They know the words but not the music: Deficits in perceiving prosodic cues to emotion by individuals with psychopathic characteristics

Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized by callousness and shallow affect. It not only manifests itself as a clinical condition but also exists as a continuous personality trait in the general population. Psychopathic individuals possess a deficit in emotion-processing that interferes with their ability to perceive emotional expression in others. Participants varying in " subclinical psychopathy " (i.e., psychopathic characteristics below the cutoff for psychopathy) categorized the emotional prosody in semantically neutral words and sentences representing five emotion categories (happy, sad, angry, fear, and disgust). Word-length stimuli were predicted to be perceived with greater ambiguity than the sentence-length stimuli due to the duration difference between the two kinds of stimuli, with the difference between the stimuli predicted to be larger for participants with more psychopathic characteristics. Participants with more psychopathic characteristics and participants with fewer psychopathic characteristics were equally good at identifying the emotion in sentence-length stimuli. However, the participants with more psychopathic characteristics were less accurate at identifying emotion in word-length stimuli than participants with fewer psychopathic characteristics. This indicates that even individuals varying in levels of subclinical psychopathy can differ in emotion perception, particularly as the ambiguity of the stimuli increases. Introduction Emotion is a key indicator of the status of others. Information about the emotional status of others is available in various forms, including facial expressions The focus of the present work is the perception of emotion information that is conveyed by the prosodic cues in spoken language, and how personality characteristics can influence the accuracy of listeners' perception of this information. The specific personality characteristic investigated in the present study is psychopathy, in part because previous research has shown that psychopathic individuals have a deficit in processing emotion information in faces and spoken language. However, almost all of this research has been done with incarcerated individuals with clinical levels of psychopathy. The goals of the present study were 1) to determine if deficits in emotion perception were present in