Primary and secondary psychopathic-traits and their relationship to perception and experience of emotion

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Abstract

Deficits in the ability to perceive and experience affect are associated with psychopaths. However, past research is inconsistent, perhaps because it measures psychopathy homogeneously rather than using the two-factor structure. This study considered psychopathic-like-traits in college students as heterogeneous (primary and secondary), and evaluated their relationship to the processing and experience of positive (PE) and negative affect (NE). Results generally indicated that primary psychopathic-traits were positively correlated with accuracy of perception of fearful faces and PE, and negatively associated with NE, while secondary psychopathic-traits were not related to emotional recognition or PE, but positively associated with NE.

Introduction

Cleckley (1941) describes the psychopath as lacking a conscience. Subsequently, primary and secondary psychopathy (associated with Factor 1 (F1) and Factor 2 (F2), respectively of psychopathy measures; Levenson, Kiehl, & Fitzpatrick, 1995) have been distinguished (for a review see Skeem, Poythress, Edens, Lilienfeld, & Cale, 2003). For example, primary psychopaths are thought to have a constitutional deficit that leads to callous and manipulative behavior, superficial relations, and a lack of negative affect such as guilt, fear or anxiety; they plan their behavior and socially rank themselves higher than others. Secondary psychopathy develops from environmental causes, such as parental abuse or rejection, resulting in an underlying emotional problem associated with neuroticism, impulsivity, aggression and emotional reactivity (Blackburn and Maybury, 1985, Karpman, 1941, Kosson and Newman, 1995, Lykken, 1995, Lynam et al., 1999, Mealey, 1995, Morrison and Gilbert, 2001). Their “disturbed emotional capacities may often manifest in hostile reactivity that interferes with stable relationships and adaptive functioning” (Poythress & Skeem, 2005, p. 178). Research utilizing cluster analyses confirms the existence of groups that parallel theoretical descriptions of primary and secondary psychopathy (Falkenbach et al., 2008, Hicks et al., 2004, Vassileva et al., 2005). Despite these findings, most research treats psychopathy as a homogenous concept, while greater validity and reliability of results may stem from evaluating it heterogeneously (Hicks et al., 2004).

Theory indicates that psychopaths may process emotions differently than non-psychopaths (Cleckley, 1976, Lykken, 1995); psychopaths are believed to be incapable of efficiently understanding, utilizing, or grasping the meaning of affective aspects of language (Williamson, Harpur, & Hare, 1991). These emotional deficits may interfere with moral socialization and therefore, make an individual susceptible to engaging in antisocial behavior (Wootton, Frick, Shelton, & Silverthorn, 1997). Research (Blair, 1995, Hare, 1999, Lorenz and Newman, 2002) generally supports a link between the antisocial standard of living of psychopaths and difficulty processing emotional facial and vocal expressions of distress (i.e., fear and sadness). However, there is inconsistency in the findings. Some research demonstrates that juveniles (Blair, Budhani, Colledge, & Scott, 2005) and adults (Blair, Mitchell, & Richell, 2002) with psychopathic-traits in forensic (Blair et al., 2004) and college samples (Montagne et al., 2005) have difficulty identifying fearful faces and voices, other research has found difficulty identifying only sad voices (Stevens, Charman, & Blair, 2001), while facial affect recognition research has found they have difficulty recognizing both sadness and fear (Blair and Coles, 2000, Blair et al., 2001, Stevens et al., 2001). These researchers hypothesize that psychopaths do not recognize distress cues from their “victim” and therefore do not pair their antisocial behavior with the distress of others (Blair, 1995). However, Hastings (2005) found that psychopathy was related to a deficit in recognizing happy and sad faces at low intensity levels. Additionally, Kosson, Suchy, and Mayer (2002) found that an adult psychopathic group was more likely to be deficient in identifying the emotion disgust and better at recognizing anger on faces than non-psychopaths. Book (2005) also found that psychopathic inmates were better at identifying emotional facial cues, specifically fear. The authors hypothesized that psychopaths might have this sensitive awareness because, in order to be deceitful they must be skilled at identifying emotions that indicate distress.

These inconsistencies in findings may be because past research evaluates psychopathy homogeneously ignoring indications that the two types of psychopathy may be differentially associated with the perception of emotional cues. Research investigating other aspects of emotional perception (e.g., startle reflex to pictures or sounds) shows different relationships between the subtypes and emotional processing (e.g., Vanman, Mejia, Dawson, Schell, & Raine, 2003). One possibility is that those with primary psychopathic-traits, who are callous, but charming and foster relationships for manipulation and conning purposes, may need to, as Book (2005) suggested, be better at identifying emotional facial cues, specifically fear and anger, in order to be successfully deceitful or know when to change strategies. However, secondary psychopaths, who tend to be reactively aggressive and demonstrate hostile attribution biases, demonstrate more errors in emotional perception.

