Schedule of Events | Symposia

EMOTIONAL PROCESSING IN COLDHEARTED FEMALES: AN ERP PSYCHOPATHY STUDY

Poster Session D - Monday, March 31, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Ingrid Lopez¹ (ingridglopezz@gmail.com), Yuhan Sun¹, Valerie Vengerov¹, Jill Grose-Fifer^1,2; ¹John Jay College, CUNY, ²The Graduate Center, CUNY

Psychopathy research has largely focused on males, and traits like coldheartedness have been understudied. To address these gaps, we investigated how coldheartedness in undergraduate women influences event-related potentials (ERPs) to emotional faces. We conducted a secondary analysis of data from 30 female participants categorized into high (n = 15) and low (n = 15) coldheartedness groups based on scores from the Psychopathic Personality Inventory-Revised (PPI-R). Participants viewed fearful, happy, and sad facial expressions in two tasks: passive viewing and emotion upregulation. We measured LPP amplitudes at six electrode sites and used a mixed ANOVA for analysis. We found a significant Emotion x Coldheartedness Group interaction. Coldhearted women exhibited larger LPP amplitudes for fearful faces compared to the low coldheartedness group, suggesting heightened attention or arousal. In contrast, they demonstrated reduced LPP amplitudes for happy and sad faces, indicating blunted emotional reactivity. Additionally, LPP amplitudes were task-dependent, with larger LPP during upregulation in earlier but not later windows. This suggests difficulties in sustaining upregulation. Our findings suggest that although coldheartedness in women is linked to blunted emotional processing for happy and sad faces, we found enhanced processing of fearful faces. The latter might reflect a compensatory mechanism to overcome difficulties in recognizing fearful expressions. Alternatively, it may indicate a heightened interest in fear stimuli. Further research is necessary to understand if these patterns are gender-specific and to differentiate between possible explanations for enhanced LPPs to fearful faces.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotional responding