title: Motor Empathy in Individuals With Psychopathic Traits: A Preliminary Study.
abstract: The present laboratory study examined motor empathy in male and female individuals, who were either high or low on psychopathic traits, drawn from a nonclinical university population. Past findings suggest that psychopathic individuals are impaired in affective empathy, but findings on impairments in cognitive empathy are mixed. Research on motor empathy in psychopathy is scarce. The authors hypothesized that individuals high on psychopathic traits would have deficient motor empathy (similar to affective empathy) related to valenced emotion stimuli because of the automatic nature of motor empathy. Potential participants completed the Psychopathic Personality Inventory-Revised (PPI-R). Participants were chosen for the study on the basis of their PPI-R scores. All participants viewed photographic images drawn from a well-established set of stimuli (the International Affective Picture System) and were video recorded while doing so. Intensity for eight emotions (anger, contempt, disgust, fear, sad, joy, surprise, and neutral) in participants' facial expressions was measured objectively using an automated program, the Computer Expression Recognition Toolbox. Individuals high on psychopathic traits as compared with low PPI-R scorers displayed significantly less emotional congruence when viewing negative images. The study results suggest that deficits in motor empathy related to psychopathic trait levels are relatively restricted to negative emotions.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, State University of New York at Binghamton.
authors.forename: Yelena
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Khvatskaya
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, State University of New York at Binghamton.|Department of Psychiatry, Weill Cornell Medical College.
authors.forename: Mark F
authors.initials: MF
authors.lastname: Lenzenweger
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000987:Antisocial Personality Disorder / Q000523:psychology*; D004644:Emotions; D004645:Empathy; D005149:Facial Expression; D005239:Fear; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D014741:Video Recording