Frontiers in Psychiatry (Nov 2013)
Dimensional assessment of psychopathy and relationship with physiological response to empathic images in juvenile offenders
Abstract
Objective: Many psychophysiological studies investigate whether psychopaths present low levels of electrodermal activity (EDA). However, despite evidence that varying degrees of psychopathy are normally distributed in the population, there is a paucity of EDA studies evaluating dimensionally. Moreover, although lack of empathy is a cornerstone of psychopathy, there has been a lack of studies using pictures of empathic emotional content to assess psycophysiological responses. Method: We studied a population of young male delinquents (n=30) from a detention center, using the Psychopathy Checklist Revised (PCL-R) to determine if higher levels of psychopathy were related to lesser degrees of EDA in response to emotion-eliciting pictures of empathic content. Results: There were significant correlations (p
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