Psychopathic traits and fear: do they feel it, or enjoy it?

Do people with psychopathic traits feel fear? The newest evidence says they probably do, and some of them seem to enjoy it. In a study in Psychological Reports, a team including Angela Book of Brock University showed volunteers a roller coaster ride and a horror game clip, then asked how each one felt. Those who scored higher on psychopathic traits called the horror clip less distressing and more exciting. The authors tie the first half of that pattern to a sense of invincibility. The second half was explained in only one of the two studies. Below we set out what the research shows, how large the effect really is, and where we think the gaps are.

What the new study found about psychopathic traits and fear

Volunteers watched both clips in random order. After each one they rated nine words for feeling afraid and nine for feeling thrilled, on a scale from 1 to 5. Across both studies, higher psychopathic trait scores went with two reactions to the horror clip: less negative feeling and more positive feeling.

The team then tested a possible reason. Invincibility belief was measured with 20 imagined scenarios, such as meeting an angry dog, where people estimated the chance they would walk away unharmed. People with higher trait scores gave themselves better odds. Those better odds statistically accounted for why they felt less distressed by the horror clip.

We only enjoy fear when we don’t feel like we are in danger.

That explains the calm. It does not explain the thrill. In Study 1, invincibility did not account for the extra excitement at all. In Study 2 it did partly account for the excitement, which the authors call unexpected and say needs more research. The path from invincibility to excitement sat right at the edge of significance (p = .064 in the paper’s table), though the overall indirect effect cleared the bar. Boredom proneness, the other candidate and a Study 2 measure only, did not explain the excitement.

Do psychopaths feel fear? How the old idea came apart

For a long time the tidy explanation for reckless behaviour in psychopathy was that these people feel no fear. In 2016, Sylco Hoppenbrouwers and colleagues checked that claim in Psychological Bulletin. They traced the theories of psychopathy back to 1806 and found only one that built fear into an explanation. Their meta-analysis found that people high in psychopathy are worse at automatically spotting and responding to threat. The evidence that they consciously feel less fear was much weaker, as the APA’s summary of the paper puts it.

That left a gap, and the fear enjoyment hypothesis moved into it. Since 2020 a run of studies has tested it, one piece at a time.

1. 2016
   Meta-analysis. The trouble looks like detecting threat, not feeling it. Psychological Bulletin.
2. 2020
   Direct test. 140 students rated a horror game clip. Higher psychopathy meant less negative and more positive ratings. A second study with 150 students found the same positive lean when judging fearful faces. Journal of Personality.
3. 2024
   Questionnaire study. Self-reported enjoyment of fear tracked with psychopathic traits. Journal of Personality, as covered by PsyPost.
4. 2026
   Heart rate. People with elevated traits showed raised heart rates during scary clips, and a faster pulse predicted more positive ratings among those high in primary traits. Biological Psychology.
5. Oct 2026
   This study. Invincibility explains the calm in both studies, and the thrill in one. Psychological Reports.

Why fear and excitement feel the same in the body

Fear and excitement share their physical symptoms: a pounding heart, quick breathing, tight muscles. What separates them is the label the mind attaches afterwards. This is the idea underneath the whole hypothesis. If the arousal is real and the label is flexible, then enjoying fear does not require feeling nothing. It requires reading the same signals differently.

How strong is the link between psychopathic traits and fear enjoyment?

The two studies tell a slightly different story. In Study 1, the correlation between psychopathy scores and positive reactions to the horror clip was about 0.26 to 0.32. For reduced negative reactions it was only about 0.07 to 0.10, and in the online sample that link was not statistically significant. In Study 2 the two sides were close: 0.22 for positive reactions and 0.21 for feeling less afraid. By the usual rule of thumb, 0.1 is small, 0.3 medium and 0.5 large.

Squaring a correlation gives the share of the differences between people that it accounts for. That is our own arithmetic, applied to the reported ranges.

What this study cannot tell us

• It cannot show cause. The data are questionnaires taken at one moment, so feeling invincible may or may not produce feeling less afraid.
• The predictions were not registered in advance. The paper states that the hypotheses were not preregistered.
• It is about traits, not diagnoses. Volunteers were students and online workers. The findings describe variation in the general population, not people with a clinical diagnosis or people in prison.
• A video clip is not danger. Three minutes of a horror game stands in for real threat, and each condition used a single clip. According to PsyPost, the team plans virtual reality scenarios next.
• Calm may not mean confident. The authors raise this themselves: earlier research suggests people high in these traits can miss threats, so lower distress could reflect not noticing rather than feeling untouchable.
• One result was a surprise. In Study 2, accounting for boredom made the link between impulsive-antisocial traits and enjoying the clip stronger, not weaker. The authors say more research is needed to tell whether that effect is real or spurious.

What we make of it: Jotted Paper’s take

Everything above is reported work. Everything below is our own thinking, and we mark each piece as an assumption so you can weigh it as one.

We came in asking whether these people feel fear. On the evidence so far, the heart races. The label seems to be what changes, and why it changes is the part nobody has pinned down.

Aaron MarshallAaron Marshall is the writer behind Jotted Paper. He writes about people and the ideas that shape them, from the mind and money to books, culture and history. More about Aaron