Attentional bias following frustration in youth with psychopathic traits

Abstract

The emotional deficit perspective predicts that youth with psychopathic traits are relatively unresponsive to negative affective cues and display smaller attentional biases for affective stimuli following negative experiences than youth without psychopathic traits. In contrast, because the negative preception hypothesis predicts that youth with psychopathic traits learn to tune out negative affective experiences, it predicts that such youth exhibit greater attentional biases away from sadness-related stimuli following negative experiences than youth without psychopathic traits, and that these biases increase with age. This study was designed to test the conflicting predictions of the emotional deficit perspective and the negative preception hypothesis by administering an affective dot probe task to 135 male and female detained adolescents (13.06 to 17.62 years of age) following a frustration experience. Analyses showed that age moderated the impact of psychopathic traits: as age increased, higher levels of the affective-interpersonal component of psychopathy were associated with increasing attentional bias away from both sadness-related and happiness-related stimuli. These findings provide initial evidence corroborating the negative preception hypothesis in youth with psychopathic traits.