Empathy and Morality by Heidi L. Maibom

Author:Heidi L. Maibom
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-09-14T04:00:00+00:00

Empathy and Moral Judgments in Psychopathy

Returning to the consideration of moral deficits in psychopathy, the fact that psychopathy impairs the recognition of others’ fear—for example, fearful facial expressions—may be particularly important to consider because responses to expressions like these have been strongly linked to empathic concern, defined as a concerned or sympathetic response to another’s distress (de Waal, 2008). It has been suggested that the ability to recognize another’s distress is critical for the experience of empathic concern (Nichols, 2001). This is compatible with data that fearful emotional facial expressions elicit empathic concern and the desire to help from people who perceive them, even subliminally (Marsh & Ambady, 2007). Data on emotion recognition in psychopaths suggest that this fundamental empathy mechanism is impaired in psychopaths. What is this basis of this mechanism? There is not yet a consensus on how emotional facial expressions are recognized, but clearly the parallels between psychopathic deficits in emotion recognition and emotional experience are hard to miss. The one emotion that psychopaths clearly seem not to feel strongly—fear—is the emotion that they have the most difficulty recognizing in others. That the experience and recognition of emotions are linked has previously been observed across a number of emotions, including fear (Buchanan, Bibas, & Adolphs, 2010). This suggests that, in response to others’ fear, people typically experience a low-level form of empathy sometimes termedemotional contagion, which is the ability to be affected by and share the emotional state of another (de Waal,2009). It has been suggested that we exploit this low level emotional contagion in order to recognize emotions expressed by other people (Goldman & Sripada, 2005). Impaired empathic responding to others’ fear may be the source of psychopaths’ fear recognition deficits and, by extension, their deficits in empathic concern. This empathic breakdown appears to render others’ expressions of fear literally meaningless in individuals with psychopathic traits.

(p.152) Here a potential link between empathic deficits and moral judgments in psychopathy also emerges. It will be recalled that deficits in moral judgment most reliably occur in psychopathy when the task highlights or manipulates the distress of victims. And, when various forms of victim distress are compared, the strongest moral judgment deficits are observed for fear (Marsh & Cardinale, 2012). Perhaps psychopaths’ moral responses to victims’ fear are impaired the same way their responses to fear expressed in the face or voice are impaired: their own muted capacity for fear leaves them unable to recognize or understand the victim’s fear and thereby formulate the appropriate concerned reaction to it. So, for example, in studies assessing the moral/conventional distinction, the distress of potential victims, whether explicitly stated (e.g., “. . . and the victim cries”) or requiring inference on the respondent’s part (How would a victim react to being hit or pushed off a swing?) are presumed to drive the average respondent’s judgment that the actions are not acceptable because they cause distress. This is also the reason the actions are viewed as impermissible and not dependent on social rules. Psychopathic

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