In the I of the beholder: an attempt to capture the implicit self-concept regarding psychopathy.

This article explores the implicit self-concept pertaining to psychopathy. Two online studies showed inconsistent results, with Study 1 (n = 243) suggesting that psychopathy is linked to an implicit self-concept marked by low empathy and Study 2 (n = 230) implying no such relationship. In a sample of offenders and community controls (Study 3a, n = 166), higher scores on the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) were related to an implicit self-concept of being less rather than more antisocial, and the implicit self-concept showed incremental validity compared to the explicit self-concept. The retesting of an offender subsample (Study 3b, n = 47) yielded no evidence for temporal stability or convergent validity. The implicit self-concept of highly psychopathic individuals thus appears to vary, depending on the social context. Future studies should replicate these results in different samples, using additional external correlates.

Explicit measures for emotional congruence with children are related to sexual interests in a male community sample, but not implicit measures.

This study sought to disentangle several phenotypic correlates of pedophilic sexual interests, such as emotional congruence with children and lack of empathy. We utilized Implicit Association Tests and self-report questionnaires for emotional congruence with children and analyzed the psychometric properties of these measures. Further, we analyzed the associations between these measures and self-reported pedophilic sexual interests and empathy. The sample consisted of 110 adult community males (prevalence of sexual interest in children at least to some extent: 5.5%) with or without child-related jobs (43.6% vs. 56.4%) recruited online in the general population. Overall, we found equivocal parameters for reliability of the implicit and explicit measures of emotional congruence with children (α = 0.29 to 0.76). The self-reported emotional congruence with children was only weakly linked to the implicit positive evaluations of children (r = 0.170, p = 0.039), not linked to empathy except for distress in social interactions (r = 0.199, p = 0.019), and moderately linked to deviant sexual interests in children (r = 0.321 to 0.404, p < 0.001), especially in men working with children (R2 = 0.04, p = 0.027). Further studies are warranted to expand the sample to the offender population and explore the more complex network of constructs related to pedophilia.