Distraction from cognitive processing by emotional pictures: Preliminary evidence for an association with interactions between psychopathy-related traits in a non-clinical sample

In individuals with psychopathy, the presence of emotional stimuli implicates a relatively weak distraction from performing cognitive tasks. This study assessed whether there is also a relationship between specific combinations of psychopathy-related traits present in the general population and sensitivity of cognitive processing to distraction by emotional stimuli. The participants (N = 80) were screened for these traits using the Psychopathic Personality Inventory and performed a classification task in the presence of pictures with a low or high arousal value. Emotional distraction (ED) was operationalized in terms of the response time on trials with high- versus low-arousal pictures. The interaction between affective-interpersonal and impulsive-antisocial traits was significantly associated with ED. This interaction reflected the fact that the association between affective-interpersonal traits (specifically fearlessness) and magnitude of ED was negative for individuals with relatively weak impulsive-antisocial traits (specifically carefree nonplanfulness) but positive for those with relatively strong impulsive-antisocial traits. These results suggest significant differences in vulnerability to ED as a function of the strength of specific combinations of psychopathy-related traits in non-clinical samples.