Affective functioning in female offenders : an analysis of the relationship between the level of psychopathy and affective and cognitive empathy
Year: 2014
Type: article
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: There is an acknowledged lack of research directly investigating the role of gender differences in affective functioning among Polish psychopathic offenders.The authors have responded by producing a study that attempts to advance the understanding of affective deficits in female psychopathy.Its aim is to examine the relationship between psychopathy and empathy in a group of incarcerated women.A multifaceted construct of empathy consisting of two components -emotional and cognitive -was applied in the study.The sample was composed of fifty-two female offenders aged from twenty to fifty-four from prisons in Kraków (Nowa Huta) and Kielce.The research tools deployed were Hare's Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) and the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI).The statistical analysis that was conducted confirmed the existence of a statistically significant negative relationship between psychopathy and empathy.It was found that psychopathic personality was related to the emotional -but not the cognitive -aspect of empathy, that the traits associated with the interpersonal-affective factors of psychopathy coexisted with low levels of personal distress, that -as interpreted by the independent t test -the presence of certain psychopathic features caused differences in the level of empathy and that psychopathic groups of offenders could be distinguished from non-psychopathic ones by their general empathy level and by their scores on the Personal Distress Sub-Scale of the IRI.
Authors: Banasik, Marlena, Gierowski, Józef, Stachura, Małgorzata
Language: English
Subfield: Clinical Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7026654568