Understanding empathy deficits and emotion dysregulation in psychopathy: The mediating role of alexithymia.

Psychopathy is a severe personality disorder marked by a wide range of emotional deficits, including a lack of empathy, emotion dysregulation, and alexithymia. Previous research has largely examined these emotional impairments in isolation, ignoring their influence on each other. Thus, we examined the concurrent interrelationship between emotional impairments in psychopathy, with a particular focus on the mediating role of alexithymia. Using path analyses with cross-sectional data from a community sample (N = 315) and a forensic sample (N = 50), our results yielded a statistically significant mediating effect of alexithymia on the relationship between psychopathy and empathy (community and forensic) and between psychopathy and emotion dysregulation (community). Moreover, replacing psychopathy with its three dimensions (i.e., meanness, disinhibition, and boldness) in the community sample revealed that boldness may function as an adaptive trait, with lower levels of alexithymia counteracting deficits in empathy and emotion dysregulation. Overall, our findings indicate that psychopathic individuals' limited understanding of their own emotions contributes to their lack of empathy and emotion dysregulation. This underscores the potential benefits of improving emotional awareness in the treatment of individuals with psychopathy.

Putting the Vicious Cycle to the Test: Evidence for the Cognitive Behavioral Model of Persistent Somatic Symptoms From an Online Study.

OBJECTIVE: In clinical practice, persistent somatic symptoms are regularly explained using a cognitive-behavioral model (CBM). In the CBM, predisposing, perpetuating, and precipitating factors are assumed to interact and to cause the onset and endurance of somatic symptoms. However, these models are rarely investigated in their entirety. METHODS: We conducted an online survey during the COVID-19 pandemic. A total of 2114 participants from the general German population completed questionnaires that measured different factors of the CBM. We used state negative affectivity and neuroticism as predisposing factors, fear of a COVID-19 infection as the precipitating factor, and somatic symptoms, misinterpretation of bodily symptoms, attention allocation to bodily symptoms, and health anxiety as perpetuating factors. Moreover, we added safety and avoidance behavior as end points to the model. We conducted a psychological network analysis to exploratively study the relationships between the model's different factors and tested the assumptions of the CBM by evaluating a structural equation model (SEM) that incorporated all factors of the model. RESULTS: Network analyses revealed clustering in our data: Health anxiety and different cognitive factors are closely related, whereas somatic symptoms and state negative affectivity are strongly associated. Our SEM showed adequate fit. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings from an exploratory and a confirmatory approach give empirical support for the CBM, suggesting it as a suitable model to explain bodily symptoms in the general population and to possibly guide clinical practice. The network model additionally indicates the necessity to apply an individualized CBM for patients, depending on a preponderance of either persistent somatic symptoms or health concerns.

Investigating measurement invariance of the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire-8 (ERQ-8) across 29 countries.

The widely used Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ) measures the habitual use of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression. Recently, a more economical 8-item version of the ERQ was proposed that showed good model fit. We assessed whether the latent constructs of the ERQ-8 are generalizable across different countries and cultures. To this end, we used data from the COVIDiSTRESS survey and investigated measurement invariance of the ERQ-8 in a large sample that included 11,288 individuals from 29 countries with diverse cultural backgrounds. Our analyses revealed configural and metric invariance of the ERQ-8 in 14 countries. The results suggest that emotion regulation strategies may not readily converge across all cultures. This underscores the importance of testing measurement invariance before interpreting observed differences and similarities between countries. Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12144-022-04220-6.