People with psychopathic traits may experience fear as pleasure
Mar 10th 2026
A new Biological Psychology study finds people with elevated psychopathic traits can show stronger physiological arousal to fear but interpret that arousal as positive, supporting a shift from a fear deficit view to an interpretation-based account.
- Study in Biological Psychology by Hofmann, Mokros, and Schneider tested 119 adults (69% female, mean age 35) who watched first-person fear, excitement, and neutral videos while ECG tracked heart rate and they rated their emotions.
- The findings support the Fear Enjoyment Hypothesis that psychopathy may involve interpreting fear-related arousal as positive rather than lacking fear.
- Participants with higher core psychopathy traits rated fear-inducing videos as less negative and more positive than those with lower scores.
- Those same participants showed increased heart rate to fear videos, often more than to excitement videos.
- In people with higher primary psychopathy, higher heart rate predicted more positive appraisals of scary clips, while the opposite pattern held for low-psychopathy participants.
- Limitations include a mostly female, non-clinical sample and reliance on heart rate and self-report, which limits generalizability to forensic populations.