Perceiving Emotion Through the Lens of Psychopathy: A Comparison of Self-Report Measures

Psychopathy is characterized by interpersonal and affective deficits, particularly difficulties in accurately perceiving emotional cues. Although psychopathy has been extensively studied within forensic populations, there is limited research exploring psychopathy and emotion perception in non-forensic contexts, especially regarding the effectiveness of self-report measures. Addressing this gap, the present study investigated the relationship between self-reported psychopathic traits and accuracy in emotion perception. Undergraduate participants completed three self-report measures of psychopathy (SRP-SF, ICU, and EPA-SSF), followed by an emotion perception task using dynamic audio-video stimuli. Results indicated significant negative correlations between psychopathy scores and emotion perception accuracy, particularly for negative emotions such as sadness, fear, and disgust. Traits measured by the ICU consistently demonstrated the strongest predictive relationships. These findings reinforce the significance of affective dysfunction in psychopathy and support the validation of self-report measures, promoting broader and more accessible research on psychopathic traits across diverse contexts.