Department of Psychology, Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057, USA.
Emotion. 2012 Oct;12(5):892-8. doi: 10.1037/a0026260. Epub 2012 Feb 6.
Psychopathy is a disorder associated with antisocial behavior and deficits in responding to emotional stimuli, particularly fear-related stimuli. This research demonstrates that these deficits extend to judgments about behaviors that cause fear in others. We assessed whether psychopathy is associated with the ability to identify the emotional consequences of social behaviors and with judgments about these behaviors' acceptability. We found that psychopathy, as indexed by the Psychopathic Personality Inventory, is associated with impairments in identifying behaviors that cause fear and in judging the moral acceptability of these behaviors. Ratings of emotional consequences and moral acceptability were also correlated, such that individuals who less accurately identified behaviors that cause fear also judged these behaviors to be more morally acceptable. Psychopathy scores mediated the relationship between these two variables. These findings suggest that understanding that frightening others is unacceptable relies on understanding this type of behavior's emotional consequences, and have significance for understanding the relationship between psychopathy, empathy, and antisocial behavior.
精神病态是一种与反社会行为和对情绪刺激（尤其是与恐惧相关的刺激）反应不足相关的障碍。这项研究表明，这些缺陷延伸到了对引起他人恐惧的行为的判断上。我们评估了精神病态是否与识别社会行为的情绪后果的能力以及对这些行为的可接受性的判断有关。我们发现，精神病态，如精神病态人格量表所衡量的，与识别引起恐惧的行为的能力以及判断这些行为的道德可接受性的能力受损有关。情绪后果和道德可接受性的评价也存在相关性，即那些不太准确地识别引起恐惧的行为的人也认为这些行为在道德上更可接受。精神病态得分在这两个变量之间的关系中起中介作用。这些发现表明，理解让他人感到恐惧是不可接受的，需要理解这种行为的情绪后果，这对于理解精神病态、同理心和反社会行为之间的关系具有重要意义。
