I would express some caution and look forward to seeing the results of the study. There is some potential for this to be disastrous. It not a particularly desireable goal to enhance the ability of potentially psychopathic individuals to understand emotional cues or recognize these in other individuals.
Some historical background is probably helpful. In the UK, there is a long tradition of treatment and rehabilitation of offenders. In fact, forensic psychotherapy is a subspecialty of psychiatry in which you can train. It focuses on the psychoanalytic treatment of violent and sexually violent offenders. Could you imagine such a thing in the US! These programs typically do not focus on treating dissocial individuals though and tend to select out individuals who make good analytic candidates.
In the US, treatment has been anthema since the 1970s when the conservative "law and order" turn that filled our prisons with black and brown bodies took hold and little emphasis on rehabilitation of offenders existed. We went from talk of prison abolition in the 1970s, the having the most incarcerated population in the world by the 1990s and the current backlash against prison overcrowding, the criminalization of the mentally ill, "the new jim crow" and the prison-industrial complex writ large.
Some of this however was due to a therapeutic nihilism that set in due to failed treatment programs in the 1960s and 70s. The most famous were the Oak Ridge Study in Canada which involved nudity, LSD, and treating schizophrenic and psychopathic individuals together. The psychopaths were released as cured, and had an increased risk of recividism following this particularly bizarre treatment. In the US, we had the Concord Prison Experiment, which used psilocybin-facilitated group psychotherapy under the direction of one Timothy Leary. The original study suggested a reduced recidivism in those so treated, but this was not found to the be case in follow up studies. psychedelic research would then fall out of favor for another 40 years. Failure of very specific types of intervention that would be considered highly unorthodox by today's standards became "treatment doesn't work." This is where the current nihilism for treating offenders has come from (and when we talk of ASPD, which is a specious construct in itself, we are chiefly talking about offenders who are convicted since this is the population who is studied and gets treatment).
In the US, there has been some interest in treatment of offenders more recently, and the more commonly used approaches are CBT focused at criminogenic thinking, mindfulness based approaches, and DBT which are used (if sparingly so) in certain correctional settings in the US. In the VA system I have seen MRT (moral reconation therapy) being used. elsewhere in the world cognitive analytic therapy has been used.
Personally, I would say that treatment of antisocials in private practice or community settings is a fool's errand, and once you get non-payment for your bills most therapists will learn the error of their ways. I did a psychologytoday search to find in my area the vast majority of psychologists listing "antisocial personality" as something they treat are the ones from the local diploma mill programs. OTOH, there may be mileage to treating these individuals in correctional settings, re-entry programs, and on probation, as part of a highly structured program that incentivizes participation and includes wraparound services to reduce recidivism.
