Cognition or Emotion: Psychopathic Traits and Attentional Disengagement from Threat and Reward.

To protect your physical and social wellbeing, it is important that you engage appropriately with emotional information in your environment. People higher in psychopathic traits often show deficits in engaging with emotional information irrelevant to their goals; but whether this is actually because they do not process emotional content the same way as others, or if they just cannot divide their attention, remains unclear. We explored this phenomenon by presenting participants with a letter identification task accompanied by a central distractor image, either of positive or negative emotional valence, or neutral, or a scrambled version of these. Task performance was compared between scrambled and intact distractor images in each valence, to calculate a distraction index. The Psychopathic Personality Inventory (PPI-R; Fearless Dominance, FD; Self-centred Impulsivity, SCI; and Cold-heartedness, COH) was administered to measure psychopathic personality traits. Our primary hypothesis was that people scoring higher in Fearless Dominance would disengage their attention from central distractors faster than those lower in Fearless Dominance. According to attention-deficit accounts of psychopathy, we would expect those higher in FD to be less distracted by task-irrelevant images of any valence, while emotion-processing accounts of psychopathy would predict those higher in FD to be less distracted by only emotionally valenced images (positive or negative). According to fear-processing accounts of psychopathy, however, those higher in FD would be expected to perform better only on trials that include negatively valenced distractors. Our secondary prediction was that Self-centred Impulsivity would moderate the relationship between Fearless Dominance and reduced distraction. Using a series of linear mixed-effects models to assess how these psychopathic traits interact with distractor valence to predict the distraction index, we found that those scoring higher in Fearless Dominance were able to disengage their attention from fearful images significantly faster than those lower in FD. This supports the fear-processing accounts of psychopathy, such as Lykkens’ low-fear hypothesis, suggesting that the psychopathic trait of Fearless Dominance may indeed be associated with aberrant fear-relevant cue processing. Self-centred Impulsivity had no moderating effect on this relationship, but those scoring higher in SCI were able to disengage their attention from the positively valenced distractor images faster.