The Dark Empath: Characterising dark traits in the presence of empathy

In 2021, Dr Heym and Prof Sumich introduced a novel construct to the personality field, namely the ‘Dark Empath’, which diverts from our traditional understanding of psychopathy and is differentially associated with general personality and a range of adverse outcomes related to internalising and externalising psychopathology. The paper was invited for and published in the 40th Anniversary special edition of Personality and Individual Differences – one of the most widely read journals within the field. The study has impacted lay and academic conceptualisations of this personality cluster and led to a new research stream within the field.

On the back of this research, we have published a similar study looking at Dark traits and emotional intelligence based on some discussion points raised in the initial study (Fino, et al. 2023), established an international collaboration to replicate and extend the initial findings (Dark Empath II, in prep), received funding for a PhD project examining the Dark Empath across a programme of studies (started Oct 2022), established a third year Dissertation Project lab on the Dark Empath where we engage in ongoing data collection so students can study differences in the established profiles across a wide range of outcomes (e.g., trauma, aggression, addiction, face processing, attachment).

We anticipate a stream of studies emerging from this and the data contributing towards a large baseline database for which we develop an automatic algorithm to enable future researchers to more easily classify the profile within smaller datasets. The initial paper has been cited 25 times to date and has been discussed in mainstream psychology outlets such as Psychology Today. Our The Conversation article about the Dark Empath, is one of the highest read articles at NTU with >700k reads, and this work has also generated more widespread independent media attention (e.g., YouTube >6.5 million views).