Attentional Bias in Psychopathy: An Examination of the Emotional Dot-Probe Task in Male Jail Inmates

Numerous studies have identified differences in the identification of emotional displays between psychopaths and non-psychopaths; however, results have been equivocal regarding the nature of these differences. The present study investigated an alternative approach to examining the association between psychopathy and emotion processing by examining attentional bias to emotional faces; we used a modified dot-probe task to measure attentional bias toward emotional faces in comparison with neutral faces, among a sample of male jail inmates assessed using the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R). Results indicated a positive association between psychopathy and attention toward happy versus neutral faces, and that this association was attributable to Factor 1 of the psychopathy construct.