Abstract
Narcissistic Personality Disorder has been linked to a lack of empathy and a disrupted recognition of facial emotional expressions (Marissen, Deen, & Franken, 2012). To further investigate the link between narcissism and categorization of facial expressions, the performance and visual strategies in facial expression categorization of 20 healthy subjects were assessed using Bubbles (Gosselin & Schyns, 2001) and a separate expression categorization task involving fully-visible faces. The Bubbles task consisted in presenting sparse versions of emotional faces created by sampling facial information at random spatial locations and at five non-overlapping spatial frequency bands. Narcissism levels were evaluated using the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI; Raskin & Hall, 1979). Each participant performed two categorization tasks with 4 facial expressions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness). NPI scores correlated positively with the number of Bubbles needed to maintain performance at 65% (r = 0.4634, p <0.05) and with reaction times in the task involving full faces (r = 0.4977, p <0.05). Classification images (CI) revealing what visual information correlated with participants accuracy were constructed separately for the most and less narcissistic subjects (z-scores higher than 0.5 or lower than -0.5) by performing a multiple linear regression on the bubbles locations and accuracy. The results shows that CIs for fear differ across groups (Zcrit = 3.36, p <0.05; corrected for multiple comparisons). Both groups use the mouth region but differ on which eye they use: narcissistic subjects using the left one. Our results are congruent with the alteration observed with clinical subjects in the performance at recognizing facial expressions (Marissen, Deen, & Franken, 2011). Furthermore, we show that in a non-clinical sample, the variations in performance are coupled with a different lateralisation bias in the eye utilisation during the processing of the fearful expression.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2014