Do psychopathic traits impair autobiographical memory for emotional life experiences?

ABSTRACT

We examined the relationship between psychopathic traits and autobiographical memory (AM) for emotional life experiences in both a community (Study 1) and forensic sample (Study 2). Considering that psychopathy is traditionally linked to an impairment in the processing of emotion, we hypothesised an emotional deficit of AM in individuals with high levels of psychopathic traits. Participants in both samples were asked to recall an emotionally charged event, and were then administered the Psychopathic Personality Inventory-Revised, the Flashbulb Memory Checklist, and the Autobiographical Memory Characteristics Questionnaire. A linguistic content analysis was applied to inmates’ memory transcriptions (Study 2). Only in the forensic sample, was self-centered impulsivity found to be positively related to the linguistic use of mood terms, and negatively related to the linguistic use of cognitive labels. Furthermore, high levels of fearless dominance were associated to a low emotional attribution to the event and its implications, and highly confident and coherent memory. Lastly, coldheartedness was the psychopathic trait most associated to a deficit in emotional AM, in terms of a lack of hedonic labels and contextual details, a poor emotional evaluation of the event and its implications. The current results encourage further investigation concerning AM in psychopathic traits.

KEYWORDS:

• Autobiographical memory
• psychopathic traits
• emotional memories
• phenomenological memories

View correction statement:

Correction

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the help of Fabiola Ciminale, Claudia Fiorentino, Francesca Guglielmi, Maria Lomuscio, Alessia Narracci, Cinzia Palmirotta, Francesco Parisi, Dayana Pascali, Alessia Ricchiuti, Laura Sardone, and Emanuela Soleti for their collaboration in collecting the data and scoring the protocols.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Tiziana Lanciano http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6533-1052

Antonietta Curci http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0932-7152

Notes

1 The choice of wholly male samples was based on the literature providing a higher rate of psychopathy in men than in women (Wynn, Høiseth, & Pettersen, 2012). Although literature shows that psychopathy also exists in women, it occurs more frequently and is typically associated with aggression in men rather than in women (Rys & Bear, 1997).

2 The moderate reliability value for the Specificity index may be due to the different scaling of items loading the Specificity factor: The category of Time was dichotomous, the category of other significant details ranged from 0 to the maximum for the additional details mentioned, and all other categories ranged from 0 to 2.

3 Descriptive analyses and Pearson’s correlations were also conducted separately for the two subsamples of events (positive vs. negative), and the pattern of results is roughly similar.

4 We feel we should underline some aspects concerning language ambiguity. All the dictionaries that we used for both the sentiment and emotional analysis are based on word meanings. Since each lemma can have more than one word meaning, in order to assign the correct word meaning we needed a disambiguation step. In this work, we do not adopt a disambiguation algorithm but we simply assign the most frequent sense. Word meaning frequencies were computed according to MultiSemCor (Bentivogli & Pianta, 2005).