Category: Psychopathy

Brain scans of psychopaths reveal what they desire more than anything.

The psychopathic brain is wired to go after rewards, whatever the cost, a neuroscience study finds.

The brains of psychopaths release four times as much dopamine in response to rewards as normal people.

Imagine how much more pleasure they get from taking whatever they want.

Dr Joshua Buckholtz, the study’s lead author, said:

“Psychopaths are often thought of as cold-blooded criminals who take what they want without thinking about consequences.

We found that a hyper-reactive dopamine reward system may be the foundation for some of the most problematic behaviors associated with psychopathy, such as violent crime, recidivism and substance abuse.”

Psychopaths are also known to have a lack of fear and empathy.

But this study emphasised their strong focus on reward.

Dr David Zald, study co-author, said:

“There has been a long tradition of research on psychopathy that has focused on the lack of sensitivity to punishment and a lack of fear, but those traits are not particularly good predictors of violence or criminal behavior.

Our data is suggesting that something might be happening on the other side of things.

These individuals appear to have such a strong draw to reward — to the carrot — that it overwhelms the sense of risk or concern about the stick.”

The results come from a study in which people — some psychopaths — were given a dose of amphetamine (speed), then had their brains scanned.

The aim was to see how people’s brains reacted to the stimulant.

Dr Buckholtz explained:

“Our hypothesis was that psychopathic traits are also linked to dysfunction in dopamine reward circuitry.

Consistent with what we thought, we found people with high levels of psychopathic traits had almost four times the amount of dopamine released in response to amphetamine.”

In the second part of the study, participants had their brains scanned while getting a monetary reward for doing a task.

Again, the psychopaths showed much higher levels of brain activity in anticipation of getting the reward.

Dr Buckholtz said:

“It may be that because of these exaggerated dopamine responses, once they focus on the chance to get a reward, psychopaths are unable to alter their attention until they get what they’re after.”

The study was published in the journal Nature Neuroscience (Buckholtz et al., 2010).

There are two types of psychopath, primary and secondary — and some can be cooperative, helpful and friendly.

The two key traits of all psychopaths are being callous and unemotional.

Being callous means having a cruel disregard for others.

On top of this, psychopaths typically have difficulty responding to the emotions of others in a normal way — they also appear unemotional themselves.

However, not all psychopaths are the same.

There are two types of psychopaths — primary and secondary — according to research.

Primary psychopaths

Primary psychopaths can be cooperative, helpful and friendly.

Secondary psychopaths, though, are usually destructive, unhelpful and perform badly at work.

Ms Nora Schütte, the study’s first author, said that primary psychopaths are marked out by the trait of ‘fearless dominance’:

“People with this character trait want to get their way, have no fear of the consequences of their actions, and can withstand stress very well.”

The concept of a primary psychopath is related to the idea of a high functioning psychopath.

A high functioning psychopath is able to mask the negative aspects of their personalities in order to get what they want partly due to high IQ.

Secondary psychopaths

In comparison, secondary psychopaths have high self-centred impulsivity, she said:

“Persons with high values here lack an inner brake.

Their self-control is thus weak, and they therefore do not have any consideration for others.

They are referred to as secondary psychopaths”.

The research included 161 people asked questions about their personalities and how they interacted at work.

The results showed that of the two types of psychopath, primary psychopaths — those displaying fearless dominance — were nonetheless often seen as cooperative and helpful.

Ms Schütte said:

“But that was true only when these primary psychopaths also had marked social skills.

Above all that included skills that are generally important at work – such as the gift of making others feel well”.

Secondary psychopaths, though, really are trouble no matter how good their social skills were, Ms Schütte said:

“These persons with high values in secondary psychopathy thus really do have the postulated negative effects upon their work environment.

And to a much greater degree than when we examine both groups together.”

Professor Gerhard Blickle, the study’s co-author, said that not all psychopaths were evil — in fact many are quite the reverse:

“Even persons with marked psychopathic traits do not necessarily exhibit antisocial behavior.

Persons with a high degree of fearless dominance can even be selfless heroes in everyday life, such as life-savers, emergency physicians, or firefighters.”

Types of psychopath signs

Around one in 200 people is a psychopath.

However, many more people than that share some traits with psychopaths.

Common signs of psychopaths include:

• Narcissism
• Superficial charm
• Being disagreeable and low in conscientiousness
• Manipulative
• Lack of empathy
• Fearless dominance and impulsivity
• Focusing on rewards and ignoring consequences
• Being great at lying

The study was published in the Journal of Management (Schütte & Blickle, 2016).

Psychopaths share this quality with people who have frontal brain damage.

A lack of empathy is one of the most obvious signs of a psychopath, research finds.

