ArticleSocial cognitive and affective neuroscience2024
Psychopathic callousness and perspective taking in pain processing: an ERP study.
Article in Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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3 citing papers in PubMed, 10 citations in OpenAlex.
- Individual differences in the empathic experience of pain: An EEG and machine learning approach.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Pain sensitivity mediates the relationship between empathy for pain and psychopathic traits.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Article
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5 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
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Abstract
Psychopathy is a multifaceted personality disorder characterized by distinct affective/interpersonal traits, including callousness-unemotionality/meanness, which are often considered the hallmarks of empathic deficits. It has been posited that the processing of others' pain could play an important role in empathy capabilities. This study aimed to investigate the influence of perspective taking on electrocortical responses during pain processing in relation to psychopathic callousness. The late positive potential (LPP) -a well-established electrophysiological indicator of sustained attention to motivationally significant stimuli- was measured while 100 female undergraduates viewed images depicting bodily injuries while adopting an imagine-self or an imagine-other perspective. Callousness factor scores -computed as regression-based component scores from EFA on three relevant self-report measures of this dimension- predicted reduced LPP amplitudes to pain pictures under the imagine-other (but not imagine-self) perspective, even after controlling for other LPP conditions. This result suggests that high-callous individuals exhibit diminished brain responsiveness to others' distress, potentially contributing to the empathic deficits observed in psychopathy. This finding highlights the usefulness of the LPP and perspective taking in studies on pain processing to refine our understanding of the low empathy characteristics of psychopathy in biobehavioral terms.
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