Empathy and emotion regulation in forensic psychiatic inpatients (DEmo)

Matthias Burghart, Daniela Mier, Jan Bulla

In this project, we investigate levels of expressed empathy and emotion regulation capacities among inpatients of a forensic psychiatry in Germany. Matched healthy controls from the general population are recruited and compared to forensic inpatients on a variety of psychological measures, including both, questionnaires and experimental paradigms. In addition, potential associations between empathy/emotion dysregulation and psychopathy, impulsivity, and alexithymia are examined. Our project comprises two parts: (1) a cross-sectional comparison, and (2) a longitudinal study that aims to determine whether treatment has a positive impact on inpatients’ level of empathy and use of adaptive emotion regulation strategies. The findings will add to our understanding of empathy and emotion dysregulation among forensic inpatients and help to improve treatment in forensic facilities.

For more information, see our preregistration: https://osf.io/x5jep/

The interrelationship between psychopathy, empathy, and emotion processing

Matthias Burghart, Alexander Sahm, Daniela Mier

Psychopathy is a severe personality disorder that is characterized by profound emotional deficits. Particularly striking is the lack of empathy. Several studies suggest that individuals with psychopathy do not only exhibit an empathy deficit, but may also show impaired emotion processing, as indicated by emotion dysregulation and alexithymia. This online study aims to assess the interrelationship between these three constructs (i.e., psychopathy, empathy, and emotion processing) by using a structural equation model. In addition, we investigate the association between empathy, emotion processing and health anxiety, because recent studies suggest a moderating role of emotion processing for the relationship between empathy and health anxiety.

For more information, see our preregistration: https://osf.io/s4jh9/

Empathy faking - The susceptibility to faking good of empathy measures (EmpMa I)

Matthias Burghart, Marta Andreatta, Daniela Mier

A lack of empathy is closely related to antisocial behavior and criminal offending. Which is why, sentencing decisions, for instance, depend in part on how much empathy an offender expresses during trial, or addressing empathy deficits is a critical component of many offender intervention programs. An accurate assessment of empathy is therefore crucial within the justice system. Yet, only little research has been conducted to date on whether – and to what extend – empathy measures are susceptible to malingering. With this project, we aim to answer the question as to how vulnerable various empathy measures (i.e., self-report, experimental, psychophysiological, and implicit) are to faking good by using a randomized double-blind design. Furthermore, we will examine whether individuals who malinger can be accurately identified with both established social desirability scales and a newly developed empathy malingering scale. Our findings will help improve the accuracy of empathy assessments, particularly in situations where individuals have an incentive to exaggerate their level of empathy.

For more information, see our preregistration: https://osf.io/4mzr5

The effect of perspective taking on empathy in relation to psychopathy (EmpMa II)

Matthias Burghart, Marta Andreatta, Daniela Mier

Empathy – the ability to experience what another person feels – is critical to the functioning of social interactions. So much so that empathizing with others in distress is an automatic process that does not require deliberate perspective taking. A deficit in this default response is associated with antisocial behavior and can be particularly observed in individuals with psychopathy. However, despite this well-established link between psychopathy and empathy deficits, it is still unclear whether psychopathic individuals lack empathy altogether or whether they merely require the activation of a more deliberate and conscious process to empathize with another person. Previous fMRI studies suggest the latter, as being instructed to imagine oneself in the situation of a distressed person seems to induce empathy at the neural level. However, whether this also occurs at a behavioral and psychophysiological level remains uncertain. With this project, we aim to answer the question whether different perspective-taking instructions (i.e., imagine-self, imagine-other, remain-objective, and no instructions) influence the experience of empathy on a behavioral and psychophysiological level in individuals with and without psychopathy. The results will shed light on the emotional deficits in psychopathy and may help improve the treatment of this severe personality disorder.

For more information, see our preregistration: https://osf.io/s5y7v

pResentation: An R package for processing presentation (neurobehavioralsystems) logfiles

Matthias Burghart* & Alexander Sahm*

Many researchers use Neurobs' presentation as their preferred software for experiment control. However, presentation stores its generated data in logfiles, which cannot be easily imported into R. Our package pResentation will change this by providing functions to not only convert logfiles into data frames, but also manipulate them beforehand.

*Equal authorship statement