Psychopathy and gaze cueing

Background and objectives

Psychopathic traits – and especially callous affective features – have been linked to altered processing of others’ emotional expressions, and to reduced attention to the eyes. Despite the importance of gaze cueing (i.e., the tendency to orient attention toward where someone else is looking) for social functioning, few studies have investigated relationships between psychopathic traits and gaze cueing, and whether facial emotional expression influence these relationships, obtaining mixed results. To address this gap, the present study aimed to evaluate associations between psychopathic traits and gaze cueing for emotional and neutral expressions.

Methods

65 non-clinical male participants (M_age = 27.3 years) completed two self-report measures of psychopathy and performed laboratory tasks to assess gaze-cueing for emotional vs. neutral faces and an arrow-cueing task as a comparison.

Results

Linear mixed models showed no significant associations of emotional (versus neutral) expressions, or psychopathy trait dimensions, with either gaze cueing or arrow cueing.

Limitations

Reliance on a convenience sample of non-clinical men, assessed with self-reports measures of psychopathy, and using static emotional stimuli limit the generalizability of our findings.

Conclusions

Findings suggest that psychopathic traits are not associated with individual differences in following others’ gaze to direct attention, and that there was no advantage for affective relative to neutral expressions.