Psychopathic meanness is associated with fewer over-mentalizing errors

In many of the tests used to investigate the relationship of psychopathic traits with theory of mind task perfromance, the nature of any mentalizing errors is unclear, and performance could reflect a tendency towards either under-mentalizing or over-mentalizing. In this study, a sample of 92 healthy adult participants completed a measure of psychopathic traits and the Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition (MASC). The MASC not only assesses mentalizing about cognitive and affective mental states but also measures the proportion of under-versus over-mentalizing errors. Psychopathic meanness, but not boldness or disinhibition, was associated with better overall mentalizing, better cognitive mentalizing, and fewer over-mentalizing errors. Our findings are discussed in the context of using a consistent and well-defined operationalization of mentalizing and the importance of assessing the tendency toward under- or over-mentalizing errors to better understand the nature of theory of mind task performance in relation to distinct psychopathic traits.