Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, United States of America.
Department of Psychiatry, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2022 Jul 1;17(7):e0270713. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0270713. eCollection 2022.
Meta-analyses have found that people high in psychopathy categorize (or "recognize") others' prototypical facial emotion expressions with reduced accuracy. However, these have been contested with remaining questions regarding the strength, specificity, and mechanisms of this ability in psychopathy. In addition, few studies have tested holistically whether psychopathy is related to reduced facial mimicry or autonomic arousal in response to others' dynamic facial expressions. Therefore, the current study presented 6 s videos of a target person making prototypical emotion expressions (anger, fear, disgust, sadness, joy, and neutral) to N = 88 incarcerated adult males while recording facial electromyography, skin conductance response (SCR), and heart rate. Participants identified the emotion category and rated the valence and intensity of the target person's emotion. Psychopathy was assessed via the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R). We predicted that overall PCL-R scores and scores for the interpersonal/affective traits, in particular, would be related to reduced emotion categorization accuracy, valence ratings, intensity ratings, facial mimicry, SCR amplitude, and cardiac deceleration in response to the prototypical facial emotion expressions. In contrast to our hypotheses, PCL-R scores were unrelated to emotion categorization accuracy, valence ratings, and intensity ratings. Stimuli failed to elicit facial mimicry from the full sample, which does not allow drawing conclusions about the relationship between psychopathy and facial mimicry. However, participants displayed general autonomic arousal responses, but not to prototypical emotion expressions per se. PCL-R scores were also unrelated to SCR and cardiac deceleration. These findings failed to identify aberrant behavioral and physiological responses to prototypical facial emotion expressions in relation to psychopathy.
元分析发现，高精神病态的人在识别他人典型面部表情时准确性降低。然而，这些发现仍然存在争议，即精神病态者的这种能力的强度、特异性和机制仍存在疑问。此外，很少有研究全面测试精神病态是否与他人动态面部表情反应的面部模仿或自主唤醒减少有关。因此，本研究向 88 名被监禁的成年男性呈现了目标人物做出典型情绪表情（愤怒、恐惧、厌恶、悲伤、喜悦和中性）的 6 秒钟视频，同时记录面部肌电图、皮肤电反应（SCR）和心率。参与者识别情绪类别，并对目标人物的情绪的效价和强度进行评分。精神病态通过修订后的精神病态检查表（PCL-R）进行评估。我们预测，总体 PCL-R 评分以及人际/情感特征的评分，特别是与情绪分类准确性、效价评分、强度评分、面部模仿、SCR 幅度和对典型面部情绪表情的心脏减速降低有关。与我们的假设相反，PCL-R 评分与情绪分类准确性、效价评分和强度评分无关。刺激未能引起全样本的面部模仿，因此无法得出关于精神病态与面部模仿之间关系的结论。然而，参与者表现出一般的自主唤醒反应，但不是对典型的情绪表情本身。PCL-R 评分也与 SCR 和心脏减速无关。这些发现未能确定与精神病态相关的典型面部表情的异常行为和生理反应。
