Impact of psychopathy on moral judgments about causing fear and physical harm

Psychopathy is a personality variable associated with persistent immoral behaviors. Despite this, attempts to link moral reasoning deficits to psychopathic traits have yielded mixed results with many findings supporting intact moral reasoning in individuals with psychopathic traits. Abundant evidence shows that psychopathy impairs responses to others’ emotional distress. However, most studies of morality and psychopathy focus on judgments about causing others physical harm. Results of such studies may be inconsistent because physical harm is an imperfect proxy for emotional distress. No previous paradigm has explicitly separated judgments about physical harm and emotional distress and assessed how psychopathy affects each type of judgment. In three studies we found that psychopathy impairs judgments about causing others emotional distress (specifically fear) but minimally affects judgments about causing physical harm and that judgments about causing fear predict instrumental aggression ...精神病态（Psychopathy）是一种与持续性不道德行为密切相关的人格变量。尽管如此，试图将道德推理缺陷与精神病态特质相联系的研究结果却喜忧参半：诸多研究表明，具备精神病态特质的个体其道德推理能力完好无损。大量研究证据显示，精神病态会损害个体对他人情绪痛苦的反应能力。然而，当前绝大多数关于道德与精神病态的研究，均聚焦于对造成他人身体伤害的判断。此类研究的结果可能存在不一致性，因为身体伤害并不能完美地作为情绪痛苦的替代指标。此前尚无任何研究范式能够明确区分针对身体伤害与情绪痛苦的判断，并评估精神病态对这两类判断的具体影响。在三项研究中，我们发现：精神病态会削弱个体对造成他人情绪痛苦（具体为恐惧情绪）的判断能力，但对造成身体伤害的判断几乎无影响；且对造成恐惧情绪的判断能够预测工具性攻击行为……