From Standardized Stimuli to Social Media: Dark Tetrad Traits in Valence Ratings of Emotional Pictures

This study explores whether the dark tetrad (DT) of personality predicts individual differences in the valence evaluation of emotional and social emotional stimuli. The DT traits—narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism—are associated with distinct patterns of cognitive and emotional processing (e.g. Jonason & Krause, 2013; Wertag et al., 2023). Previous research reported associations between DT traits and evaluative preferences across various emotional domains. For example, psychopathy has been shown to predict music and film preferences (Bowes et al., 2018), narcissism has been linked to preferences for violent motives and paintings, and psychopathy has been identified as a predictor of preferences for religious motives (Tucaković & Marković, 2021). Furthermore, Thomas and Egan (2022) demonstrated that all DT traits were associated with more positive emotional reactions to violent stimuli. Notably, sadism was related not only to increased positive emotional responding to violent stimuli but also to a lack of negative emotions in response to such content (Thomas & Egan, 2022). Consistent with these findings, Wertag and collegues (2023) provided evidence for a substantial association between DT traits and valence ratings of emotional images. Specifically, narcissism predicted more positive evaluations of positive images, Machiavellianism influenced the speed of valence ratings, and higher levels of sadism were linked to more positive evaluations of negative images (Wertag et al., 2023). The authors concluded that deficits in affective processing appear to be more pronounced in sadism compared to other dark personality traits, whereas Machiavellianism may be associated with advantages in cognitive processing. Taken together, existing findings point toward meaningful associations between DT traits and emotional evaluation; however, the results are partly inconsistent and vary across stimulus types and outcome measures. Investigations of personality driven differences in the evaluation of emotional stimuli, remain scarce. Therefore, a systematic study is essential to deepen our understanding of its underlying mechanisms and to inform the design of future research involving emotional stimuli. The present study extends prior research demonstrating evaluative differences associated with other personality factors (Ohmann et al., 2025) as well as differences in visual attention patterns related to sadism (Meyer et al., 2025). 2 In addition to standardized emotional database images, this study includes social emotional stimuli derived from social networking sites (SNS). These stimuli were created by AI. Social networking sites (SNSs) have become ubiquitous in modern daily life (Pew Research Center, 2021). Including SNS posts therefore allows for a more ecologically valid assessment of emotional evaluation and enables the examination of whether DT-related differences generalize from controlled laboratory stimuli to socially relevant emotional content. The present study examines the predictive power of DT traits on valence ratings of emotional and social emotional images (SNS). Based on prior findings, we expect higher DT scores to be associated with more positive evaluations of negatively valenced stimuli (see Thomas & Egan, 2022; Wertag et al., 2023). Exploratorily, we assume that these effects also generalize to SNS stimuli. In addition, we investigate whether valence ratings and the influence of DT traits differ between standardized emotional database stimuli and social emotional SNS posts. To date, no studies have directly compared these stimulus categories in the context of the DT. While stronger DT-related effects for social emotional stimuli may be theoretically plausible due to reduced empathy, no directional hypotheses are specified due to the exploratory nature of this analysis. Finally, we examine the incremental validity of DT traits by testing whether they explain additional variance in valence ratings beyond conceptually related constructs previously associated with evaluative differences. These constructs include empathy (or lack thereof), impulsivity, aggression, BIS/BAS, and psychological capital. They were selected based on prior evidence of their relevance to emotional reactivity and attentional allocation (e.g., Cowan et al., 2014; Aluja et al., 2015; Gantiva et al., 2014) as well as their theoretical and empirical links to the DT (e.g., Pajevic et al., 2018; Duan et al., 2021). In summary, this study examines: (1) the main effects of DT traits on valence ratings of emotional and social emotional images, (2) differences in evaluation and DT-related effects between emotional and social emotional images, and (3) the incremental predictive validity of DT traits beyond related personality constructs.