Turning a deaf ear to fear: Impaired recognition of vocal affect in psychopathic individuals.

Abstract

The processing of emotional expressions is fundamental for normal socialization and interaction. Reduced responsiveness to the expressions of sadness and fear has been implicated in the development of psychopathy (R. J. R. Blair, 1995). The current study investigates the ability of adult psychopathic individuals to process vocal affect. Psychopathic and nonpsychopathic adults, defined by the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R; R. D. Hare, 1991), were presented with neutral words spoken with intonations conveying happiness, disgust, anger, sadness, and fear and were asked to identify the emotion of the speaker on the basis of prosody. The results indicated that psychopathic inmates were particularly impaired in the recognition of fearful vocal affect. These results are interpreted with reference to the low-fear and violence inhibition mechanism models of psychopathy.Psychopathy is a disorder characterized in part by emotional traits such as callousness, a diminished capacity for remorse, and superficial charm as well as impulsivity and poor behavioral controls (Hare, 1991). Psychopathy is indexed in adults by the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R; Hare, 1991). Recent data suggest that the emotional difficulties associated with psychopathy interfere with moral socialization and put the individual at risk for developing high levels of antisocial behavior (Wootton, Frick, Shelton, & Silverthorn, 1997).Currently, there are two main models that attempt to explain why psychopathic individuals show emotional dysfunction and poor socialization. These are the low-fear model (e.g., Patrick, 1994) and the empathy dysfunction, violence inhibition mechanism (VIM) model (e.g., Blair, 1995Blair, , 2001. The low-fear explanation suggests that failed socialization in psychopathic individuals is the result of an attenuated ability to experience fear and, subsequently, a reduced ability to adjust their behavior in response to the negative consequences their behavior has led to in the past. Empirical support for this position is drawn from experiments suggesting that psychopathic individuals show impaired fear conditioning (Lykken, 1957) and impaired startle reflex potentiation (Levenston, Patrick, Bradley, & Lang, 2000).The VIM model suggests that there is a system that preferentially responds to sad and particularly fearful emotional displays (Blair, 1995(Blair, , 2001. The functional integrity of this system is thought to be crucial for moral socialization; the healthy individual learns to avoid initiating behaviors that result in the sadness or fear of others because this is aversive to the observer. One of the important predictions of the VIM model is that psychopathic individuals should show particular difficulty when processing sad and fearful expressions. Responding to other facial expressions (e.g., anger and disgust) has been shown, through neuroimaging studies, to involve dissociable systems from those that process sad and fearful expressions. These other systems are not thought to be impaired in psychopath...

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