There has been an argument on psychopath's cognitive empathy for a long time. some researchers have said psychopaths are deficient in cognitive empathy, while others have suggested they have superior ability for cognitive empathy. Because the vast majority of psychopathy research have dealt with male forensic samples, little is known about gender difference of psychopathy and female psychopathy. Therefore, this study attempts to figure out psychopaths' cognitive empathy ability and characteristic gender difference which they have on it. In order to do so, college students are asked to fill out the Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy Scale. From the participants, a group of 46 people with psychopathic tendency and normal control of 54 people are selected. Both groups' empathic accuracies are examined with the examination paradigm of Ickes and then compared. The results were as follows, First, the normal control group demonstrated higher empathic accuracy than the psychopathic tendency group did. Second, the female group also demonstrated higher empathic accuracy than the male group did. Third, significant interaction effects between psychopathic tendency and gender were identified. Finally, on the basis of the above results, the implications and limitations of this research were discussed and future research direction were proposed.
This study investigated gender differences in contribution of antisocial personality and affective empathy to psychopathy. Two hundred fifteen college students (male, 118; female,97) completed three measures including the PPI-R(Psychopathic Personality Inventory-Revised), the PAI-ANT(Personality Assessment Inventory-Antisocial Features), and the EETS (Emotional Empathy Tendency Scale). According to the results, the mean scores of PPI-R and EETS in male group were higher than in female group. Antisocial features were positively associated with psychopathy in both male and female groups and negatively with affective empathy. Males showed that the scores of affective empathy were negatively associated with those of antisocial features and psychopath. Females showed that the scores of affective empathy were negatively associated with those of antisocial personality and psychopathy but the correlation was significant only with the scores of antisocial behavior (ANT-A). To scrutinize the differences between male and female groups, the scores on the PAI and EETS were compared between 30% upper and 30% lower groups based on the scores of the PPI-R. According to the results, the upper group of the scores on the PPI had higher scores on the PAI and lower scores on the EETS. The differences of the scores on the EETS between high-psychopathy and low-Psychopathy groups were bigger in male group than in female group. Explanations and implications of the results were discussed and the directions of the future studies were suggested.
