Automatic processing of emotional images and psychopathic personality traits

Snowden, Robert J. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9900-480X, Frongillo Juric, Altea, Leach, Robyn, McKinnon, Aimee and Gray, Nicola S. 2022. Automatic processing of emotional images and psychopathic personality traits. Cognition and Emotion 36 (5) , pp. 821-835. 10.1080/02699931.2022.2054780

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Abstract

Psychopathy is associated with a deficit in affective processes and might be reflected in the inability to extract the emotional content of a stimulus. Across two experiments, we measured the interference effect from emotional images that were irrelevant to the processing of simultaneous target stimuli and examined if this interference was moderated by psychometrically defined traits of psychopathy. In Experiment 1, we showed this emotional distraction effect was reduced as a function of psychopathic traits related to cold-heartedness and occurred for both positively- and negatively-valenced images. Experiment 2 attempted to test the automaticity of the effects by presenting the emotional stimuli briefly so that the emotion was difficult to report. Again, high visibility images produced strong effects that were moderated by the cold-heatedness/meanness traits of psychopathy, but the low-visibility images did not evoke the emotional distractor effect. Our results strongly support the notion that psychopathic traits related to cold-heartedness/meanness are associated with an inability to automatically process the emotional content of images.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Psychology
Publisher:	Routledge
ISSN:	0269-9931
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	14 March 2022
Date of Acceptance:	14 March 2022
Last Modified:	14 Nov 2023 05:02
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/148363

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