Digital Phenotyping and Mobile Sensing (pp. 31-44). Heidelberg: Springer
  Geiger, M., Wilhelm, O.