Disentangling the relation between psychopathy and emotion recognition ability: A key to reduced workplace aggression?

Abstract Research on emotion recognition ability (ERA) and psychopathy produces divergent outcomes: While some studies find ERA deficits in persons with psychopathy, others find heightened emotional abilities. In this study, we seek to disentangle these inconclusive findings by employing different measures of psychopathy, analyzing them globally as well as on a facet level, and drawing on a newly developed nonlinguistic measure of ERA. We hypothesize that ERA moderates the relation between psychopathy facets representing disinhibition and meanness and counterproductive work behavior directed toward individuals (CWB-I). In a multi-source design with a sample of 477 working adults with at least one coworker rating, we found no relations between the psychopathy facets and nonlinguistic ERA. We did find a moderation effect indicating that individuals high in psychopathy with lower ERA exhibited more CWB-I. Our results suggest that psychopathy does not inherently affect ERA; rather, further cognitive and affective processes need to be taken into account. ERA's mitigating effect might help explain why not all individuals high in psychopathy behave aggressively.