DYNAMIC EXPRESSIONS & PSYCHOPATHY 1 Running head: DYNAMIC EXPRESSIONS & PSYCHOPATHY Psychopathic personality traits and the recognition of dynamic, spontaneous emotional facial expressions

The present two-part study assesses how psychopathic traits affect individuals’ ability to process naturalistically elicited, dynamic emotional facial expressions. A new stimulus set of spontaneous, dynamic facial expressions was created by filming participants as they watched emotional video clips, and then validated using the program FaceReader. Faces from this set were then viewed by a second set of study participants who identified each emotional facial expression. We then calculated the relationship between emotion recognition accuracy and psychopathic traits as measured by the Psychopathic Personality Inventory-Revised (PPI-R). A statistically significant relationship between psychopathic traits and impairments in the recognition of dynamic fear expressions was observed such that increases in psychopathy were associated with larger impairments in recognizing fear. No similar relationship was observed for amusement, disgust, sadness, or overall accuracy. Future research should focus on expanding upon the use of naturalistically elicited, dynamic emotional facial expressions to assess the relationship between psychopathy and impairments in emotion recognition. DYNAMIC EXPRESSIONS & PSYCHOPATHY 3 Psychopathic personality traits and the recognition of dynamic, spontaneous emotional facial expressions Psychopathy is a developmental disorder involving both affective-interpersonal and behavioral components. It is characterized by frequent antisocial behavior and impaired emotional responding such as shallow affect and reduced guilt and remorse (Blair, 2003). Instrumental aggression and impairments in both emotional processing and empathic responding are also characteristic of the disorder (Blair, 2006). It has been suggested that aggression and other types of maladaptive behaviors may result from an inability to recognize and respond to the social cues of others (Corden, Critchley, Skuse, & Dolan, 2006). Emotional facial expressions in particular may be especially important in moderating social behaviors. For this reason, the present research focuses on identifying a link between antisocial behavior and impairments in facial affect recognition. Prior research has shown that psychopathy is associated with impairments in facial affect recognition. Antisocial populations have demonstrated generalized impairments in facial affect recognition and processing (Woodbury-Smith et al., 2005). Psychopaths seem to have particular difficulty recognizing emotional expressions that signal distress, such as fear and sadness. A recent meta-analysis demonstrated that high levels of antisocial traits, including psychopathic traits, are associated with impaired ability to process certain emotional facial expressions, in particular, expressions of fear, and that these impairments are not attributable to task difficulty (Marsh & Blair, 2008). Some research has suggested that the fear expression in particular is important for inhibiting aggression and antisocial behavior (Blair, 2001; Marsh, Adams, & Kleck, 2005), DYNAMIC EXPRESSIONS & PSYCHOPATHY 4 which provides a possible explanation for the link between psychopathy, which is characterized by instrumental aggression and other forms of antisocial behavior, and an inability to recognize fear. An impairment in fear recognition could interfere with the normal inhibitory response that accompanies the observation of a fearful expression. This is in accordance with findings that suggest accuracy in recognizing fearful expressions predicts prosocial behavior (Marsh, Kozak, & Ambady, 2007), and it has been suggested that the fearful facial expression may be socially adaptive and serve to elicit empathy and thus inhibit aggression in the observer (Marsh, Adams, & Kleck, 2005). Psychopathic individuals demonstrate marked deficits in recognizing and processing fearful expressions, which provides a possible mechanism by which their aggressive, antisocial behavior can be explained. While extensive research has identified a robust link between antisocial behaviors and impairments in facial affect recognition, the use of primarily static and posed stimuli to test this relationship remains a serious shortcoming. Previous studies have mainly tested the ability of psychopaths to recognize posed, static, and exaggerated expressions of emotion. Most previous sets of posed expressions were created for the purpose of conveying a discrete emotion, and often contain exaggerated features and combinations of features that are not seen in the spontaneous expressions of everyday life (Naab & Russell, 2007). This creates some concern about how well findings related to the recognition of posed facial expressions would generalize to the recognition of genuine, spontaneous emotional expressions present in actual social