Browsing by Author "Efferson, Leah"
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Item Empathy-relevant processing in psychopathic offenders(University of Alabama Libraries, 2019) Efferson, Leah; Glenn, Andrea L.; University of Alabama TuscaloosaThe purpose of this study was to examine the influence of psychopathic traits on empathy-relevant processes and two types of empathy. Previous research has suggested that empathy requires that a person be able to identify emotional content, identify emotions of others, experience one’s own emotions, identify and describe one’s emotions, and figure out what another person is feeling and thinking. Empathy-relevant processes have been examined in separate studies, however, no studies have examined all of these constructs at once in relation to psychopathy. An exploratory goal was to examine gender differences in the relationship between psychopathic traits and empathy-relevant processes and types of empathy. One hundred inmates from the Tuscaloosa county jail participated in the study and half the sample was female. They completed the Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version along with an emotional processing task, two theory of mind tasks, empathy, alexithymia, and emotional experiences questionnaires. Controlling for demographic variables, psychopathic traits predicted slower reaction times to emotional words, increased difficulty identifying feelings, and experiencing more anger but did not predict self-reports of emotional nor cognitive empathy, theory of mind, or difficulty describing feelings. Gender moderated the relationship between psychopathic traits and reaction time to emotional words in that this relationship was positive for females but not significant for males. Interventions might focus on helping and motivating psychopathic individuals to identify their feelings and how to identify, pay attention to, and respond to emotional content. Future studies should further probe the lack of significant association between the PCL:SV and self-reported emotional empathy, which other studies have similarly failed to observe.Item Psychopathic traits, vengeance, and motivations to punish in criminal scenarios(University of Alabama Libraries, 2017) Efferson, Leah; Glenn, Andrea L.; University of Alabama TuscaloosaThe purpose of this study was to examine the influence of psychopathic traits on punishment allocations and the motivations those higher in psychopathy use in their decisions to punish others. A previous study found that individuals higher in psychopathic traits were less retributive when punishing a murderer (Aharoni, Weintraub, & Fridlund, 2007). However, those higher in psychopathy have also been found to be more vengeful after a personal mistreatment (Book & Quinsey, 2004) and this emotional vengeance has been associated with more retributive punishments and increased support for capital punishment (McKee & Feather, 2008). Therefore it is unclear if those higher in psychopathy would punish more retributively than those lower in these traits. I examined the relationship between psychopathy and punishment allocations for a variety of crimes, and explored the influence of emotional vengeance on the relationship between psychopathic traits and punishment allocations. Participants provided prison-sentencing recommendations for a variety of criminal acts. Individuals scoring higher in psychopathy allocated less harsh punishments than those scoring lower in psychopathy but these effects were small. Individuals scoring higher in psychopathy also scored higher on vengeance, but vengeance did not moderate the relationship between psychopathic traits and punishments. Individuals higher in psychopathy reported being slightly less influenced by all types of motivations for punishment than those lower in psychopathy. Overall, more research is needed to examine what motivates those higher in psychopathy to punish others in criminal scenarios.