In his classic monograph
The Mask of Sanity (
Cleckley, 1976), Harvey Cleckley highlighted the indicators of positive psychological functioning in psychopaths. With regard to anxiety he wrote: “those called psychopaths are very sharply characterized by the lack of anxiety (remorse, uneasy anticipation, apprehensive scrupulousness, the sense of being under stress or strain)” (
Cleckley, 1976, p. 257). The empirical findings concerning psychopathy and anxiety are somewhat mixed, however (
Hare, 2003,
Harpur et al., 1989,
Schmitt and Newman, 1999,
Skeem et al., 2007). The callous and interpersonal, emotional detachment traits of psychopathy that are also sometimes linked to the label “primary psychopathy” have rather consistently been shown to be associated with lower levels of anxiety, compared to the impulsive and antisocial traits of psychopathy, which are more positively associated with anxiety (
Frick et al., 1999,
Lykken, 1957,
Skeem et al., 2007,
Skeem et al., 2011,
Widiger, 2006).