Psychopathic Traits Partly Explained the Reduced Vagal Tone of Batterers Coping with Acute Stress

ABSTRACT

The importance of psychopathy for perpetration and maintenance of intimate partner violence (IPV) has been speculated. However, less is known about whether psychopathy would explain a psychophysiological response (cardiorespiratory and electrodermal) of IPV perpetrators dealing with acute stressors. Therefore, we first aimed to assess whether IPV perpetrators (n = 58) showed differences in psychopathic traits and their psychophysiological response to acute stress compared to nonviolent men (n = 53). Second, we examined in both groups whether psychopathic traits would explain a psychophysiological response when dealing with acute laboratory stress. Our results revealed that IPV perpetrators differed from controls in all the psychopathic traits, scoring higher on all psychopathy scales. Moreover, IPV perpetrators showed lower total respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) levels than controls. Finally, regarding high total psychopathy scores, factor 1 and affective facet entailed low RSA levels in both groups and scoring high in lifestyle facet of factor 2 explained reduced heart rate (HR) changes in response to acute stress in both groups. All these results highlighted that a reduced vagal tone could be characteristic of psychopathic traits, especially for the affective facet of psychopathy. Therefore, it would be important to incorporate biological markers in combination with psychological measurements to clearly diagnose IPV perpetrators before starting intervention programs. This would increase our ability to improve IPV intervention therapeutic targets and reduce risk of recidivism.

KEYWORDS:

• Cardiorespiratory
• electrodermal
• intimate partner violence
• psychopathy
• vagal tone

Acknowledgments

This project was supported by The Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (MCIN), The Spanish State Research Agency (AEI), The Valencian Government of Science, The Prometeo Program for research groups of excellence of the Ministry of Innovation, Universities, Science and Digital Society of the Generalitat Valenciana.

Disclosure statement

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

Ethical standards and informed consent

The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki of 1974, as revised in 2000, and followed the ethical standards of the Ethics Committee on human experimentation of the University of Valencia (code: H1515749368278). All participants voluntarily agreed to participate, were informed about the nature of the study, and gave their written informed consent before the study began.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by The Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (MCIN) and The Spanish State Research Agency (AEI) grant number PID2022-142287OA-I00; The Valencian Government of Science, grant number GV/2021/161; The Prometeo Program for research groups of excellence of the Ministry of Innovation, Universities, Science and Digital Society of the Generalitat Valenciana, grant number CIPROM/2021/46, and the University of Valencia, grant number UV-INV-AE-2641711.