Psychopathy, narcissism, and borderline personality: A critical test of the affective empathy-impairment hypothesis☆

a r t i c l e i n f o Two studies were conducted to test whether psychopathy, narcissism, and borderline personality are linked to impairment in affective empathy experience. In both studies, two forms of affective empathy (emotional contagion and empathic concern) were covertly manipulated and measured. Use of state empathy change scores and data aggregation across both studies and a third previously published study revealed little evidence of a consistent negative association between most measures of narcissistic, borderline, or psychopathic traits and affective empathy change scores. The one exception was the psychopathic trait of Callous Affect, which revealed consistent negative associations with affective empathy change scores. Specifically, relative to neutral stimuli, Callous Affect was associated with lower emotional contagion of sadness to sad faces, lower emotional contagion of sadness, anger, and fear to those in need, and lower empathic concern to those in need. The results suggest that claims of clear links between affective empathy impairment and most traits comprising narcissism and borderline personality are unsubstantiated when subjected to critical test conditions. Moreover, emotional callousness, as opposed to other psychopathic traits, appears to be responsible for the proposed link between psychopathy and affective empathy impairment. A growing body of work spanning the domains of social-personality psychology, neuropsychology, clinical psychology, psychiatry, and forensic psychology has long assumed a link between affective empathy impairment and various divisive personality constructs including psychopathy, narcissism, and borderline personality However, the evidence supporting this assumed link is based mostly on the use of ambiguous measures of affective empathy and relatively weak test conditions. These limitations may in turn promote overstated conclusions regarding the link between these personality constructs and affective empathy. Although some have noted similarities among psychopathy, narcis-sism, and borderline personality (Furnham et al., they are typically treated as distinct in the literature. Psychopathy refers to a higher-order personality construct characterized by emotional callousness, egocentricity, deceptive and manipulative interpersonal style, and tendency to engagesism is characterized by an overly positive and grandiose view of the self, as well as tendency to engage in behavior that is interpersonally ex-ploitive and designed to promote admiration by others and aggrandize-Borderline personality is marked by instability in self-image, heightened emotional reactivity, and behavioral impulsivity, which may manifest in behavior that is antisocial, self-injurious, or suicidal Prominent theoretical approaches typically emphasize that psychop-athy, narcissism, and borderline personality are multifaceted. For example, psychopathy has been conceptualized as consisting …