No feelings for me, no feelings for you : A meta-analysis on alexithymia and empathy in psychopathy

Abstract

Psychopathy is characterized by extensive emotional impairments. However, the current empirical literature on empathy and alexithymia in psychopathy provides heterogeneous results.Random-effects models were performed on studies examining the association between psychopathy and the Interpersonal Reactivity Index as well as the Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20. In total, 72 articles providing 716 effect sizes and representing 15,016 participants were included in the analyses. Furthermore, differences among psychopathy factors and the role of potential moderators were assessed.We found negative relationships between psychopathy and empathy (r = −0.31), empathic concern (r = −0.29), perspective taking (r = −0.22), and personal distress (r = −0.14). In addition, our results yielded positive relationships between psychopathy and alexithymia (r = 0.21), difficulty describing feelings (r = 0.20), difficulty identifying feelings (r = 0.16), and externally-oriented thinking (r = 0.15). The results varied by psychopathy factors, and some were moderated by gender.These findings suggest that psychopathy is associated with deficits in various empathic processes as well as with an impaired perception of one's own emotions. Moreover, the results highlight the necessity to investigate these deficits not only across overall constructs, but also across their factors to further improve the understanding of aberrant emotionality in psychopathy.