'Our assumption of a lack of empathy in dark traits was blown out the water'

What were the skies like when you were young?

As in the skies to reach? I grew up in East Germany, and I went through the fall of the Wall as a 10-year-old. The skies were sometimes dark grey, and then we suddenly experienced the West – lots of neon lights, very loud. There were so many influences in terms of understanding more about people and why they do the things they do, why they believe the things they believe, and how attitudes can change so quickly.

I think this is when I thought, 'I'd like to become a psychologist'. I was intrigued by Sherlock Holmes too, how he can just predict things and behaviours. I was very young… most of my peers didn't really know what they wanted to do, but for me it was always between architecture and psychology. I love building designs, and I love psychology.

And of course, psychology didn't really exist there and then… I had to persuade the teachers to put on a new Psychology module, first as an extracurricular activity in the afternoon, and then it got integrated into the curriculum.

You've done nothing to dissuade me from asking that seemingly random question! When did you come to the UK?

2001. I applied to do a psychology degree in Germany, in Berlin, and then also applied to do it in the UK. I got in quicker in the UK. So, I came to the University of Nottingham, did my undergraduate there, then my master's, then my PhD. I worked there for a few years as a Research Coordinator and Teaching Associate, and in 2014, I moved over to NTU for a Lectureship.

You've obviously been very fond of Nottingham.

It could have been Berlin, could have been Nottingham. I got the Nottingham scholarship. I got my undergraduate studentship fees paid for by the Department of Education back then. And then I got a studentship to do my Master's and PhD, the ESRC one plus three studentship. So I just stayed on. It's in front of you; you've got to take that opportunity.

Then I got a job as a research coordinator in the brain and body centre at the University of Nottingham. I worked there for three years, as a part of a large European project where we invited 14-year-olds in for a whole lot of psychometric assessments, cognitive assessments, clinical assessments, and brain scans.

That was a huge project that is still running, actually… they followed them up at 16, 18, now as adults.

For my PhD, I looked at psychopathy, in particular: Eysenck's model of psychoticism, and how that linked to psychopathy and the affective deficits we see in it. Maybe this came from the Sherlock Holmes thing: I was always quite interested in aggressive behaviour and that callousness you see in some offenders and murderers.

So that's been a thread right through to your work to now?

I've expanded into other areas as well. I also look at general mental health. For my PhD, I had two ideas. One was psychopathy, and going into the forensic aspects. The other was more clinical – the role of culture and nutrition in depression. But I couldn't find a supervisor. So that was it, the road ahead.

What don't people understand about that area – misconceptions around the 'Dark Triad' and the sorts of things you're studying?

Well, I think most people see psychopaths as what we hear in the media, what we see on Netflix. I tend to study traits and the sub-clinical level in the general population. If you have elevated traits that are linked to psychopathy – callous and unemotional traits, for example, how does that relate to your propensity to aggress, or to engage in antisocial behaviours? 

Sometimes I also look at the brighter side – do these traits give you success in some areas of life? We generally assume that if these personality traits survive in the population, there must be some cost and benefit model… in business, or politics, can it be adaptive if you are worrying less about other people's feelings? Do you just power through to achieve some goals? Indirect aggression, manipulation, and coercive control over others doesn't always necessarily imply criminal behaviour.

One of your areas is domestic violence. Is that a new project?

I've been looking at this for four or five years…

I initially got involved in a project with a third sector organisation that supports children from a domestic violence background. They got in touch because they wanted to understand why children who have been exposed to these traumatic experiences engage in aggressive or externalising behaviours. 

When the pandemic hit, the organisation suddenly had different priorities… they wanted our help in finding ways to deliver support for these children online. And a lot of younger children came through, but their interventions were more geared towards older kids.

So we looked at a lot of data they had routinely collected and nobody had looked at before. About 23 per cent of these children engaged in aggressive behaviour, mostly within the family household towards siblings or mothers, but sometimes also peers or teachers. We saw a lot of other emotional problems, internalising problems, as well. The more they had witnessed and directly suffered emotional, psychological and physical abuse, the more likely they were to show both internalising and externalising problems, as well as risk to self and to others.

The worse the trauma, the more psychopathological problems we might see in those kids?

Yes, and that's not surprising. The Skuse and Matthew trauma recovery model is a good one here. It's based on Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and the assumption is that the worse the trauma, the more basic needs you need to address before you can actually tackle the trauma. 

There is this whole notion of reinstating safety and structure, addressing challenging behaviours, then attachment difficulties, gaining trust again between caregiver and child, building those basic things up before you reach that cognitive threshold of being able to process a trauma. 

If you tackle the trauma too soon, you risk re-traumatising the child. Integrating that model has helped this organisation to target its interventions based on the needs that they're seeing. And we've helped them to improve their assessment process in terms of having automated scoring sheets and giving normative data for different age groups to compare against.

So that work is quite grounded in the local community.

The organisation we've been working with, Living Without Abuse, is based in Leicester. Meanwhile, I've also been connecting with other local domestic violence and abuse organisations in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire… most recently, IMARA in Nottingham, supporting children with a sexual abuse background. 

