Inverted Social Reward: Associations between Psychopathic Traits and Self-Report and Experimental Measures of Social Reward

Individuals with high levels of psychopathic traits tend to undervalue long-term, affiliative relationships, but it remains unclear what motivates them to engage in social interactions at all. Their experience of social reward may provide an important clue. In Study 1 of this paper, a large sample of participants (N = 505) completed a measure of psychopathic traits (Self-Report Psychopathy Scale Short-Form) and a measure of social reward value (Social Reward Questionnaire) to explore what aspects of social reward are associated with psychopathic traits. In Study 2 (N = 110), the same measures were administered to a new group of participants along with two experimental tasks investigating monetary and social reward value. Psychopathic traits were found to be positively correlated with the enjoyment of callous treatment of others and negatively associated with the enjoyment of positive social interactions. This indicates a pattern of ‘inverted’ social reward in which being cruel is enjoyable and being kind is not. Interpersonal psychopathic traits were also positively associated with the difference between mean reaction times (RTs) in the monetary and social experimental reward tasks; individuals with high levels of these traits responded comparatively faster to social than monetary reward. We speculate that this may be because social approval/admiration has particular value for these individuals, who have a tendency to use and manipulate others. Together, these studies provide evidence that the self-serving and cruel social behaviour seen in psychopathy may in part be explained by what these individuals find rewarding.     

The Human Factor: Behavioral and Neural Correlates of Humanized Perception in Moral Decision Making

The extent to which people regard others as full-blown individuals with mental states (“humanization”) seems crucial for their prosocial motivation towards them. Previous research has shown that decisions about moral dilemmas in which one person can be sacrificed to save multiple others do not consistently follow utilitarian principles. We hypothesized that this behavior can be explained by the potential victim’s perceived humanness and an ensuing increase in vicarious emotions and emotional conflict during decision making. Using fMRI, we assessed neural activity underlying moral decisions that affected fictitious persons that had or had not been experimentally humanized. In implicit priming trials, participants either engaged in mentalizing about these persons (Humanized condition) or not (Neutral condition). In subsequent moral dilemmas, participants had to decide about sacrificing these persons’ lives in order to save the lives of numerous others. Humanized persons were sacrificed less often, and the activation pattern during decisions about them indicated increased negative affect, emotional conflict, vicarious emotions, and behavioral control (pgACC/mOFC, anterior insula/IFG, aMCC and precuneus/PCC). Besides, we found enhanced effective connectivity between aMCC and anterior insula, which suggests increased emotion regulation during decisions affecting humanized victims. These findings highlight the importance of others’ perceived humanness for prosocial behavior - with aversive affect and other-related concern when imagining harming more “human-like” persons acting against purely utilitarian decisions.     

Evidence for Unintentional Emotional Contagion Beyond Dyads

Little is known about the spread of emotions beyond dyads. Yet, it is of importance for explaining the emergence of crowd behaviors. Here, we experimentally addressed whether emotional homogeneity within a crowd might result from a cascade of local emotional transmissions where the perception of another’s emotional expression produces, in the observer''s face and body, sufficient information to allow for the transmission of the emotion to a third party. We reproduced a minimal element of a crowd situation and recorded the facial electromyographic activity and the skin conductance response of an individual C observing the face of an individual B watching an individual A displaying either joy or fear full body expressions. Critically, individual B did not know that she was being watched. We show that emotions of joy and fear displayed by A were spontaneously transmitted to C through B, even when the emotional information available in B’s faces could not be explicitly recognized. These findings demonstrate that one is tuned to react to others’ emotional signals and to unintentionally produce subtle but sufficient emotional cues to induce emotional states in others. This phenomenon could be the mark of a spontaneous cooperative behavior whose function is to communicate survival-value information to conspecifics.     

