Abstract
The present study (N = 212; 150 females) examined the relationships between the Dark Triad, empathy, and emotion recognition in a cross-cultural sample. The Dark Triad, especially psychopathy, impeded cognitive empathy, which highlights their indifference towards others’ emotional states. Further, the Dark Triad and primary psychopathy, but not secondary psychopathy, hampered emotion recognition, which was measured using multi-modal stimuli. We discuss how measures of psychopathy assess the construct differently, as well as how the relationship between psychopathy and emotion recognition is complicated. Finally, we found that those high on the Dark Triad spectrum were worse at recognizing the emotions of female actors on the Geneva Emotion Recognition Test.
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Notes
At a power of .08, an effect size of .04, and a significance level of .01, a sample size of 60 is sufficient for each sex.
The sexes were dummy coded as Female = 1, Male = 2. Women scored higher than men on empathy and emotion recognition.
The nationalities were dummy coded as: Indians = 1, Americans = 2, Others = 3.
Non-Indian participants (including Americans) were significantly better at overall emotion recognition, F(2, 209) = 6.34, p < .01, as well as recognition of female actors’ emotions, F(2, 209) = 15.48, p < .001 as compared to Indians.
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We thank Ahuti Das and Juhi Vajpayee for setting the foundations for this work.
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PURPOSE: To study the relationship between personality and emotion recognition.
WHO IS CONDUCTING THIS STUDY: This study is being conducted by Arathy Puthillam, Research Assistant at the Department of Psychology, Monk Prayogshala (ar@monkprayogshala.in), under the supervision of Sampada Karandikar, Senior Research Assistant at Monk Prayogshala (ssk@monkprayogshala.in).
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Puthillam, A., Karandikar, S. & Kapoor, H. I see how you feel: How the dark triad recognizes emotions. Curr Psychol 40, 3966–3973 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-019-00359-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-019-00359-x