Psychopaths are also believed to lack the capacity to feel emotions, such as fear, guilt, or anxiety (Cleckley, 1941, Hare, 1970, Mealey, 1995). These unpleasant emotional states combined together are considered negative emotionality (NE; Hicks and Patrick, 2006, Levenston et al., 2000). When the types of psychopathy are differentiated in terms of affective experience, primary psychopaths are defined by deficient anxiety, guilt and fear, which suggests a low NE profile, and secondary psychopaths are characterized as having more neuroticism, impulsivity, depression, anger, and distress (Karpman, 1941, Lykken, 1995), which suggests a high NE profile. The empirical research in this area is somewhat inconsistent. The most prominent results are consistent with primary psychopathy traits being negatively related to NE (Patrick, 1994, Verona et al., 2001) and secondary psychopathy traits being positively associated with NE (e.g., Hale et al., 2004, Hicks and Patrick, 2006, Shine and Hobson, 1997). However, other results suggest that F1 (Hale et al., 2004, Vitale et al., 2002) and F2 are unrelated to NE (Harpur, Hare, & Hakstian, 1989).

There has been little research considering psychopathy and positive emotionality (PE), or the experience of emotions associated with extraversion, dominance, ambition and engagement with others. However, PE is important as it typically reflects lack of psychological distress and problems, and has implications in terms of treatment amenability and strategies. When typologies are considered, PE is uncovered in definitions of primary psychopathy which includes high social dominance, determination, extraversion, and striving for maximum extrinsic gain (Karpman, 1941), and these same people who lack empathy and anxiety may present a particular type of risk to society, different than secondary psychopaths who may have less PE resulting from rejection, alienation and difficulty in social situations (Karpman, 1941). Research suggests that F1 is positively related to PE, whereas, F2 is negatively correlated with PE (Hicks et al., 2004, Verona et al., 2001).

The current study evaluated the relationship between emotional perceptual abilities, emotional experience (NE and PE), and psychopathic-traits in a non-forensic sample. Recent research with these samples has found evidence for diverse expressions of psychopathic-traits across the population; (Skeem et al., 2003), exploring psychopathy as a dimensional construct (Benning et al., 2003, Levenson et al., 1995), and consequently, research on noninstitutionalized samples is important for making results generalizable to more individuals (Lilienfeld, 1998, Williams and Paulhus, 2004). Further, using a non-forensic sample allows for less likelihood of Axis I disorders and random responding than in a forensic setting (Lilienfeld & Hess, 2001). Previous research looking at emotional perception in non-forensic individuals has not consistently utilized validated measures of psychopathy (e.g., Montagne et al., 2005), however, the current study utilized the PPI, which is an established measure of psychopathic-traits in non-forensic populations (Poythress, Edens, & Lilienfeld, 1998) that has two underlying facets that are representative of primary psychopathic-traits (PPI-I) and secondary psychopathic-traits (PPI-II; Benning et al., 2003, Edens, 2004).

Past studies looking at the link between affect perception (verbal and facial) and psychopathy have found mixed results and often failed to consider psychopathy in terms of subtype traits. Furthermore, past research has often yielded inconsistent results with psychopathy and the experience of NE and there is limited research looking at the relationship between psychopathy and PE. This study expanded the previous research by looking at psychopathy in terms of the two-factor model and evaluated both perception and experience of NE and PE.

Psychopathic-traits were investigated in terms of total score (PPI-T), primary-traits (PPI-I), and secondary-traits (PPI-II). Since primary psychopaths are callous, with limited emotional responsiveness, “immune to negative events (low stress reaction), socially dominant (high Agentic-PE) but lacking in close attachments… capable of strategic action…but prone to take risks” (Hicks et al., 2004, p. 283); but are charming in order to manipulate others for their own gain, it was hypothesized that the PPI-I would be negatively correlated with facial and vocal errors, and NE, and positively correlated with PE. The secondary psychopath tends to be easily irritated, aggressive, emotionally reactive, disinhibited, selfish, have poor relations with others and a hostile attribution bias (Hicks et al., 2004, Karpman, 1941), therefore it was hypothesized that the PPI-II would be positively related to emotional perception errors and NE, and negatively correlated with PE.

Section snippets

Participants

The participants for the current study were 175 undergraduate students from an urban college; 119 females and 56 males participated for extra credit in psychology classes. The age of the participants ranged from 17 to 45 years old (M: 19.74, SD: 3.30). The sample included participants from various racial and ethnic backgrounds with 37.8% (n = 65) Hispanic, 25.6% (n = 44) Caucasian, 23.3% (n = 40) African American, 2.3% (n = 4) Asian, 11% (n = 19) from other racial backgrounds, and 1.1% (n = 2) who did not

Emotional recognition

The relationship between psychopathic-traits and facial recognition was evaluated first. As shown in Table 1, there was a significant negative correlation between PPI-T and fearful facial errors (r = −.187, p < .05), specifically at low intensity (r = −.170, p < .05). Also, there was a negative correlation between PPI-I and fearful facial recognition errors (r = −.156, p < .05), specifically at high intensity (r = −.157, p < .05). However, there were no significant relationships between PPI-II and perceptual

Discussion

This study investigated psychopathic-traits and emotionality, and supports the need to evaluate psychopathy as a heterogeneous construct; primary and secondary-traits were uniquely related to emotionality. Additionally, psychopathic-traits appear, at least in this population, more related to affective experience than perception. Concurrent with past research, primary psychopathic-traits were related to less NE and secondary psychopathic-traits were related to more NE. Further, most of the

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