Experiencing Physical Pain Leads to More Sympathetic Moral Judgments

Previous studies have shown that observing another’s pain can evoke other-oriented emotions, which instigate empathic concern for another’s needs. It is not clear whether experiencing first-hand physical pain may also evoke other-oriented emotion and thus influence people’s moral judgment. Based on the embodied simulation literature and neuroimaging evidence, the present research tested the idea that participants who experienced physical pain would be more sympathetic in their moral judgments. Study 1 showed that ice-induced physical pain facilitated higher self-assessments of empathy, which motivated participants to be more sympathetic in their moral judgments. Study 2 confirmed findings in study 1 and also showed that State Perspective Taking subscale of the State Empathy Scale mediated the effects of physical pain on moral judgment. These results provide support for embodied view of morality and for the view that pain can serve a positive psychosocial function.     

Differentiating Psychopathy from General Antisociality Using the P3 as a Psychophysiological Correlate of Attentional Allocation

Recent studies have shown that while psychopathy and non-psychopathic antisociality overlap, they differ in the extent to which cognitive impairments are present. Specifically, psychopathy has been related to abnormal allocation of attention, a function that is traditionally believed to be indexed by event-related potentials (ERPs) of the P3-family. Previous research examining psychophysiological correlates of attention in psychopathic individuals has mainly focused on the parietally distributed P3b component to rare targets. In contrast, very little is known about the frontocentral P3a to infrequent novel events in psychopathy. Thus, findings on the P3 components in psychopathy are inconclusive, while results in non-psychopathic antisocial populations are clearer and point toward an inverse relationship between antisociality and P3 amplitudes. The present study adds to extant literature on the P3a and P3b in psychopathy by investigating component amplitudes in psychopathic offenders (N = 20), matched non-psychopathic offenders (N = 23) and healthy controls (N = 16). Also, it was assessed how well each offender group was able to differentially process rare novel and target events. The offender groups showed general amplitude reductions compared to healthy controls, but did not differ mutually on overall P3a/P3b amplitudes. However, the psychopathic group still exhibited normal neurophysiological differentiation when allocating attention to rare novel and target events, unlike the non-psychopathic sample. The results highlight differences between psychopathic and non-psychopathic offenders regarding the integrity of the neurocognitive processes driving attentional allocation, as well as the usefulness of alternative psychophysiological measures in differentiating psychopathy from general antisociality.     

Spontaneous Facial Mimicry Is Enhanced by the Goal of Inferring Emotional States: Evidence for Moderation of “Automatic” Mimicry by Higher Cognitive Processes

A number of studies have shown that individuals often spontaneously mimic the facial expressions of others, a tendency known as facial mimicry. This tendency has generally been considered a reflex-like “automatic” response, but several recent studies have shown that the degree of mimicry may be moderated by contextual information. However, the cognitive and motivational factors underlying the contextual moderation of facial mimicry require further empirical investigation. In this study, we present evidence that the degree to which participants spontaneously mimic a target’s facial expressions depends on whether participants are motivated to infer the target’s emotional state. In the first study we show that facial mimicry, assessed by facial electromyography, occurs more frequently when participants are specifically instructed to infer a target’s emotional state than when given no instruction. In the second study, we replicate this effect using the Facial Action Coding System to show that participants are more likely to mimic facial expressions of emotion when they are asked to infer the target’s emotional state, rather than make inferences about a physical trait unrelated to emotion. These results provide convergent evidence that the explicit goal of understanding a target’s emotional state affects the degree of facial mimicry shown by the perceiver, suggesting moderation of reflex-like motor activities by higher cognitive processes.     

