Dataset Information

Psychopathy and Pride: Testing Lykken's Hypothesis Regarding the Implications of Fearlessness for Prosocial and Antisocial Behavior.

ABSTRACT: Despite widespread assumptions that psychopathy is associated with serious and repeated law-breaking, individuals with psychopathic personality traits do not invariably become chronic criminal offenders. As a partial explanation for this finding, Lykken (1995) ventured that a fearless temperament underlies both psychopathic traits and heroic behavior, and that heroic individuals' early exposure to effective socializing forces such as warm parenting or healthy self-esteem often fosters a characteristic adaption that tends to beget "successful" behaviors, thereby differentiating heroes from convicts. In this study, we investigate relations between psychopathy, principally its fearless dominance dimension, pride, and prosocial and antisocial behavior in a community sample (N = 339). Fearless dominance and self-centered impulsivity components of psychopathy yielded differential relations with authentic and hubristic pride (Tracy and Robins, 2004), such that fearless dominance was significantly positively correlated with both facets of pride while self-centered Impulsivity was significantly negatively correlated with authentic pride and significantly positively correlated with hubristic pride. Further, authentic pride moderated (potentiated) the relation between fearless dominance and transformational leadership, one of the two outcome measures for prosocial behavior employed in our investigation. Authentic pride did not moderate the relations between fearless dominance and either our other measure of prosocial behavior (heroism) or antisocial behavior, nor did positive parenting moderate the relations between psychopathy components and social behavior. Unexpectedly, hubristic pride significantly moderated the relation between impulsive-antisocial features and antisocial behavior in a protective manner.

SUBMITTER: Costello TH

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5827669 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Psychopathy and Pride: Testing Lykken's Hypothesis Regarding the Implications of Fearlessness for Prosocial and Antisocial Behavior.

Costello Thomas H TH Unterberger Ansley A Watts Ashley L AL Lilienfeld Scott O SO

Frontiers in psychology 20180220

Despite widespread assumptions that psychopathy is associated with serious and repeated law-breaking, individuals with psychopathic personality traits do not invariably become chronic criminal offenders. As a partial explanation for this finding, Lykken (1995) ventured that a fearless temperament underlies both psychopathic traits and heroic behavior, and that heroic individuals' early exposure to effective socializing forces such as warm parenting or healthy self-esteem often fosters a characte ...[more]

PMID: 29520247

Similar Datasets

Project description:Social rejection elicits profound feelings of distress. From an evolutionary perspective, the best way to alleviate this distress is to behave prosocially, minimizing the likelihood of further exclusion. Yet, examples ranging from the playground to the pub suggest rejection commonly elicits aggression. Opposing theoretical perspectives and discordant empirical results have left a basic question unanswered: does rejection more commonly elicit prosocial or aggressive behavior? We conducted three meta-analyses (one with studies measuring aggressive behavior; one with studies measuring prosocial behavior; and one with studies measuring both aggressive and prosocial behavior; N = 3864) to quantify: (1) the extent to which social rejection elicits prosocial or aggressive behavior and (2) potential moderating effects on these relations. Random-effects models revealed medium effects such that social rejection potentiated aggressive behavior (k = 19; d = 0.41, p < .0001) and attenuated prosocial behavior (k = 7; d = 0.59, p < .0001), an effect that remained consistent even when participants were given the option to behave prosocially or aggressively (k = 15; d = 0.71, p < .0001). These results cast doubt on the theory that rejection triggers prosocial behavior, and instead suggest it is a robust elicitor of aggression. Statement of Relevance: To our knowledge, these meta-analyses are the first to directly test whether social rejection elicits aggressive or prosocial behavior. By including a comprehensive collection of both published and unpublished research studies, and examining a wide variety of previously untested moderators, we show that social rejection robustly elicits aggressive behavior and inhibits prosocial behavior. Additionally, we demonstrate that aggressive behavior following social rejection is not simply a function of limited choices in response options. In fact, aggressive behavior was evoked even when the option to engage in prosocial behavior was provided. Furthermore, we conducted a comprehensive narrative review of the neural mechanisms underlying social rejection-elicited aggressive and prosocial behavior to supplement primary analyses. Overall, we believe that our work makes a critical theoretical contribution to the field.

Dataset Information

Psychopathy and Pride: Testing Lykken's Hypothesis Regarding the Implications of Fearlessness for Prosocial and Antisocial Behavior.

Publications

Psychopathy and Pride: Testing Lykken's Hypothesis Regarding the Implications of Fearlessness for Prosocial and Antisocial Behavior.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets