Psychopathy, aggression, and emotion processing of violent imagery in women

Emotion processing is pivotal during development and deficient processing of certain emotions disrupts normal socialization increasing risk for violent behavior later in life. Psychopathy has been linked to both of these phenomena in men; however, the study of such relations has been relatively neglected in women. In the present study, 88 collegiate women completed measures of psychopathy, aggression, and a lexical-decision-task (LDT) assessing the processing of affective words. Participants were primed by viewing images of violence or prosocial behavior immediately before completing the LDT. Psychopathy was unrelated to emotion processing in the positive image condition, however, following exposure to violent imagery, emotional detachment (F1), but not social deviance (F2) predicted decreased processing of sadness words. This deficit mediated the relationship between F1 and proactive aggression. Results suggest that F1 may relate to deficient activation of sadness in response to inciting events and, therefore, may inform the risk of proactive aggression in emotionally detached women.