The Relative Contributions of Facial Shape and Surface Information to Perceptions of Attractiveness and Dominance

Although many studies have investigated the facial characteristics that influence perceptions of others’ attractiveness and dominance, the majority of these studies have focused on either the effects of shape information or surface information alone. Consequently, the relative contributions of facial shape and surface characteristics to attractiveness and dominance perceptions are unclear. To address this issue, we investigated the relationships between ratings of original versions of faces and ratings of versions in which either surface information had been standardized (i.e., shape-only versions) or shape information had been standardized (i.e., surface-only versions). For attractiveness and dominance judgments of both male and female faces, ratings of shape-only and surface-only versions independently predicted ratings of the original versions of faces. The correlations between ratings of original and shape-only versions and between ratings of original and surface-only versions differed only in two instances. For male attractiveness, ratings of original versions were more strongly related to ratings of surface-only than shape-only versions, suggesting that surface information is particularly important for men’s facial attractiveness. The opposite was true for female physical dominance, suggesting that shape information is particularly important for women’s facial physical dominance. In summary, our results indicate that both facial shape and surface information contribute to judgments of others’ attractiveness and dominance, suggesting that it may be important to consider both sources of information in research on these topics.     

The Development of Infants’ Sensitivity to Behavioral Intentions when Inferring Others’ Social Preferences

The present study investigated whether infants reason about others’ social preferences based on the intentions of others’ interactive actions. In Experiment 1, 12-month-old infants were familiarized with an event in which an agent either successfully helped a circle to climb up a hill (successful-helping condition) or failed to help the circle to achieve its goal (failed-helping condition). During the test, the infants saw the circle approach either the helper (approach-helper event) or the hinderer (approach-hinderer event). In the successful-helping condition, the 12-month-old infants looked for longer at the approach-hinderer event than at the approach-helper event, but in the failed-helping condition, looking times were about equal for the two test events. These results suggest that 12-month-old infants could not infer the circle’s preference when the helper’s action did not lead to its intended outcome. In Experiment 2, 16-month-olds were tested in the failed-helping condition; they looked longer at the approach-hinderer event than at the approach-helper event, which suggests that they could reason about the third party’s social preferences based on the exhibited intentions. In Experiment 3, 12-month-olds were familiarized with events in which the final outcomes of helping and hindering actions were ambiguous. The results revealed that 12-month-old infants are also sensitive to intentions when inferring other’s social preferences. The results suggest that by 12-months of age, infants expect an agent to prefer and approach another who intends to help the circle to achieve its goal, regardless of the outcome. The current research has implications for moral reasoning and social evaluation in infancy.     

Low Levels of Empathic Concern Predict Utilitarian Moral Judgment

Is it permissible to harm one to save many? Classic moral dilemmas are often defined by the conflict between a putatively rational response to maximize aggregate welfare (i.e., the utilitarian judgment) and an emotional aversion to harm (i.e., the non-utilitarian judgment). Here, we address two questions. First, what specific aspect of emotional responding is relevant for these judgments? Second, is this aspect of emotional responding selectively reduced in utilitarians or enhanced in non-utilitarians? The results reveal a key relationship between moral judgment and empathic concern in particular (i.e., feelings of warmth and compassion in response to someone in distress). Utilitarian participants showed significantly reduced empathic concern on an independent empathy measure. These findings therefore reveal diminished empathic concern in utilitarian moral judges.     

Investigating Empathy-Like Responding to Conspecifics’ Distress in Pet Dogs

Empathy covers a wide range of phenomena varying according to the degree of cognitive complexity involved; ranging from emotional contagion, defined as the sharing of others’ emotional states, to sympathetic concern requiring animals to have an appraisal of the others’ situation and showing concern-like behaviors. While most studies have investigated how animals reacted in response to conspecifics’ distress, dogs so far have mainly been targeted to examine cross-species empathic responses. To investigate whether dogs would respond with empathy-like behavior also to conspecifics, we adopted a playback method using conspecifics’ vocalizations (whines) recorded during a distressful event as well as control sounds. Our subjects were first exposed to a playback phase where they were subjected either to a control sound, a familiar whine (from their familiar partner) or a stranger whine stimulus (from a stranger dog), and then a reunion phase where the familiar partner entered the room. When exposed to whines, dogs showed a higher behavioral alertness and exhibited more stress-related behaviors compared to when exposed to acoustically similar control sounds. Moreover, they demonstrated more comfort-offering behaviors toward their familiar partners following whine playbacks than after control stimuli. Furthermore, when looking at the first session, this comfort offering was biased towards the familiar partner when subjects were previously exposed to the familiar compared to the stranger whines. Finally, familiar whine stimuli tended to maintain higher cortisol levels while stranger whines did not. To our knowledge, these results are the first to suggest that dogs can experience and demonstrate “empathic-like” responses to conspecifics’ distress-calls.     

