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.
