Emotional Learning and Psychopathic Personality Traits: The Role of Attentional Focus and Intention to Learn

Psychopathy is often associated with aggressive behavior, the lack of empathy, and shallow affect. It is debated whether these characteristics are the result of a specific impairment of emotion processing or a general attentional neglect of goal-irrelevant information. Even though there is strong evidence for a crucial role of attentional focus, some studies confound attentional focus with explicit learning instructions. This ignores situations of automatic, implicit processing in which emotional information is selectively attended, but no active control processes are involved to compensate for an impairment in encoding emotional information effectively. This study was designed to separate selective attention toward emotional or nonemotional information from the effect of implicit and explicit learning processes. The online study (N = 429) examined selective attention toward emotional and nonemotional information in relation to psychopathic traits, under conditions of implicit and explicit learning. With regard to psychopathy as a unitary construct assessed via the PPI-R-40, we found no evidence for reduced learning from emotional information under implicit or explicit learning conditions. However, individuals scoring high on the Coldheartedness facet of psychopathy showed impaired implicit but not explicit learning from affective information, even when the information was in the current focus of attention. This suggests that Coldheartedness is associated with impaired implicit affective processing but that this impairment can be compensated under explicit, intentional task processing