Dissociation between Emotional Remapping of Fear and Disgust in Alexithymia

There is growing evidence that individuals are able to understand others’ emotions because they “embody” them, i.e., re-experience them by activating a representation of the observed emotion within their own body. One way to study emotion embodiment is provided by a multisensory stimulation paradigm called emotional visual remapping of touch (eVRT), in which the degree of embodiment/remapping of emotions is measured as enhanced detection of near-threshold tactile stimuli on one’s own face while viewing different emotional facial expressions. Here, we measured remapping of fear and disgust in participants with low (LA) and high (HA) levels of alexithymia, a personality trait characterized by a difficulty in recognizing emotions. The results showed that fear is remapped in LA but not in HA participants, while disgust is remapped in HA but not in LA participants. To investigate the hypothesis that HA might exhibit increased responses to emotional stimuli producing a heightened physical and visceral sensations, i.e., disgust, in a second experiment we investigated participants’ interoceptive abilities and the link between interoception and emotional modulations of VRT. The results showed that participants’ disgust modulations of VRT correlated with their ability to perceive bodily signals. We suggest that the emotional profile of HA individuals on the eVRT task could be related to their abnormal tendency to be focalized on their internal bodily signals, and to experience emotions in a “physical” way. Finally, we speculated that these results in HA could be due to a enhancement of insular activity during the perception of disgusted faces.     

What Are Lay Theories of Social Class?

Numerous studies have documented the effects of social class on psychological and behavioral variables. However, lay beliefs about how social class affects these dimensions have not been systematically tested. Studies 1 and 2 assessed lay beliefs about the association between social class and 8 variables (including psychological and behavioral tendencies and cognitive ability). Study 3 assessed lay beliefs about the Big five personality traits and social class, and study 4 reframed the 8 variables from study 1 in opposite terms and yielded similar results. Study 5 contained the variables framed as in both studies 1 and 4, and replicated those results suggesting that framing effects were not responsible for the effects observed. Interestingly, for the most part lay beliefs about social class did not differ as a function of participants’ own social class. In general people held relatively accurate and consistent stereotypes about the relationship between social class and well-being, health, intelligence, and neuroticism. In contrast lay beliefs regarding social class and reasoning styles, as well as relational, social, and emotional tendencies were less consistent and coherent. This work suggests that on the whole people’s beliefs about social class are not particularly accurate, and further that in some domains there are contradictory stereotypes about the consequences of social class.     

Sexual Conflict and Gender Gap Effects: Associations between Social Context and Sex on Rated Attractiveness and Economic Status

Human mate choice research often concerns sex differences in the importance of traits such as physical attractiveness and social status. A growing number of studies indicate that cues to social context, including other people who appear in stimulus photographs, can alter that individual’s attractiveness. Fewer studies, however, consider judgements of traits other than physical attractiveness, such as wealth. Here we manipulate the presence/absence of other people in photographs of target models, and test the effects on judgments of both attractiveness and earnings (a proxy for status). Participants (N = 2044) rated either male or female models for either physical attractiveness or social/economic status when presented alone, with same sex others or with opposite sex others. We collectively refer to this manipulation as ‘social context’. Male and female models received similar responses for physical attractiveness, but social context affected ratings of status differently for women and men. Males presented alongside other men received the highest status ratings while females presented alone were given the highest status ratings. Further, the status of females presented alongside a male was constrained by the rated status of that male. Our results suggests that high status may not directly lead to high attractiveness in men, but that status is more readily attributed to men than to women. This divide in status between the sexes is very clear when men and women are presented together, possibly reflecting one underlying mechanism of the modern day gender gap and sexist attitudes to women’s economic participation. This adds complexity to our understanding of the relationship between attractiveness, status, and sex in the light of parental investment theory, sexual conflict and economic theory.     

