Summary: A new study links psychopathy with alexithymia, or emotional blindness, which may explain the emotional deficits seen in people with psychopathic traits. Individuals with strong psychopathic traits struggle to recognize and describe their emotions, which affects their ability to show empathy and regulate emotions.
This insight opens the door for potential therapeutic interventions aimed at improving emotional awareness, which could enhance empathy and reduce reoffending risks. Researchers suggest that addressing alexithymia in treatment could improve emotional functioning in individuals with psychopathic tendencies.
Key Facts:
- Psychopathy is linked to alexithymia, hindering emotion recognition and regulation.
- People with psychopathic traits have greater difficulty showing empathy.
- Improving emotional awareness could reduce recidivism in psychopathic offenders.
Source: Max Planck Institute
Psychopathic people have great difficulty or are even unable to show empathy and regulate their emotions. According to a new study by Matthias Burghart, a Max Planck researcher in Freiburg, this could be because these people suffer from alexithymia, also known as emotional blindness.
The work is published in the journal PLOS ONE.
The term alexithymia is an amalgam of the Greek prefix a- (without) and the words lexis (reading) and thymos (emotion). It refers to the inability of a person to recognize and describe their own emotions.
People with alexithymia tend to perceive their feelings as purely physical sensations. For example, emotional tension is registered as mere physical discomfort or pain.
Previous research has linked alexithymia to mental health issues such as depression and anxiety.
“However, research in clinical psychology shows that the ability to properly identify and understand one’s own emotions is essential for the healthy functioning of other emotional abilities such as empathy and emotion regulation.
“For us as scientists, this raises the question: Is psychopathy related to alexithymia and, if so, could this relationship (at least in part) explain the many other emotional deficits often observed in psychopathy?” explains Burghart, a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law in Freiburg.
To answer this question, Burghart and colleagues from the University of Konstanz conducted a survey of two groups: a randomly selected group of people from the general population (315 people), who were recruited through posters, flyers, and social media ads, and a group of 50 inpatients from a psychiatric clinic.
The latter group consisted of patients from four different wards of the clinic; what they all had in common was that they had been admitted to the forensic clinic after having committed crimes under conditions such as diminished criminal responsibility or drug addiction.
Both groups completed the following self-report questionnaires, which are commonly used in psychological research:
- the Triarchic Psychopathy Measure (TriPM) to assess psychopathic traits;
- the Saarbrücken Personality Questionnaire to measure empathy;
- the Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20 to assess alexithymia;
- the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ) to assess emotion regulation strategies.
The result: the “forensic sample” was found to exhibit significantly higher levels of boldness, meanness, and disinhibition compared to the general population cohort. These characteristics are considered typical psychopathic traits.
This result corresponds to earlier studies and indicates that there is a higher proportion of people with psychopathic symptoms in groups of offenders from forensic clinics than in the general population.
What is new, however, is the scientific finding that individuals with strong psychopathic traits tend to have greater difficulty recognizing and describing their own emotions (i.e., to be suffering from alexithymia), which in turn contributes to a lack of empathy and poor emotion regulation.
Conversely, this means that therapeutic measures to improve emotional awareness could be helpful for people with psychopathic personalities.
“If these people manage to recognize and describe their own emotions, their empathy and ability to regulate their emotions may also improve,” says Burghart.
Ideally, this therapeutic approach could reduce the risk of recidivism in offenders.
About this alexithymia and psychopathy research news
Author: Matthias Burghart
Source: Max Planck Institute
Contact: Matthias Burghart – Max Planck Institute
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Open access.
“Understanding empathy deficits and emotion dysregulation in psychopathy: The mediating role of alexithymia” by Matthias Burghart et al. PLOS ONE
Abstract
Understanding empathy deficits and emotion dysregulation in psychopathy: The mediating role of alexithymia
Psychopathy is a severe personality disorder marked by a wide range of emotional deficits, including a lack of empathy, emotion dysregulation, and alexithymia. Previous research has largely examined these emotional impairments in isolation, ignoring their influence on each other.
Thus, we examined the concurrent interrelationship between emotional impairments in psychopathy, with a particular focus on the mediating role of alexithymia.
Using path analyses with cross-sectional data from a community sample (N = 315) and a forensic sample (N = 50), our results yielded a statistically significant mediating effect of alexithymia on the relationship between psychopathy and empathy (community and forensic) and between psychopathy and emotion dysregulation (community).
Moreover, replacing psychopathy with its three dimensions (i.e., meanness, disinhibition, and boldness) in the community sample revealed that boldness may function as an adaptive trait, with lower levels of alexithymia counteracting deficits in empathy and emotion dysregulation.
Overall, our findings indicate that psychopathic individuals’ limited understanding of their own emotions contributes to their lack of empathy and emotion dysregulation.
This underscores the potential benefits of improving emotional awareness in the treatment of individuals with psychopathy.
