Autonomic responses to modeled distress in prison psychopaths

The present experiment was designed to study the physiological basis of the proposition that psychopaths are indifferent to the feelings of others. Young male subjects from a prison population were divided into groups according to their Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) Pd score and then subdivided on the basis of MMPI Welsh Anxiety Scale (WAS) scores. Subjects in each group observed a model exhibiting either mild or severe distress to electric shock. Heart rate and skin conductance were measured over 15 trials in each subject. We hypothesized that the different clinical groups would exhibit different physiological emotional response patterns. The results showed that low-Pd subjects were more autonomically responsive to an emotional stimulus (modeled distress) than high-Pd subjects from the same prison population. Moreover, high-WAS subjects were more responsive than low-WAS subjects. The level of distress exhibited by the model had no effect.