Action Recognition Depends on Observer’s Level of Action Control and Social Personality Traits

Humans recognize both the movement (physical) goals and action (conceptual) goals of individuals with whom they are interacting. Here, we assessed whether spontaneous recognition of others’ goals depends on whether the observers control their own behavior at the movement or action level. We also examined the relationship between individual differences in empathy and ASD-like traits, and the processing of other individual’s movement and action goals that are known to be encoded in the “mirroring” and “mentalizing” brain networks. In order to address these questions, we used a computer-based card paradigm that made it possible to independently manipulate movement and action congruency of observed and executed actions. In separate blocks, participants were instructed to select either the right or left card (movement-control condition) or the higher or lower card (action-control condition), while we manipulated action- and movement-congruency of both actors’ goals. An action-congruency effect was present in all conditions and the size of this effect was significantly correlated with self-reported empathy and ASD-like traits. In contrast, movement-congruency effects were only present in the movement-control block and were strongly dependent on action-congruency. These results illustrate that spontaneous recognition of others’ behavior depends on the control scheme that is currently adopted by the observer. The findings suggest that deficits in action recognition are related to abnormal synthesis of perceived movements and prior conceptual knowledge that are associated with activations in the “mirroring” and “mentalizing” cortical networks.     

Observing others give & take: A computational account of bystanders’ feelings and actions

Social interactions influence people’s feelings and behavior. Here, we propose that a person’s well-being is influenced not only by interactions they experience themselves, but also by those they observe. In particular, we test and quantify the influence of observed selfishness and observed inequality on a bystanders’ feelings and non-costly punishment decisions. We developed computational models that relate others’ (un)selfish acts to observers’ emotional reactions and punishment decisions. These characterize the rules by which others’ interactions are transformed into bystanders’ reactions, and successfully predict those reactions in out-of-sample participants. The models highlight the impact of two social values—‘selfishness aversion’ and ‘inequality aversion’. As for the latter we find that even small violations from perfect equality have a disproportionately large impact on feelings and punishment. In this age of internet and social media we constantly observe others’ online interactions, in addition to in-person interactions. Quantifying the consequences of such observations is important for predicting their impact on society.     

Clinical symptoms of ADHD and psychopathy in perpetrators

ADHD and psychopathy are both associated with poor social adaptation and antisocial behavior. Previous studies have also suggested that ADHD and psychopathy share some symptomatology. The current study attempted to further uncover the relationship between ADHD and psychopathy in perpetrators by investigating the possibility of underlying common factors of ADHD and psychopathy using standardized instruments. Correlation analyses and principal component analyses were performed on ADHD-SB self-rating questionnaires and the PCL-SV from a population of 314 offenders. Further, subjects without ADHD, full ADHD and partially remitted ADHD according to DSM-IV were compared regarding psychopathic traits. ADHD and psychopathy rating scores were found to be correlated. Only psychopathic features related to unstable and antisocial lifestyle, but not related to affective features of psychopathy accounted to this association. Findings on the principal component analysis suggest that ADHD and psychopathy are unrelated on a symptomatic level, with the exception of impulsivity, which is a common feature that seems to combine both constructs.     

Mirroring and the development of action understanding

The discovery of mirror neurons in the monkey motor cortex has inspired wide-ranging hypotheses about the potential relationship between action control and social cognition. In this paper, we consider the hypothesis that this relationship supports the early development of a critical aspect of social understanding, the ability to analyse others’ actions in terms of goals. Recent investigations of infant action understanding have revealed rich connections between motor development and the analysis of goals in others’ actions. In particular, infants’ own goal-directed actions influence their analysis of others’ goals. This evidence indicates that the cognitive systems that drive infants’ own actions contribute to their analysis of goals in others’ actions. These effects occur at a relatively abstract level of analysis both in terms of the structure infants perceive in others’ actions and relevant structure in infants’ own actions. Although the neural bases of these effects in infants are not yet well understood, current evidence indicates that connections between action production and action perception in infancy involve the interrelated neural systems at work in generating planned, intelligent action.     

Inability and Obligation in Moral Judgment

It is often thought that judgments about what we ought to do are limited by judgments about what we can do, or that “ought implies can.” We conducted eight experiments to test the link between a range of moral requirements and abilities in ordinary moral evaluations. Moral obligations were repeatedly attributed in tandem with inability, regardless of the type (Experiments 1–3), temporal duration (Experiment 5), or scope (Experiment 6) of inability. This pattern was consistently observed using a variety of moral vocabulary to probe moral judgments and was insensitive to different levels of seriousness for the consequences of inaction (Experiment 4). Judgments about moral obligation were no different for individuals who can or cannot perform physical actions, and these judgments differed from evaluations of a non-moral obligation (Experiment 7). Together these results demonstrate that commonsense morality rejects the “ought implies can” principle for moral requirements, and that judgments about moral obligation are made independently of considerations about ability. By contrast, judgments of blame were highly sensitive to considerations about ability (Experiment 8), which suggests that commonsense morality might accept a “blame implies can” principle.     

White Matter Deficits in Psychopathic Offenders and Correlation with Factor Structure

Psychopathic offenders show a persistent pattern of emotional unresponsivity to the often horrendous crimes they perpetrate. Recent studies have related psychopathy to alterations in white matter. Therefore, diffusion tensor imaging followed by tract-based spatial statistics (TBSS) analysis in 11 psychopathic offenders matched to 11 healthy controls was completed. Fractional anisotropy was calculated within each voxel and comparisons were made between groups using a permutation test. Any clusters of white matter voxels different between groups were submitted to probabilistic tractography. Significant differences in fractional anisotropy were found between psychopathic offenders and healthy controls in three main white matter clusters. These three clusters represented two major networks: an amygdalo-prefrontal network, and a striato-thalamo-frontal network. The interpersonal/affective component of the PCL-R correlated with white matter deficits in the orbitofrontal cortex and frontal pole whereas the antisocial component correlated with deficits in the striato-thalamo-frontal network. In addition to replicating earlier work concerning disruption of an amygdala-prefrontal network, we show for the first time that white matter integrity in a striato-thalamo-frontal network is disrupted in psychopathic offenders. The novelty of our findings lies in the two dissociable white matter networks that map directly onto the two major factors of psychopathy.     

Social observation increases deontological judgments in moral dilemmas

A concern for positive reputation is one of the core motivations underlying various social behaviors in humans. The present study investigated how experimentally induced reputation concern modulates judgments in moral dilemmas. In a mixed-design experiment, participants were randomly assigned to the observed vs. the control group and responded to a series of trolley-type moral dilemmas either in the presence or absence of observers, respectively. While no significant baseline difference in personality traits and moral decision tendency were found across two groups of participants, our analyses revealed that social observation promoted deontological judgments especially for moral dilemmas involving direct bodily harm (i.e., personal moral dilemmas), yet with an overall decrease in decision confidence and significant prolongation of reaction time. Moreover, participants in the observed group, but not in the control group, showed the increased sensitivities towards warmth vs. competence traits words in the lexical decision task performed after the moral dilemma task. Our findings suggest that reputation concern, once triggered by the presence of potentially judgmental others, could activate a culturally dominant norm of warmth in various social contexts. This could, in turn, induce a series of goal-directed processes for self-presentation of warmth, leading to increased deontological judgments in moral dilemmas. The results of the present study provide insights into the reputational consequences of moral decisions that merit further exploration.