People diagnosed with psychopathy tend to behave in an extremely anti-social way, with a total lack of compassion for others.

Psychopaths can appear immune to negative feelings, along with being aggressive and, sometimes, dangerous.

While psychopaths lack empathy, they are able to understand other people’s minds.

In other words, they can guess what people are thinking, but cannot guess, do not feel, or totally disregard, other people’s emotions.

This is why psychopaths are so good at manipulating people and causing harm.

One study has compared 17 people diagnosed as psychopathic with 25 others who had suffered brain damage.

They were given tests of empathy and cognitive ability.

Dr Simone Shamay-Tsoory, the study’s first author, explained the results:

“Our findings show that people who have psychopathic symptoms behave as though they are suffering frontal brain damage.”

Both people with damage to the frontal areas of their brains and psychopaths had difficulty showing empathy.

However, psychopaths scored the same as normal people on tests of what other people are thinking.

So, psychopaths are able to ‘read other people’s minds’ in the normal way that we can all guess what other people are thinking to a certain extent.

However, they are not constrained by what other people are feeling.

Dr Shamay-Tsoory said:

“Seeing as psychopathic behavior is similar to that of a person with brain damage, it could be that it could benefit from similar forms of treatment.”

There is evidence, though, that there are two types of psychopaths: primary and secondary.

Primary psychopaths can be cooperative, helpful and friendly.

Secondary psychopaths, though, are usually destructive, unhelpful and perform badly at work.

So, not all psychopaths are evil — in fact many are quite the reverse.

Professor Gerhard Blickle, who has studied psychopaths in the workplace, says:

“Even persons with marked psychopathic traits do not necessarily exhibit antisocial behavior.

Persons with a high degree of fearless dominance can even be selfless heroes in everyday life, such as life-savers, emergency physicians, or firefighters.”

The study was published in the journal Cortex (Shamay-Tsoory et al., 2010).

Workplace psychopaths lack empathy and are cool-headed and fearless.

Unlike everyone else in the workplace, psychopaths feel positive and engaged towards abusive bosses, research finds.

Bad bosses do things like invade privacy, gossip, break promises and display rudeness.

While normal people naturally find these behaviours in the workplace very stressful, psychopaths feel more positive and engaged with them.

What are known as ‘primary psychopaths’ benefit from bad bosses the most, the researchers found.

Dr Charlice Hurst, the study’s first author, explained the term:

“There are primary and secondary dimensions of psychopathy.

Both consist of high levels of antisocial behavior; however, people who score high in primary psychopathy lack empathy and are cool-headed and fearless.

They don’t react to things that cause other people to feel stressed, fearful or angry.

Secondary psychopaths are more hot-headed and impulsive.

“We found that primary psychopaths benefit under abusive supervisors.

Relative to their peers low in primary psychopathy, they felt less anger and more engagement and positive emotions under abusive supervisors.”

Workplace psychopath research

Two studies were conducted involving 419 people.

In the first, each was asked to react to profiles of different types of workplace bosses.

In the second, they reported on their real-life bosses.

In some ways, psychopaths who didn’t mind their bad bosses were enablers, Dr Hurst said:

“It may reward and retain exactly the kind of people who are likely to perpetuate abusive cultures.

Psychopaths thriving under abusive supervisors would be better positioned to get ahead of their peers.”

Dr Hurst continued:

“If they have a problem of endemic abuse, like Wells Fargo — where former employees have reported that managers used tactics designed to induce fear and shame in order to achieve unrealistic sales goals — and upper-level managers are either unaware of it or are not taking action, they might notice increasing levels of engagement due to turnover among employees low in primary psychopathy and retention of those high in primary psychopathy.

At the extreme, they could end up with a highly engaged workforce of psychopaths.”

The study was published in the Journal of Business Ethics (Hurst et al., 2017).

Psychopath’s sense of smell is impaired because of poor frontal lobe functioning.

Psychopaths find it hard to tell the difference between simple odours like fish and oranges, research finds.

The finding comes from 79 non-criminal psychopaths whose smelling capabilities were tested.

Each was checked out for psychopathic traits: how much they manipulated people, whether they had erratic lifestyles, how callous they were and their criminal tendencies.

They were then given various common smells to identify, such as coffee, fish, orange, apple, peppermint, banana and liquorice.

The stronger their psychopathic traits, the more difficulty they had identifying and telling the difference between smells.

Cause of psychopath’s sense of smell problems

The cause is probably down to the frontal areas of the brain, which help to process smells.

Psychopaths typically have impaired functioning in the frontal part of the brain.

Frontal lobe deficits are linked to problems in planning, decision-making and with social behaviour.

The studies authors conclude:

“Our findings provide support for the premise that deficits in the front part of the brain may be a characteristic of non-criminal psychopaths.

