Unlike the cognitions associated with depressive symptoms, little is known about those associated with antisocial personality and with its related traits ("dark traits"). Using the scrambled sentences task, an instrument from depression research, we investigated cognitions such as justifications (external blaming for one's behavior) and harm to others (based on the notion that some of these individuals enjoy harming or humiliating others) that we hypothesized may be prevalent in those high in antisocial personality traits. Confirming our hypothesis, these cognitions were associated with ratings on different antisocial personality scales and with antisocial and detachment scores in the alternative model of personality disorders of the DSM-5 (AMPD) in three non-clinical samples, but not with depressive symptoms or neuroticism. Cognitions including harm to others were differentially associated with high sadism. These findings empirically characterize classes of cognitions that are shared by individuals with antisocial tendencies, and that differ from those associated with depressive symptoms.Antisocial personality is characterized by maximization of one's own utility disregarding the consequences for others, or even by placing positive value on damage or harm to others 1,2 . Individual degrees in the tendency to enact antisocial behaviour (and display low levels of social value orientation) 3 constitute manifestations of dark personality 2,4 . A multitude of traits exist within the dark personality, but factor-analytic studies have identified a common core tendency, the dark factor of personality (D), on which the dark personality traits are based, but also add unique content to it 1,2 . Four of these traits have been most prominently studied and are known as the dark tetrad (psychopathy, Machiavellianism, narcissism and sadism) 5,6 .Little is known about the cognitions about the self and the world that accompany antisocial personality traits 7 . There is considerable evidence that antisocial personalities entertain justificatory cognitions that rationalize their behaviour 2,8 . This suggests that a personality construct such as D integrates personality traits with specific cognitions 3 , but no empirical approach to document these cognitions has been undertaken.In the clinical literature, cognitions have been extensively investigated in the context of affective disorders, starting from depression 9,10 . Negative cognitions in depression involve a negative view of oneself, the world and the future (negative cognitive triad) 9,11,12 . Further research in this area led to the development of an empirical task to assess the individual tendency to activate negative cognitions, the scrambled sentences task (SST) 13 . Each item of the SST 13,14 consists of a few words in random order that may be used to form a grammatically correct sentence. The words and the formed sentence give information on the tendency to activate specific cognitions. For example, with a set such as "is the bright future dismal", the frequency with wh...
