summary #2

PSY101 Lab Section #

Spring 2013

Blair, R. J. R., Mitchell, D. G. V., Richell, R. A., Kelly, S., Leonard, A. & Newman, C. (2002). Turning a deaf ear to fear: Impaired recognition of vocal affect in psychopathic individuals. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 111, 682-686. doi: 10.1037/0021-843X.111.4.682.

Introduction

Psychopathy is a severe personality disorder marked by a distinct pattern of antisocial behavior and emotional characteristics. These include “callousness, a diminished capacity for remorse, and superficial charm as well as impulsivity and poor behavioral controls” (Blair, Mitchell, Richell, Kelly, Leonard, & Newman, 2002, p. 682). Perhaps most importantly, psychopaths seem to lack an intrinsic sense of morality. As a result, many are capable of horrific crimes for which they feel no guilt. Although psychopathic individuals have been extensively studied, they are still not well understood.

Recent studies have attempted to explain why psychopaths exhibit such extreme emotional dysfunction. Currently, there are two popular perspectives used to address this question. One explanation, the low-fear model, suggests that much of a psychopath’s aberrant behavior can be attributed to an impaired ability to experience fear (Blair et al., 2002). Basically, psychopaths never learn to avoid dangerous situations because they fail to feel fear in dangerous situations. They tend to put themselves in threatening positions (by starting a fight, for example) because they do not fear the consequences for themselves or others. In support of this explanation, previous studies have suggested that psychopathic individuals lack appropriate fear and startle reflexes in comparison with normal individuals. The second explanation, the violence inhibition mechanism (VIM) model, posits that the ability to read expressions of fear or sadness on other people’s faces is what allows people to develop morality. Normal people learn to avoid behaviors that tend to cause other people to feel and appear sad or afraid. The VIM model argues that psychopaths have an impaired ability to identify sad and fearful expressions, and so they do not learn to avoid immoral behaviors that cause others to feel negative emotions (Blair et al., 2002).

Many previous studies have looked into psychopaths’ ability to identify facial expressions. However, none have investigated the ability of psychopathic individuals to identify the emotional intonation of spoken words. The purpose of this study was “to explore the ability of psychopathic individuals to recognize emotional vocal intonalities” (Blair et al., 2002, p. 683).

Methods

The study took place in a London prison. Potential participants were screened using the Psychopathy Checklist - Revised, a measure of psychopathic tendencies. Nineteen men were identified as psychopaths. Twenty other men who did not meet the criteria for psychopathy also took part in the study (Blair et al., 2002).

Each participant took the Vocal Affect Recognition Test, which consisted of 60 neutral stimulus words spoken in an emotional vocal tone. Each tone reflected happiness, disgust, anger, sadness, or fear. Participants were asked to listen to each of the words and then identify the emotional tone of the word. The independent variable in this study was psychopathy (whether or not psychopathy was present in the individual), and the dependent variable was performance on the Vocal Affect Recognition Test (Blair et al., 2002).

Results/Discussion

The results showed that the psychopathic participants were far less able to correctly identify fearful voices than the nonpsychopathic participants. They were also less accurate than the nonpsychopathic participants at identifying sad voices. These findings correspond with previous findings that psychopathic individuals have difficulty recognizing facial expressions of fear and sadness. The findings also show that psychopathic individuals’ inability to recognize these negative emotions applies to auditory information in addition to visual information (Blair et al., 2002).

The authors do not explicitly mention any weaknesses of their study, but the small sample size is a drawback and should be considered. In addition, the authors mentioned that these results relate to previous findings of dysfunctional activity of the amygdala in the brains of psychopathic individuals. They suggest that further research involving brain imaging should be done to discover more about the structural brain abnormalities that may contribute to psychopathy (Blair et al., 2002).