Psychopathy and trait emotional intelligence

Abstract

Psychopathic individuals are infamous for their chronic and diverse failures of social adjustment despite their adequate intellectual abilities. Non-cognitive factors, in particular trait emotional intelligence (EI), offer one possible explanation for their lack of success. This study explored the association between psychopathy and EI, as measured by the Psychopathy Checklist -Revised (PCL-R; Hare, 2003) and Trait Meta-Mood Scale (TMMS, Salovey, Mayer, Golman, Turvey & Palfai, 1995). Consistent with the Response Modulation (RM) model of psychopathy (Newman & Lorenz, 2003), low-anxious psychopathic individuals had significantly lower scores on TMMS Repair and Attention compared to controls. Consistent with proposals by Patrick and Lang (1999) regarding PCL-R factors, these EI deficits related to different aspects of the psychopathy construct. Correlations revealed significant inverse associations between PCL-R factor 1 and Attention and PCL-R factor 2 and Repair. We propose that the multi-dimensional EI framework affords a complementary perspective on laboratory-based explanations of psychopathy.

The SRP-II as a rich source of data on the psychopathic personality.

“…In reading Cleckley"s (1964) 15 case descriptions, two broad commonalities emerge: 1) the individuals described have significant personality deficits as evidenced by the way they regard themselves and others, and 2) the individuals have significant emotional deficits as evidenced by the way they treat and (fail to) react to others" distress. This observation is supported by recent research that has suggested that psychopathy is associated with lower emotional intelligence (e.g., Ali, Amorim, & ChamorroPremuzic, 2009;Malterer, Glass, & Newman, 2008); however, specific deficits in emotional intelligence have been found to be differentially associated with facets of psychopathy. Thus, exploration of the associations between psychopathy and the emotional intelligence subscales will help to further clarify the patterns of deficits described in the literature in a normative sample.…”

Relationship between Parenting Styles, Self-compassion and Emotional Intelligence and Antisocial Behaviors in Students

“…2017; 4(4):e12918. skills, are related to antisocial behaviors (18)(19)(20)(21). Besides, findings reveal that those individuals who gained higher scores in sociopathy, gained lower scores in emotional intelligence (5).…”

Trait Emotional Intelligence and the Dark Triad Traits of Personality

“…It is now well established that trait EI is conducive to mental health and inversely related to psychopathology (Ali et al, 2009;Malterer et al, 2008;Williams et al, 2010; for a comprehensive meta-analysis, see Martins et al, 2010). The negative association with Machiavellianism is also straightforward in the context of trait EI theory, given that high trait EI individuals view themselves as empathetic and basically good-natured (hence the possibility of mapping high trait EI onto the positive pole of the General Factor of Personality; Petrides et al, 2010;Rushton et al, 2009).…”