Exploring the Dark Side of Personality: Emotional Awareness, Empathy, and the Dark Triad Traits in an Italian Sample

A primer on the Dark Triad traits

“…However, combining such assessments may result in participant fatigue. Despite these criticisms, the older of these-the Dirty Dozen, which was developed by an Australian-based researcher-has been validated using item response theory (Gouveia, Monteiro, Gouveia, Athayde, & Cavalcanti, 2016;Medeiros, Monteiro, Gouveia, Nascimento, & Gouveia, 2017;Webster & Jonason, 2013), correlates with long-form measures of the Dark Triad traits (Jonason & Luévano, 2013;Jonason & Webster, 2010), predicts the same outcomes as longer measures (Jonason & Jackson, 2016), is associated with the domain general traits found in the HEXACO (Jonason & McCain, 2012), and has predictive validity in the form of associations with limited empathy in different countries (Jonason & Krause, 2013;Schimmenti et al, 2017). The SD3 has stronger validity than the DD (Maples, Lamkin, & Miller, 2014), although both scales may Fail to capture the lower-level facets of each trait (McLarnon & Tarraf, 2017;Muris et al, 2017) given that they shrink larger pools of heterogenous content into smaller, even homogenous (potentially bloated-specific) inventories.…”

“…Shorter measures such as the Short Dark Triad (SD3; Jones & Paulhus, 2014) and the Dark Triad Dirty Dozen (DD; Jonason & Webster, 2010) have been developed to facilitate measurement. Australian scholars have collaborated internationally, translating the DD into to Polish (Czarna, Jonason, Dufner, & Kossowska, 2016), Japanese (Tamura, Oshio, Tanaka, Masui, & Jonason, 2015), German (Küfner, Dufner, & Back, 2015), Italian (Schimmenti et al, 2017), and Turkish (Özsoy, Rauthmann, Jonason, & Ardıç, 2017) to study the cross-cultural nature of the Dark Triad traits. Despite these criticisms, the older of these-the Dirty Dozen, which was developed by an Australian-based researcher-has been validated using item response theory (Gouveia, Monteiro, Gouveia, Athayde, & Cavalcanti, 2016;Medeiros, Monteiro, Gouveia, Nascimento, & Gouveia, 2017;Webster & Jonason, 2013), correlates with long-form measures of the Dark Triad traits (Jonason & Luévano, 2013;Jonason & Webster, 2010), predicts the same outcomes as longer measures (Jonason & Jackson, 2016), is associated with the domain general traits found in the HEXACO (Jonason & McCain, 2012), and has predictive validity in the form of associations with limited empathy in different countries (Jonason & Krause, 2013;Schimmenti et al, 2017).…”

“…The SD3 has stronger validity than the DD (Maples, Lamkin, & Miller, 2014), although both scales may Fail to capture the lower-level facets of each trait (McLarnon & Tarraf, 2017;Muris et al, 2017) given that they shrink larger pools of heterogenous content into smaller, even homogenous (potentially bloated-specific) inventories. Despite these criticisms, the older of these-the Dirty Dozen, which was developed by an Australian-based researcher-has been validated using item response theory (Gouveia, Monteiro, Gouveia, Athayde, & Cavalcanti, 2016;Medeiros, Monteiro, Gouveia, Nascimento, & Gouveia, 2017;Webster & Jonason, 2013), correlates with long-form measures of the Dark Triad traits (Jonason & Luévano, 2013;Jonason & Webster, 2010), predicts the same outcomes as longer measures (Jonason & Jackson, 2016), is associated with the domain general traits found in the HEXACO (Jonason & McCain, 2012), and has predictive validity in the form of associations with limited empathy in different countries (Jonason & Krause, 2013;Schimmenti et al, 2017). Australian scholars have collaborated internationally, translating the DD into to Polish (Czarna, Jonason, Dufner, & Kossowska, 2016), Japanese (Tamura, Oshio, Tanaka, Masui, & Jonason, 2015), German (Küfner, Dufner, & Back, 2015), Italian (Schimmenti et al, 2017), and Turkish (Özsoy, Rauthmann, Jonason, & Ardıç, 2017) to study the cross-cultural nature of the Dark Triad traits.…”

Psychopathic Traits, Multimodal Emotion, and Empathy

“…Lockwood, Bird, Bridge, and Viding (2013) found that psychopathy and alexithymia both predicted deficits in affective processes involved in empathy but that these constructs predicted such processes independently from one another. A recent study in an Italian sample (Schimmenti et al, 2017) found that Dark Triad traits (including psychopathy) were associated with alexithymia but these traits were negatively correlated with empathy. Kroner and Forth (1995) demonstrated a link between psychopathy and alexithymia; however, the relationship was not as predicted: Factor 2 (antisocial/lifestyle) of psychopathy was correlated with the Importance of Emotions scale of the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20),…”

“…If attention to others' emotions is a necessary requirement for the experience of empathy, the substantial body of evidence pointing to impoverished emotion-processing by psychopathic individuals would be consistent with their decreased capacity for empathic responding. Several studies have demonstrated that empathy is negatively associated with psychopathy (Brouns, de Wied, Keijsers, Branje, & van Goozen, 2013;Giammarco & Vernon, 2014;Holmqvist, 2008;Ali & Chamorro-Premuzic, 2010;Jones, Happé, Gilbert, Burnett, & Viding, 2010;Schimmenti et al, 2017).…”