psychopathy & facial emotion detection timothy c. bates tim@maccs.mq.edu.au

Psychopathy & Facial Emotion Detection

Timothy C. Bates

tim@maccs.mq.edu.au

PCL: The “gold standard”

• Psychopathy Checklist (PCL)• Hare, 1995

• Psychopathy Checklist–Revised (PCL–R)• Hare, 1991.• see Hare, 1991, 1996; Hart, Har ,&Harpur, 1992).

• Uses clinical ratings based from a 2 hour semistructured interview combined with a review of file information.

PCL 2-factor structure

• Factor I• Grandiosity• Absence of guilt• Callousness

• Cleckley (1941/1982)

• Factor II• chronic antisocial and criminal lifestyle

• more akin to DSM ASPD

Self reports

• Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 Psychopathic Deviate scale

• Butcher, Dahlstrom, Graham, Tellegen, & Kaemmer, 1989),

• California Psychological Inventory Socialization scale

• (Gough, 1969)

• Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory–II Antisocial• (Millon, 1987)

Problems with self report

• Moderate Factor II correlations (.3-.4)• Close to zero with Factor I

• Harpur, Hare, & Hakstian, 1989; Hart, Forth, & Hare, 1991.

Other problems

• A core element of psychopathy is impression management • Not apologizing, maximizing their own

reputation, silencing dissent and dissimulating

• Hare et al., 1989

• Why would they, then self-report psychopathic behavior?

PPI (Lilienfeld & Andrews, 1996)

Eight Subscales

• Machiavellian Egocentricity (30 items) Narcissistic and ruthless attitudes in interpersonal functioning.• “I always look out for my own interests before

worrying about those of the other guy” • Social Potency(24 items) Perceived ability

to influence and manipulate others.• “Even when others are upset with me, I can

usually win them over with my charm”

PPI

• Coldheartedness (21items) Callousness, guiltlessness, and an absence of sentimentality.• “I have had ‘crushes’ on people that were so

intense that they were painful” [false]• Carefree Nonplanfulness (20 items)

Indifference in planning one’s actions.• “I often make the same errors in judgment

over and over again”

PPI• Fearlessness (19 items) Absence of

anticipatory anxiety concerning harm and the willingness to participate in risky activities.

• “Making a parachute jump would really frighten me” [false])

• Blame Externalization, (18 items) Blame others for one’s problems and to rationalize one’s own misbehavior.

• “I usually feel that people give me the credit I deserve” [false])

PPI

• Impulsive Nonconformity, (17 items) Reckless lack of concern regarding social mores.

• “I sometimes question authority figures ‘just for the hell of it’” [true])

• Stress Immunity, (11 items): Absence of marked reactions to anxiety-provoking events.

• “I can remain calm in situations that would make many other people panic”

PPI Validity Scales• Deviant Responding (10 items). Malingering,

careless responding, comprehension• “During the day, I generally see the world in color rather

than in black-and-white”• Unlikely Virtues (14 items). Socially desirable

impression management. • “I have always been completely fair to others”

• derived from Tellegen’s (1978) Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire and measure

• Variable Response Inconsistency• Sum of the absolute differences between 40 item pairs

with high intercorrelations.

Validity

• Most self-report indexes of psychopathy fail to correlate with PCL or other diagnostic ratings

• PPI correlates with questionnaire, interview, and rating measures of Primary Psychopathy

• (Lilienfeld, 1990; Lilienfeld & Andrews, 1996).

• PPI & PCL-R factor 1 correlate > .45• (Poythress, Edens, & Lilienfeld, 1998; Lilienfeld et al., 1998)

Predicts

• Violence and recidivism • Salekin, Rogers, & Sewell, 1996

• Poor passive-avoidance learning • withholding responses that lead to

punishment• Belmore & Quinsey, 1994; Newman & Kosson, 1986.

Lykken (1957)• Suggested that

• Psychopaths are deficient in fear• Everything else follows from that

• Predicts some unlikely things• Heroic people are psychopaths

• Ignores some likely things• You have not only to not fear punishment, but to desire the

activity - are we all simply restrained from evil by fear?• Reciprocity may exist

• I must not only not fear you, I must not empathize with your pain

Effortful Control• Raine

• Reduced prefrontal cortex in murderers• Damasio

• Infant Head injury can create sociopathy• Jensen-Campbell (2002)

• A & C related to reduced Stroop and Wisconsin • Bates (submitted)

• A & C related to frontal damage scales• Attentional network performance

• Lynam: Delinquency & IQ/Executive fn

Social information Processing

• Raine: reduced PFC volume in murderers

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Psychopathy & the Face

• We display emotions on our faces• Psychopaths have severe emotional

disturbances• Perhaps face processing will reflect

individual differences in psychopathic information processing?

While there appears to be a “face” area in the fusiform gyrus

Haxby,2002

Faces evoke a diverse range of systems

Haxby,2002

Morphs

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Fear is the key?

a) A great book by Alistair MacLean

b) A good movie by Michael Tuchner

c) A thing in which Psychopaths are deficient

d) All of the above

Psychopathy & FFM

Is psychopathy a normal trait? NEO weightings

Coefficient Std. Coeff. F-to-Remove

Intercept 296.472 296.472 137.343

A1Trust -.697 -.190 8.180

A5Modesty -.772 -.199 9.578

A6Tendermindedness -.662 -.150 5.094

C5Self-Discipline -1.460 -.400 45.098

E5Excitement Seeking 1.480 .325 30.112

N1Anxiety -1.918 -.435 36.317

N2Angry Hostility 1.446 .371 26.321

O2Aesthetics .703 .133 4.818

O4Actions .659 .161 7.093

NEO-PI R Regression graph

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100 150 200 250 300 350 400Fitted PPI

Dependent vs. FittedStep: 11

But no sig relationships to personality appear