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Introduction: Impairments in facial affect recognition have been linked to the development of various disorders. The aim of the current work is to conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis of studies examining whether this ability is impaired in males with psychopathy or antisocial traits, when compared to healthy individuals. Method: Studies were eligible for inclusion if they compared facial affect recognition in either a) psychopathic vs. antisocial males, b) psychopathic vs. healthy controls and c) antisocial vs. healthy controls. Primary outcomes were group differences in overall emotion recognition, fear recognition, and sadness recognition. Secondary outcomes were differences in recognition of disgust, happiness, surprise and anger. Results: Fifteen papers comprising 214 psychopathic males, 491 antisocial males and 386 healthy community controls were identified. In psychopathy, limited evidence suggested impairments in fear (k=2), sadness (k=1) and surprise (k=1) recognition relative to healthy individuals, but overall affect recognition ability was not affected (k=2). Findings were inconclusive for antisocial (k=4-6), although impairments in surprise (k=4) and disgust (k=5) recognition were observed. Psychopathic and antisocial samples did not differ in their ability to detect sadness (k=4), but psychopaths were less able to recognise happiness (k=4) and surprise (k=3). Conclusion: Limited evidence suggests psychopathic and antisocial personality traits are associated with small to moderate deficits in specific aspects of emotion recognition. However considerable heterogeneity was identified, and study quality was often poor. Adequately powered studies using validated assessment measures, rater masking and a priori public registration of hypotheses and methods are required.

The relationship between politics and ontology has long been a troubled one for geography. More recently, the emergence of affect theory has complicated things even further by introducing a new set of frequently vague concepts into the already cluttered theoretical field of critical geography. This dissertation collects six articles that endeavor to develop the groundwork for establishing a continuum between affect, politics, and ontology. Specifically, it argues that not only is affect a politically rich area for approaching ontology, but, further, it is particularly well suited for addressing difference and radical politics. It proceeds by developing a series of concepts that animate a politically driven ontology of difference, namely: A) becoming and bordering in the context of border studies; B) a flat ontology as a fix for the debilitating transcendence of scale theory; C) an animation of a Nollywood as a 'site' based upon the flat ontological critique of scale; D) a politics of confusion that isolates the workings of affect in relation to the State and in direct action; E) a psycho-pragmatism that checks studies of affect and nonrepresentational theory against the analytic determinism that attends their developing methodologies; and F) the notions of fidelity and affinity as they get articulated through to the State and political subjectivity.

The focus of this thesis was the hedonic value of stimuli, which is more commonly known as pleasure or positive affect. First, the scientific meaning of hedonic value was dissected. Second, a classification identifying core causes of positive affect was created. The classification was derived from specific positive moments reported by individuals throughout a day (collected through experience sampling methodology). Seventeen triggers of positive affect were identified, which were extracted from the data rather than originating from theory. Third, affective influences on reflexive-like motor responses were investigated using an approach-avoidance task. Contrary to previous studies, approach reaction times were not speeded by highly affective stimuli. Instead, a novel non-emotional effect was found on reaction times, which could directly explain the current results, and those of previous studies, in non-affective terms. Fourth, the propagation of hedonic reactivity from pleasurable to neutral stimuli was investigated. Contrary to expectations, the evaluative conditioning procedure utilised did not exhibit a phenomenon called blocking. Instead, 'liking' spread non-selectively to all stimuli co-occurring with the source hedonic stimulus. Fifth, the positive effect of pleasure on goal-directed motivation was established: participants were found to press a food trigger harder for highly palatable snacks compared to bland snacks, even though participants were not informed about the hidden measurement of forces. Additionally, the impact of hedonic value on actual food intake was quantified with best-fit equations that predicted consumption at both the group and individual level. In the last study, hedonic habituation, or the inhibitory effect of pleasure on itself, was demonstrated: eating pleasant snacks, as compared to bland ones, reduced the hedonic ratings of test foods that were consumed afterwards. Finally, these inputs and outputs of hedonics were integrated into a model specifying principal roles of pleasure in human behaviour. This pleasure-incentive model explains the effects of pleasure on incentive motivation, and makes important predictions about the mechanisms of pathological conditions such as over-eating and drug addiction.