Effects of psychopathic traits on preferential recall and recognition of emotionally evocative photos

ABSTRACT

Psychopathic traits are associated with impaired emotional processing. The present study examines the potential association between psychopathic traits and memory for emotional stimuli. Although a significant body of research suggests that memory is heightened for emotional stimuli, it is unclear how psychopathic traits may disrupt this process. Eighty-two male jail inmates completed an emotional memory task as well as portions of a standardised memory assessment. Psychopathic traits were not associated with the ability to freely recall images of positive, negative or neutral valence that participants had seen more than 15 min prior; psychopathic traits were also not associated with the ability to recognise these previously viewed images when shown them again. Exploratory analyses indicated trends toward reduced accuracy in recognising both positive and negative, but not neutral, emotional stimuli in individuals with higher levels of interpersonal and affective traits of psychopathy. As expected, psychopathy was unrelated to non-emotion-related memory functioning in auditory and visual domains as measured by the Wechsler Memory Scales 4th Edition. Overall, these results do not support the hypothesis that psychopathic traits significantly interfere with memory for emotional stimuli.

KEYWORDS:

• Psychopathy
• memory
• recognition
• recall
• emotion

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge and thank the Tuscaloosa County Jail as well as many research assistants for their invaluable assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings from this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.