I believe in individual differences – each child is unique, and each might need a unique and targeted approach to help them. Some problems are better helped by some interventions or therapies than others. The gold standard is often trauma-focused CBT, but that assumes the child can cognitively process the trauma and is able to communicate in some way. 

With those with kids, where you have really high trauma impact, they might not be at that stage. You might need to work differently with them initially.

Any link with your virtual reality work there?

Yes, IMARA are interested in using VR as a tool to support their Art Therapy, so I have been advising on this and would like to initiate a project to evaluate its usefulness and acceptability. So this builds on my other ongoing VR work.

One of the reasons I'm crossing over these different bridges is because a lot of the time, I'm working with Gray's Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory as a neurobiological model explaining approach and avoidance motivation – why we do things or why we avoid things. 

I can think in terms of callous and unemotional traits; how children respond to reward; how they respond to aversive cues and conditions; how we respond to uncertainty. And I can look at that across psychopathy, anxiety, and depression. It's my underlying model.

In my virtual reality work, I was particularly interested in the lack of fear. During my PhD, I had been presenting stimuli via the computer and measuring people's startle response. But a picture on a computer screen is not really that emotionally evoking. Virtual Reality came along as a tool that might help us to induce and measure emotions that are much more realistic, and we started developing Virtual Reality exposure therapy for social anxiety. 

We found that a couple of sessions could significantly reduce public speaking anxiety. Then we introduced biofeedback – we simply asked them to try to modulate their physiological measures, without giving any strategies. We find that if you don't have that feedback, you can still modify your response; it's just a little more erratic. Now we're introducing relaxation training up front –breathing techniques, muscle attention, and engaging with the audience.

So the VR is a tool to make things more immersive and realistic, and then we can apply that to the physiological response to threatening stimuli in a range of contexts – I have a PhD student who wants to develop a protocol to use VR as an intervention tool in borderline personality disorder, and another interested in extending our VRET for social anxiety work into schools. 

We know social anxiety manifests early, and often people don't seek help for many years. Our tool is quite useful because it's self-regulated and self-guided, so they can use it at home or in schools and libraries.

I like the fact that some of your research with VR is about design features in the environment, in collaboration with the School of Architecture Design. That takes you back to your potential alternative path…

I got there in the end! I had to laugh when I started that work, I was so excited to combine my love of people and buildings. We started looking at the role of biophilic designs in improving mental health and wellbeing, bringing nature indoors and integrating it into architectural designs. It calms people down, makes them more creative and inspired, and facilitates better recovery during stressful periods.

I come from Germany… houseplants are everywhere. When I came to the UK, it was one of the strangest things that people don't tend to have many plants in their houses. In the university, what we want to see in the corridors, in the communal spaces and the kitchen, is some nature or nature analogues.

I have to ask about the 'Cascade of chaos' project, just because I love that as a title.

That was in collaboration with a colleague from Arizona. We ran a project across the US, Mexico, Brazil, Sweden and the UK, looking at childhood determinants of dark traits and aggressive behaviour.

We asked adults to retrospectively report on childhood resource instability, low maternal sensitivity, and earlier adversarial schemas, leading to a fast life history strategy. That's an evolutionary theory around resource allocation in survival and reproductive success as a function of environmental harshness and instability. 

With psychopathy, for example, we assume that a fast-paced life history allocates resources to early maturation, higher mating and reproduction rates (rather than parental effort), ensuring reproduction of genes within the evolutionary line under harsh conditions.

Then there follows behavioural dysregulation, development of a dark personality, and interpersonal aggression. What we tested for is the order of this 'cascade', whether swapping things around would make a model with higher predictive power. What we found reinforced the notion that adversarial backgrounds and experiences during childhood might lead to issues in terms of behavioural dysregulation, and then to the development of particular traits.  

A fast-paced life history does sound quite cool! Do you think that's a bit of an issue with studying something that is fundamentally antisocial – the whole 'dark triad' stuff, and the idea that we don't know how many successful psychopaths there are out there – it's quite an alluring psychological concept.

People like it. Dark traits get a lot of media attention, particularly after Killing Eve came out. Same with our 'dark empath'… people just jump on it. It is quite paradigm-shifting. It's a very novel construct. Our assumption was always that people with these dark traits lack empathy for others, and that's why they are engaging in these behaviours. 

But the literature was dotted all over the place… conflicting findings, or sometimes it wasn't quite clear what type of empathy was involved. I always thought these people need cognitive empathy, to manipulate, deceive and control others, but they might be lacking that affective feeling.

So we had a sample of almost 1,000 people, we did the latent profile analysis, and found four groups, two with low dark traits – Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy – and two groups with high dark traits. But what's key is the two high dark trait profiles separated: one group with low empathy, and one with higher levels than typical. Our assumption that there's always a lack of empathy in dark traits was blown out of the water.

That dark empath group was about 20 per cent of people. Sometimes in your social environment, or even in workplaces, you meet people who are behaving in ways that you feel uncomfortable with, and who might give you a bit of an eerie feeling. Sometimes it's good to just listen to your intuition at that point.