Olfactory measures represent a potentially interesting marker for psychopathic traits, because performance expectancies are unclear in odor tests and may therefore be less susceptible to attempts to fake good or bad responses.”

The study was published in the journal Chemosensory Perception (Mahmut et al., 2012).

People’s answer to this moral question can reveal if they are a psychopath.

A moral dilemma often used by psychologists may help to distinguish psychopaths, research finds.

Here is the dilemma:

“A runaway trolley is about to run over and kill five people, and you are standing on a footbridge next to a large stranger; your body is too light to stop the train, but if you push the stranger onto the tracks, killing him, you will save the five people.

Would you push the man?”

Now take a moment to consider your answer, and bear in mind there is no ‘right’ one.

In one scenario, you let five people die while you stand by and do nothing.

In the other scenario, you push an innocent man who has no say in the matter to his death.

It’s a tough choice.

However, it turns out that psychopaths are more likely to say they would push the large person onto the tracks.

Now, here’s a problem.

There are certain moral philosophies, particularly utilitarianism, that say the psychopath’s choice is correct.

Sacrificing one person to save five is OK, because it is the result that matters (or this is what a utilitarian would say).

So, does that mean that utilitarians are psychopaths?

Or, perhaps it suggests a flaw in the test, argues Professor Daniel Bartels, the study’s first author:

“Although the study does not resolve the ethical debate, it points to a flaw in the widely-adopted use of sacrificial dilemmas to identify optimal moral judgment.

These methods fail to distinguish between people who endorse utilitarian moral choices because of underlying emotional deficits (like those captured by our measures of psychopathy and Machiavellianism) and those who endorse them out of genuine concern for the welfare of others.”

So, even if you chose to push the large man, you might just be a utilitarian, and not a psychopath after all.

The study was published in the journal Cognition (Bartels & Pizarro, 2011).

Theodore Roosevelt and JFK top the list of US presidents with the highest ‘positive’ psychopathic tendencies.

Two Roosevelts, JFK and Reagan top the list of most psychopathic presidents, research finds.

Of the 42 presidents up to and including George W. Bush, here are the top 10 according to a study by Lilienfeld et al. (2012):

1. Theodore Roosevelt (1.462)
2. John F. Kennedy (1.408)
3. Franklin D. Roosevelt (1.079)
4. Ronald Reagan (.912)
5. Rutherford B. Hayes (.824)
6. Zachary Taylor (.671)
7. Bill Clinton (.569)
8. Martin Van Buren (.554)
9. Andrew Jackson (.516)
10. George W. Bush (.391)

The higher the scores in brackets, the higher their psychopathic tendencies.

And there you have it: Roosevelt by a short head over JFK.

Fearless dominance

Actually, I have cheated slightly.

These ratings are for one aspect of psychopathy called ‘fearless dominance’.

This is the ‘useful part’ of being a bit of a psychopath (or sociopath — the terms mean the same thing to psychologists).

This is the part related to having no fear, to being charming, bold and taking charge.

The other aspect of psychopathy, sometimes called ‘self-centred impulsivity’—an aspect generally considered maladaptive—showed no relationship with presidential performance.

Psychopathic presidential performance

What the authors were really interested in, though, was whether this aspect of psychopathy called ‘fearless dominance’ was associated with better presidential performance.

To find out, the authors looked at common measures of presidential greatness, like how long they were president, their intellectual greatness and their war heroism before becoming president.

Then they looked to see if the ‘greatest’ presidents—as measured by averaging out 12 different surveys on the question—had higher levels of fearless dominance.

Indeed they did.

As Lilienfeld et al. (2012) conclude:

“…our results raise the intriguing but unresearched possibility that the boldness often associated with psychopathy may confer advantages across a host of occupations, vocations, and social roles, such as positions of power and prestige in politics, business, law enforcement, athletics, and the military.”

Least psychopathic presidents

For comparison, here is the bottom of the rankings for fearless dominance starting with the lowest scorer, William H. Taft, in other words he was the most fearful and least dominant US president:

1. William H. Taft
2. John Q. Adams
3. Calvin Coolidge
4. William McKinley
5. James Buchanan
6. John Adams
7. Herbert Hoover
8. Andrew Johnson
9. Harry S. Truman
10. James Garfield

.

Psychopaths and sociopaths display both fearless dominance and self-centred impulsivity.

From a clinical perspective there is no difference between a psychopath and a sociopath — the words can be used interchangeably.

For many psychologists the word sociopath and the word psychopath mean the same: that someone has an antisocial personality disorder.

People with an antisocial personality disorder typically have no regard for other people’s feelings or judgments.

They likely have a history of crime or impulsive and borderline illegal behaviour.

