| The current study was designed to determine the effect of level of psychopathy on the ability to empathize with a positive affective state in another individual as assessed through behavioral performance on a reinforcement task with increasing probability of being punished. The subjects consisted of 52 undergraduate male and female psychology students at Hofstra University. The LSRP scale was used to designate subjects in the high psychopathy group and the low psychopathy group. The procedures in the current study involved a card game of chances to win money with increasing probability of losing money. This was based on procedures used by Siegel (1978) and Newman, Patterson, and Kosson (1987). There were two initial conditions that served as baselines: a practice trial with no reinforcement and a self-reinforcement trial. The two other experimental conditions involved the positive affect of the participant induced via another individual (present or absent) receiving reward based on participant's performance. The tasks were administered via a computer through a program developed on Q-basic. There was a significant amount of variability in the button-pressing frequencies and many of the results were not significant although the trends were in the expected directions. Once outliers were removed, results showed that high psychopathy individuals had a greater frequency of button pressing than did the low psychopathy individuals to reinforce themselves, p = .008, the person they played for in the room, p < .001, and the person not present in the room, p = .045. Additional analyses were also conducted. A significant interaction, p = .03, indicated that the high psychopathy individuals did not increase their frequency of button pressing as much as the low psychopathy group when they were playing for the person not present in the room even though their average button pressing was still higher than the low psychopathy group's. Additionally, significant correlations showed that primary psychopathy accounted for a small portion of the variances of the button-pressing behaviors. The trends in the data give support to the hypotheses proposed therefore implying that high psychopathy individual are able to empathize with another person's positive affective experience. |
