The Impact of Psychopathic Personality on Interpersonal Closeness: A Multi-Modal Approach

<p><strong>This thesis examines the impacts of psychopathy on naturalistic dyadic interactions. Social interactions make up a key element of the human experience and contribute to many facets of our wellbeing. Psychopathic personality is associated with traits that can detrimentally impact the quality of these interactions. The quality of these interactions can be measured by how close we feel to someone, and there are factors that contribute to this including synchrony in facial expression of emotion, physiological responses, and the interpersonal distance we have between ourselves and an interaction partner. Research has shown that the more in sync we are the closer we feel after sharing an emotional moment with another, and the closer we are stand to someone, the more intimate and closer we feel to them, with physical proximity being seen as a support mechanism. The current study investigates these relationships using actor-partner interdependent mediation models (APIMeM), with psychopathic personality scores as predictor variables, changes in feelings of closeness across conversation tasks as outcome variables, and the three mediator variables: facial expression of emotion synchrony, physiological synchrony, and minimum interpersonal distance (i.e. the closest the interaction partners got throughout the conversation task). Data was collected from familiar and stranger dyads who took part in 4 conversations, positively and negatively valenced, and whose movements were captured through motion capture suits, physiological responses through sensors, and facial expressions of emotion from videos of faces put through emotion recognition software. Feelings of closeness were captured through the Inclusion of the Other in the Self Scale (Aron et al. 1992), a self-report measure, before the conversations and after them, and the difference between the two measures was used. Results showed that the Coldheartedness scale scores were associated with greater increase in the person’s own feelings of closeness, with less facial expression of emotion synchrony, and less interpersonal distance. Less interpersonal distance was associated with greater increase in feelings of closeness. Possible interpretations and implications are discussed.</strong></p>