An elusive deficit: Psychopathic personality traits and aberrant attention to emotional stimuli

Emotional stimuli are typically prioritized in competition for attention in healthy individuals. In contrast, there is evidence that individuals high in psychopathic traits fail to similarly prioritize emotional stimuli. With aberrant attention to emotional stimuli implicated in the development and maintenance of other psychopathologies, attentional insensitivity to emotional stimuli may also be important in the callous-unemotional responding seen in psychopathy. This study assessed emotional attention in association with psychopathic traits in a community sample (N = 121) using two commonly used emotional attention tasks-the dot probe and emotion-induced blindness tasks. Psychopathic personality traits were examined in association with two attention domains where emotional attention effects are reliably found: early perceptual competition and competition for spatial attention. Participants high in interpersonal-affective traits of psychopathy (boldness or meanness) exhibited emotional attention deficits in both domains when impulsive-antisocial traits were also high. These findings are discussed in the context of the inconsistent literature on attention to emotional stimuli in psychopathy. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).