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This study compares the performance, when identifying negative emotions on facial expression, of male offenders (n = 62) with a high level of psychopathy (n = 25) with other criminals with a low level of psychopathy (n = 37), as well as other “successful psychopaths” (n = 12) and non-criminals with a low level of psychopathy (n = 39) in order to clarify the negative emotional processing of offenders and non-offenders that are either high or low in psychopathy. The participants were assessed on a Go/No-Go paradigm in which subjects had to respond to the facial expressions of fear, sadness, and anger. The psychopathy level was obtained by Factor 1 of Hare’s PCL:SV. Both psychopathic groups, criminal and non-criminal, showed worse performance than their non-psychopathic counterparts on the identification of fear and sadness. An overresponsivity to both anger and fear was common to criminals, psychopaths, and non-psychopaths. These results reinforce the idea that psychopathy is related to a poor ability to identify fear and sadness in facial expressions independently of its manifestation in criminal behavior. In turn, a misidentified response pattern, characterized by an overresponsiveness for fear and anger, is common to both psychopaths and the criminal groups, and it appears to be the characteristic that distinguishes the three groups under study from non-criminal non-psychopath controls.

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This study assessed the expectation effects of monetary reward and monetary response cost on the performance of 57 offenders and 47 controls in a facial emotion identification task, applying a randomised cross-over design with three experimental conditions (monetary reward, monetary response cost and no-contingency). Offenders showed a poor performance compared with normal controls when the condition was monetary reward, but no differences between groups were found for the two other conditions. Within group analysis, offenders performed better when their response involved a monetary cost than a monetary reward. These results suggest that offenders may have a specific, reward-oriented motivational pattern, in which the expectation of having a monetary reward interferes negatively with the identification of facially expressed emotions, whereas the expectation of monetary cost does not seem to interfere with their performance. So, the performance of antisocial offenders in emotional identification tasks seems to be monetary condition specific.

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