Trust and distrust: the perception of trustworthiness of faces in psychopathic and non-psychopathic offenders

Psychopathy is a disorder linked to impairments in social cognition. Individuals with psychopathy and comparison individuals, as defined by the Hare Psychopathy Checklist Revised (Hare, 1991), completed a task requiring complex social judgments. Participants viewed a series of male faces, and made judgments concerning how trustworthy they considered the person pictured to be and the degree to which each face was displaying specific emotions. Judgments of trustworthiness did not differ between the individuals with psychopathy and the comparison individuals. Trustworthiness judgments of the faces negatively correlated with, in particular, ratings of anger in the faces for both groups of participants. The data are discussed with reference to the neural systems, including the amygdala, considered to be involved in the mediation of task performance and also neuro-cognitive models of psychopathy.