Emotional empathy and psychopathy in offenders: an experimental study.

Previous studies associated psychopathy in adults with deficits in empathy but these studies did not directly compare cognitive and emotional facets of empathy. The present study sought to establish whether psychopathy is associated with impairments in emotional empathy among adult offenders. Participants were 90 male offenders scoring low (n = 29), medium (n = 33) or high (n = 28) on the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) and n = 28 male noncriminal controls. Empathy functioning was assessed through self-report and computerized decision tasks, differentiating between perspective-taking (cognitive empathy) and compassion (emotional empathy). Against expectations, level of psychopathy among the offenders was not associated with either emotional or cognitive empathy. Offenders however had lower scores for both cognitive and emotional components of empathy functioning than controls. Both facets of empathy showed small but significant positive correlations with education level and social desirability. The methods employed to assess differences in empathy functioning may not be sensitive enough to assess differences in forensic samples. Pychopaths are characterized by a general lack of empathy and remorse, and attenuated responding to emotional stimuli (Hare, 2003; Herpertz & Sass, 2000). Studies show that psychopaths are particularly prone to antisocial and criminal behaviors (Leistico, Salekin, DeCoster, & Rogers, 2008) and are thus overrepresented in forensic populations (Coid et al., 2009; Habermeyer, Passow, & Vohs, 2010; Hare & Neumann, 2009). There is an ongoing discussion about the relationship between psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder. Whereas some researchers regard psychopathy as a severe form of antisocial personality disorder (Coid & Ullrich, 2010), others argued for distinct disorders with different developmental underpinnings (Cooke, Michie, Hart, & Clark, 2004).