Mistakes that harm others: A neurocognitive investigation of social performance monitoring and psychopathic traits

Psychopathic traits are associated with reduced empathy, lack of concern for others and a tendency for externalisation of blame, which are important motivating factors for monitoring our own actions with negative consequences for others. Those with high levels of psychopathic traits may therefore engage in reduced performance monitoring in a social responsibility context than those with low levels. To investigate this, healthy adults scoring low or high on psychopathic traits (N=23 each) performed the error-responsibility task, a social variant of the Flanker task, in two contexts: they were led to believe their mistakes either resulted in non-harmful consequence (soft sound) or harmful consequence (loud, aversive sound) for a confederate. Error-related event-related potentials in the form of the error-related negativity (ERN), the early error positivity (Pe) and the late Pe were recorded as electrophysiological correlates of performance monitoring and analysed with linear mixed...Show morePsychopathic traits are associated with reduced empathy, lack of concern for others and a tendency for externalisation of blame, which are important motivating factors for monitoring our own actions with negative consequences for others. Those with high levels of psychopathic traits may therefore engage in reduced performance monitoring in a social responsibility context than those with low levels. To investigate this, healthy adults scoring low or high on psychopathic traits (N=23 each) performed the error-responsibility task, a social variant of the Flanker task, in two contexts: they were led to believe their mistakes either resulted in non-harmful consequence (soft sound) or harmful consequence (loud, aversive sound) for a confederate. Error-related event-related potentials in the form of the error-related negativity (ERN), the early error positivity (Pe) and the late Pe were recorded as electrophysiological correlates of performance monitoring and analysed with linear mixed effect models. The study hypothesised that those scoring high on psychopathic traits would show reduced ERN amplitudes and differentiate less between the harmful versus non-harmful context than low scorers. As expected, ERN amplitudes were reduced for high scores in comparison to low scorers; context, however, did not affect any electrophysiological measures. Early and late Pe as well as behavioural measures were generally unaffected by psychopathic traits. These results indicate those scoring high on psychopathic traits engage in less performance monitoring in social responsibility contexts than low scorers, although further research is required to explore mediating factors such as motivation and examine whether this differs to a non-social context.Show less

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Mistakes that harm others: A neurocognitive investigation of social performance monitoring and psychopathic traits