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The researchers made these observations by testing affective priming in thirty people resident in a high security institution in England, 15 of whom were psychopathic and 15 of whom weren't, based on their scores on an established measure of psychopathy.
It's not that psychopathic people have some kind of general language or priming problem because the researchers found psychopaths showed normal semantic priming. Similar to affective priming, semantic priming is when we're quicker to categorise a word when it follows a preceding word that had a related meaning.
The researchers said their observations fit with the idea that "...individuals with psychopathy do represent the lexical meaning of emotions, but they do not experience their affective value; they 'know the words but not the music'".
Blair, K.S., Richell, R.A., Mitchell, D.G.V., Leonard, A., Morton, J. & Blair, R.J.R. (2006). They know the words, but not the music: Affective and semantic priming in individuals with psychopathy. Biological Psychology, 73, 114-123.
Link to complete PDF download of Hervey Cleckley's classic text on psychopathy - 'The Mask of Sanity'. Thanks to Vaughan at MindHacks for the heads up.
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