Annotated Bibliography: Empathy expressed in Psychopaths

Emma Anderson

Department of English, University of Arizona

English 102: Foundations Writing

Professor Gratten

October 3rd, 2022

 Annotated Bibliography:

Blair, R. J. R. (2005). Responding to the emotions of others: Dissociating forms of empathy

through the study of typical and psychiatric populations. Consciousness and Cognition,

14(4), 698–718. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2005.06.004

In the journal article “Responding to the emotions of others: dissociating forms of

empathy through the study of typical and psychiatric populations”, R.J.R Blair claims that there

are three main forms of empathy: cognitive empathy, motor empathy, and emotional empathy.

Between these three, psychopaths “show clear difficulties with a specific form of emotional

empathy but no indications of impairment with cognitive and motor empathy” (Blair 2005). This

was found through analysis and discussion of many studies on empathy which are discussed with

each other in this article and conclusions were made based on the findings.

Through his research, Blair found that both adults and children with psychopathy have

reduced autonomic responses to the sad expressions of others thus showing low signs of

emotional empathy. He concludes that psychopaths not being able to process fearful, sad, and

disgusted expressions is at the heart of the disorder. The most important conclusion he draws is

within the further thinking of his findings. Blair declares that if psychologists could “find means

to increase the empathic reaction of children with psychopathic tendencies” then there would be

an improvement in the prognosis of psychopathy. This helped with my research as it narrowed

down psychopathy to an emotional empathetic impairment rather than overall empathy, and it led

to a clear goal for psychopaths learning to express empathy.

Dadds, M. R., Hawes, D. J., Frost, A. D. J., Vassallo, S., Bunn, P., Hunter, K., & Merz, S. (2009).

Learning to ‘talk the talk’: The relationship of psychopathic traits to deficits in empathy

across childhood. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 50(5), 599–606.

https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-7610.2008.02058.x

In the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, an issue titled “Learning to ‘talk the

talk’: the relationship of psychopathic traits to deficits in empathy across childhood” (2009),

Mark Dadds et. al argue that while psychopathy is associated with less empathy across all ages

for males, no such deficits were found for females in their childhood. Their research shows that

for men as they hit puberty “they appear to learn to ‘talk the talk’ about other people’s emotions,

despite suffering severe deficits in their emotional connection (affective empathy) to others”

(Dadds et al. 2009).

They determined this through parent report data of children where they reported on levels

of empathy, callous-unemotional traits, and antisocial behavior. The psychopathic traits were

then derived from this data. A limitation of this study would be that the method was through

parent report data, which could be biased. While self-report data might have been more accurate

it is hard because children as young as three years old were used. I can use this in my research as

it shows a new and different perspective on psychopathy within genders.

Künecke, J., Mokros, A., Olderbak, S., & Wilhelm, O. (2018). Facial responsiveness of

psychopaths to the emotional expressions of others. Plos One, 13(1).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0190714

In the study “Facial responsiveness of psychopaths to the emotional expressions of

others”, Künecke and her colleagues worked to find the relationship between facial expression
recognition and psychopathy which directly correlates to emotional empathy. Consequently, they

found that their was no significant difference between the results in nonoffenders, low, and high

psychopathic offenders. This contradicts all of the other research I read and has been done on this

topic thus far. They used a psychopathy checklist and EMG to record facial muscle activity to

test their participants.

The discussion on the limitations of the study mention that the EMG might not have been

accurate and was favored towards natural expressions which may have skewed the data. This

data is surprising and is an outlier in my research. Although, it is good to see multiple

perspectives on the argument and this offers that which would fill some gaps in my research.

Palermo, G. (2012). Do Psychopaths Feel Empathy? International Journal of Offender Therapy

and Comparative Criminology, 56(8), 1147–1148.

https://doi.org/10.1177/0306624X12466648

Palermo in his article “Do Psychopaths Feel Empathy?” argued that psychopaths could

have a capacity for cognitive and emotional empathy as they are capable of recognizing the

emotions of others but they decide to disregard these emotions or exploit their awareness of the

emotions. The overall purpose of this article is to encourage further research and inquiry as it

gives a baseline and a basic understanding into psychopaths feeling empathy. This is a more

informal article but it still gives meaningful insight and recommends many other articles on the

subject which is valuable for the research process. Most interestingly, Palermo asserts that

“psychopaths may have the capacity for cognitive empathy. They may be aware of other people’s

emotions and, in mimicking them without actually feeling them, they exploit them” (Palermo
2012). While this article did not offer a lot of evidence, it offered many more resources that

helped me in my research.

Rijnders, R. J. P., Terburg, D., Bos, P. A., Kempes, M. M., & van Honk, J. (2021). Unzipping

empathy in psychopathy: Empathy and facial affect processing in psychopaths.

Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 131, 1116–1126.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2021.10.020

In “Unzipping empathy in psychopathy: Empathy and facial affect processing in

psychopaths”, Rijinders and his colleagues explore the “zipper model” of empathy in which the

zipper is the components of both cognitive and affective of empathy interacting. They found that

“psychopaths fail to automatically and deeply process emotional facial information of others they

perceive as unimportant, ultimately leaving the zipper unzipped” (Rijnders 2021). Their

justification was based on previous studies related to the study and on their prior knowledge of

empathy and psychopathy.

In the article, the purpose was to show components of empathy in psychopathy, as well as

explaining how facial affect processing substantiates empathy deficits in psychopathy. The

overall audience is other academics in the field as it encourages future research and is based on

studies done in the past. This article in my opinion is too theoretical for my research. While it

gave useful insights on a new model of empathy, it is just a theory and is not tested. They

mention a need for further research which for my purposes would be useful.