ArticleCognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience2025
Empathy in dark and vulnerable personality traits: A multimethod study from self-reported, performance-based, and electrophysiological empathy correlates.
Article in Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Borderline personality symptom severity predicts reduced mentalization and affective empathy and altered responses to fairness in the Ultimatum Game.Borderline personality disorder and emotion dysregulation · 2026Article
- Factors Contributing to Criminal Behavior in the Context of Buying-Shopping Behavior.European addiction research · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Deficits in empathic functioning are a hallmark of dark personality traits, such as psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and sadism, which form the Dark Tetrad construct (D4). The Vulnerable Dark Triad construct (VDT; borderline symptomatology, vulnerable narcissism, and secondary psychopathy) shares antagonism with the D4 but also includes emotionally vulnerable facets. Maheux-Caron et al. (2024) uncovered meaningful profiles based on D4 and VDT traits using Latent Class Analysis and found significant differences across profiles on self-reported empathy. The current study aimed to investigate differences in empathy and emotional face processing across profiles from Maheux-Caron et al.'s (2024) work-adopting a multimethod approach in which dispositional, behavioral, and electrophysiological empathy correlates were examined. An empathy task based on the Affective and Cognitive Measure of Empathy (ACME; Vachon & Lynam, 2016) was developed and preliminary construct validity data for the task are reported in the present paper. Significant differences were found across profiles on dispositional affective empathy and behavioral cognitive empathy. Although differences across profiles on electrophysiological data were not found, exploratory supplemental analyses showed associations between the personality measures of borderline and Machiavellian traits and a reduced N170 amplitude. The present study highlights how the operationalization of empathy and its related measures play a paramount role in understanding empathic functioning. Our findings support the idea that self-reported cognitive empathy measures are not valid proxies for actual empathic ability, and this should be carefully considered in research and clinical practice settings.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.