Comparing the relationship between emotional responsiveness and psychopathy across assessment types: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Although psychopathic personality traits are widely reported to be related to reduced reactivity to emotion-eliciting situations, findings are not consistent. It has been argued that these differences could be related to variations in the way psychopathy is measured. To examine whether measurement variance resulting from the use of clinical assessment versus self-report assessment could be driving such differences, this systematic review and meta-analysis investigated the comparability of relations between psychopathic traits and responsiveness to emotion-inducing tasks for clinical versus self-report measures. The systematic review resulted in eight studies and 131 effect sizes, which included studies of emotion categorization, emotion regulation, decision-making, and executive functioning tasks. Robust Variance Estimation correlated effects models revealed no significant differences between effect sizes for clinical (PCL-R) versus self-report (PPI, SRP, and LSRP) assessment-based psychopathic traits and emotion tasks. Despite the small number of studies that included both clinical and self-report assessments of psychopathy, these results do not provide any evidence for an assessment-based difference in correlations with emotional responsiveness across tasks. The findings also show no associations between scores on emotional responsiveness and indices of psychopathy. Future research on emotional responsiveness in psychopathy should include both assessment types to be able to increase the research basis for the comparison.