Psychopathy and Fear Response, Recognition, and Acceptability

This answers the question: What is the relationship between psychopathy and the ability to recognize fear? A lot of times when you hear the word “psychopathy,” we think of antisocial personality disorder, which is a diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). There is a lot of overlap between these two constructs, but they're not exactly the same thing. Usually the way we think of psychopathy is that everybody who has psychopathy would qualify for a diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder, or at least the vast majority would, but not everybody who has antisocial personality disorder would qualify as having psychopathy. We see a number of characteristics associated with psychopathy and many of these we also see with antisocial personality disorder. A few of the characteristics with psychopathy would be a lack of empathy, narcissism (in particular grandiosity), impulsivity, irresponsibility, callousness, a superficial charm, an ability and a desire to manipulate other people, and violating social norms.

Marsh, A. A., & Cardinale, E. M. (2012). Psychopathy and fear: Specific impairments in judging behaviors that frighten others. Emotion, 12(5), 892-898. doi:10.1037/a0026260