Distress Tolerance and Psychopathy: The Role of Emotional Endurance in a Seemingly “Emotionless” Personality

The purposes of this project was to assess how distress tolerance and psychopathy traits were related. We hypothesized that people with more psychopathy traits would have lower empathy for others and would be better at tolerating negative emotions. Additionally, we hypothesized that distress tolerance would moderate the relationship between psychopathy and criminal behavior, such that people with more psychopathy traits would engage in criminal behavior only when they were unable to manage negative emotional states well.

Study 1 was administered entirely online, while study 2 was administered in person. Both datasets contain college participant responses to the Basic Empathy Scale for Adults (subscales include Affective Empathy and Cognitive Empathy; Carre et al., 2013), a modified version of the Self-Report Psychopathy Scale-III (SRP-III; Callous Affect, Erratic Lifestyle, and Interpersonal Manipulation; a fourth subscale [Criminal Tendencies] was treated as it's own unique scale, not included in total SRP-III scores; Mahmut et al., 2011), and Distress Tolerance Scale (Absorption, Appraisal, Regulation, and Tolerance; Simons & Gaher, 2005). Measure items were formatted in a 5-point Likert scale, with higher scores in each measure representing more empathy, better distress tolerance, and more psychopathy traits. Study 2 replicated the design from study one, and includes responses from the Emotional Images Tolerance task (EIT; Veillieux et al., 2019), a computer task measuring behavioral patterns of distress tolerance. In the EIT, participants view a variety of positive, negative, and neutral emotion-evoking images on a screen. They are instructed to press one key to indicate when they first start experiencing feelings of distress or discomfort and another key to indicate if that distress becomes so overwhelming that they no longer want to view the image (i.e., "escaping" an image). Two types of variables were calculated for this measure: count variables (the total number of images that participants pressed one or both keys for) and reaction time variables (calculating the average time between when the image was first presented and when the participant pressed a key, as well as the time between pressing the first and second key, if applicable).

Results indicated that empathy was negatively correlated with psychopathy, as predicted. Self-reported distress tolerance was not meaningfully correlated with psychopathy in either study. However, in the behavioral distress tolerance measure in study 2, people with more psychopathy traits indicated they were distressed less often, but were able to tolerate distress for longer when it did occur. The hypothesized moderation model was not supported. However, in an exploratory analysis, we found that the relationship between psychopathy and distress tolerance was moderated by criminal behavior, suggesting that the more people engaged in criminal activity, the better they were at enduring negative emotions.