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Individuals with psychopathic personality traits are generally thought to have difficulties in processing and experiencing emotions. These difficulties could also translate to emotionally charged social situations such as social exclusion. Being socially excluded is often experienced as stressful and unpleasant, potentially even leading to selfish or aggressive behavior–both of which are linked to certain aspects of psychopathy. The current study investigated self-report and physiological responses to social exclusion in the cyberball paradigm in a carefully selected community sample of individuals either scoring high on primary (N = 24) or secondary psychopathy traits (N = 17). Across the sample, the cyberball paradigm decreased experiences of joy and approach motivation, increased subjective anger reports, and induced changes in heart rate. In contrast, individuals scoring high on secondary psychopathy traits (Self-Centered Impulsivity group) displayed stronger physiological reactivity during a habituation phase of prolonged social exclusion than individuals scoring high on primary psychopathy traits (Fearless Dominance group), indexed by changes in skin conductance level. Moreover, a potential mismatch between self-reported and physiological arousal seemed to be only observable in individuals with high secondary psychopathy traits. Overall, the current results suggest diverging patterns of emotional processing and regulation in a social exclusion situation when comparing well-functioning individuals with varying psychopathy traits. It seemed as if individuals high on primary psychopathy traits were insensitive to contextual social cues, while individuals high on secondary psychopathy traits were more affected by the potentially threatening social situation. Cautiously transferring the current findings to forensic samples, they support the idea of moving from a behavioral understanding of the psychopathy construct to a more clinical picture with distinct cognitive and emotional processing patterns in individuals high on either primary or secondary psychopathy traits.

The stomach-derived hormone ghrelin motivates food search and stimulates food consumption, with highest plasma concentrations before a meal and lowest shortly after. However, ghrelin also appears to affect the value of non-food rewards such as interaction with rat conspecifics, and monetary rewards in humans. The present pre-registered study investigated how nutritional state and ghrelin concentrations are related to the subjective and neural responses to social and non-social rewards. In a cross-over feed-and-fast design, 67 healthy volunteers (20 women) underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in a hungry state and after a meal with repeated plasma ghrelin measurements. In task 1, participants received social rewards in the form of approving expert feedback, or non-social computer reward. In task 2, participants rated the pleasantness of compliments and neutral statements. Nutritional state and ghrelin concentrations did not affect the response to social reward in task 1. In contrast, ventromedial prefrontal cortical activation to non-social rewards was reduced when the meal strongly suppressed ghrelin. In task 2, fasting increased activation in the right ventral striatum during all statements, but ghrelin concentrations were neither associated with brain activation nor with experienced pleasantness. Complementary Bayesian analyses provided moderate evidence for a lack of correlation between ghrelin concentrations and behavioral and neural responses to social rewards, but moderate evidence for an association between ghrelin and non-social rewards. This suggests that ghrelin’s influence may be restricted to non-social rewards. Social rewards implemented via social recognition and affirmation may be too abstract and complex to be susceptible to ghrelin’s influence. In contrast, the non-social reward was associated with the expectation of a material object that was handed out after the experiment. This may indicate that ghrelin might be involved in anticipatory rather than consummatory phases of reward.