They see themselves as free of society’s rules and standards.

Sociopath vs psychopath

In the popular imagination, though, the word sociopath does have a different meaning from a psychopath.

People in general tend to view sociopaths as, essentially, not as bad as psychopaths.

In other words, sociopaths share many of the same traits as psychopaths, but not to the same extent.

For example, the pure psychopath is generally seen as having little empathy.

In contrast, the sociopath is thought to have some small amount of empathy and feelings of remorse.

Similarly, sociopaths are thought in the popular imagination not to be violent in comparison to psychopaths, who people imagine to be violent.

Technically, there is no truth to this.

For psychologists and clinicians these distinctions are not recognised — they would tend to talk mainly about psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder.

How to spot a sociopath vs psychopath

Most people find psychopaths or sociopaths difficult to spot; even psychologists have long argued over what it means.

But some think it all boils down to two ingredients: one side of psychopathy, or sociopathy, is all about fearless dominance and the other is all about self-centred impulsivity (Skeem et al., 2011).

It’s only when a person’s personality is fused with these two that they can truly be called a psychopath.

1. Fearless dominance

Fearless dominance is (sort of) the more ‘useful’ half of being a psychopath or sociopath.

Having fearless dominance means that psychopaths or sociopaths don’t experience anxiety and are not afraid of anyone or anything.

Far from seeming weird, psychopaths or sociopaths are charming and bold and don’t particularly care what other people think of them, unless they need to manipulate those perceptions in some way.

People high in fearless dominance are certainly not ‘mad’: they tend to be very outgoing people who are not at all neurotic.

There’s even a heroic element to fearless dominance.

Some evidence suggests that those high in fearless dominance are more likely to help stranded motorists or break up fights in public.

Perhaps as a consequence, those high on fearless dominance may be more likely to end up doing well in traditional professions, or even becoming president (see: Which Professions Have The Most Psychopaths?).

2. Self-centred impulsivity

The darker side of being a sociopath or psychopath is that they find it difficult to control their impulses.

If they want to do something, they just go ahead and do it; there’s no fear or anxiety to hold them back.

Psychopaths or sociopaths continually take risks, with no regard to the consequences.

Psychopaths or sociopaths are also usually very manipulative and likely to engage in promiscuous sexual relationships and have the potential to commit crimes (although many do not).

Psychopaths are rebellious egoists and automatically blame others for their own mistakes, which means they rarely learn from those mistakes.

Research has shown that self-centred impulsivity peaks through adolescence (perhaps suggesting parallels between psychopathy and being an adolescent!) and then settles down with maturity.

This side of psychopathy or sociopathy, though, brings with it greater risk of depression and suicide.

Personality traits of psychopaths or sociopaths

Two personality traits that are strongly linked to being a psychopath or sociopath are being disagreeable and low in conscientiousness  (Decuyper et al., 2009).

People who are not conscientious are disorganised, careless, irresponsible and do not follow through on their obligations.

People like this also find it hard to resist temptation.

Disagreeable people tend to be unfriendly, cold and not tactful — rarely taking into account other people’s feelings.

Psychopaths or sociopaths are particularly low on three critical aspects of agreeableness:

• They are not straightforward: psychopaths or sociopaths are deceitful and manipulative.
• They are not compliant: psychopaths or sociopaths have strong heads, are aggressive, antagonistic and quarrelsome.
• They are not modest: psychopaths or sociopaths are arrogant, conceited, proud and vain.

Another personality trait psychopaths tend to have is high neuroticism.

They tend to be:

• Angry and hostile: psychopaths get upset very easily.
• Impulsive: psychopaths cannot resist temptations and may overeat or indulge themselves in other ways.

Psychopaths or sociopaths also show one aspect of high extraversion, which is that they seek out excitement.

However, unlike many extraverts they are not warm — instead they are interpersonally cold and emotionless.

Spot a psychopath or sociopath

Psychopathy or sociopathy isn’t a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ decision, it exists on a sliding scale like other personality traits.

But some combination of these elements—the fearless dominance and self-centred impulsivity and other personality traits—together are what make a psychopath.

It may be that their relative balance, one to the other, is what determines how successful they can be in everyday life.

Their fearless dominance may help them succeed in some areas while their self-centred impulsivity brings them down.

Treating psychopaths or sociopaths

Historically, personality disorders were considered difficult to treat.

More recently, though, psychologists have found that personality disorders can get better.

Time can slowly remedy personality disorders, even without treatment, research shows.

Talking therapies can help to change depressive personality traits.

That could be individual therapy, group therapy, self-help and/or medication.

Personality disorders, like other aspects of personality are amenable to change.

Personality may determine who we are now, but not necessarily who we can become.

.