The relationship between the Dark Tetrad and a two-dimensional view of empathy

Abstract

Although a disturbance in empathy has been related to all personality traits comprising the Dark Tetrad (i.e. Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, sadism), the relationship between different aspects of empathy and these dark traits measured jointly has not been empirically scrutinised. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to examine the associations between the Dark Tetrad, the two-dimensional (cognitive vs affective) model of empathy, and the ability to recognize emotions. Participants (N = 576; 250 males) for this online study were recruited using the snowball sampling method via social networking sites. Results revealed that all personality traits were inversely related to both affective and cognitive empathy, except for a positive correlation between narcissism and cognitive empathy. The regression analyses showed that the unique aspects of the Dark Triad negatively predicted affective empathy, whereas only Machiavellianism (negatively) and narcissism (positively) predicted cognitive empathy. Although both psychopathy and sadism were inversely correlated with the performance in the emotion recognition task, only sadism remained as a significant negative predictor once the shared variance was accounted for. The findings established different empathic profiles of each dark trait, thus supporting the construct of the Dark Tetrad as a set of overlapping, yet distinctive traits.