The criminal psychopath is not just born: he is also made.
The eyes of psychopaths reveal their fearless dominance by not reacting to distressing images.
The eyes of psychopaths reveal their fearless dominance by not reacting to distressing images.
The pupils of psychopaths do not respond normally to distressing images or scenes, research reveals.
The pupils — the dark part of the eye in the centre — usually get bigger when people look at nasty images or something revolting.
Psychopaths, who display fearless dominance, do not show this response.
The reason is that strongly psychopathic individuals have little or no fear response, explained Dr Dan Burley, the study’s author:
“Our findings provide physical evidence of an emotional deficit common to psychopathic offenders.
The pupil has long been known to be an indicator of a person’s arousal.
Card sharks have learnt to look carefully at the eyes of their opponents to gauge if they have a great hand, and many an astute salesperson knows to up their price if your eyes reveal your excitement at their product.
Likewise, the pupil usually dilates when an image shocks or scares us.
The fact that this normal physiological response to threat is reduced in psychopathic offenders provides us with an obvious physical marker for this condition.”
The conclusions come from a study of offenders, some of whom were psychopaths.
The results showed that psychopaths reacted normally to cute images of puppies and couples, but not to distressing images.
This suggests psychopaths do respond to emotions — just not all of them.
Professor Nicola Gray, who was involved with the project, said:
“This is one of the first times we have objective, physiological, evidence of an emotional deficit underpinning the offending behaviour of psychopathic offenders that does not depend on invasive methods or expensive equipment.
We hope to be able to develop this methodology to assist with clinical assessment and intervention in offender populations.”
Professor Robert Snowden, who supervised the research, said:
“Many psychopathic offenders appear to be bold, confident, and can act in cold-blooded manner.
It’s much easier to act bold if you have no feelings of fear, and to be cold-blooded if there is no emotion to get in the way of the act.”
The study was published by Cardiff University (Burley et al., 2017).
Around one-in-a-hundred people has psychopathic traits so strong that it can lead to criminal behaviour.
The reason companies sometimes ignore people with better qualifications in favour of psychopaths.
Usually, psychopaths are easily upset, impulsive and have complete disregard for other people’s feelings.
‘Successful’ psychopaths were given scans to see how their brains differ.
Cold and unemotional children tend to have smaller brains along with differences in how areas of their brain are connected.
Psychopathic traits leave a gap where a natural response should be.
Psychopathic traits leave a gap where a natural response should be.
Psychopaths cannot spot real facial emotions of sadness or distress, new research finds.
It may partly be why psychopaths are unlikely to help others in distress.
Dr Amy Dawel, who led the study, explained:
“For most people, if we see someone who is genuinely upset, you feel bad for them and it motivates you to help them.
People who are very high on the psychopathy spectrum don’t show this response.”
For the study, 140 people looked at photographs of others displaying different emotions, like sadness, happiness and disgust.
Sometimes, though, the person in the photo was faking it and sometimes it was a genuine emotion.
Dr Dawel explained the results:
“We found people with high levels of psychopathic traits don’t feel any worse for someone who is genuinely upset than someone who is faking it.
They also seem to have problems telling if the upset is real or fake.
As a result, they are not nearly as willing to help someone who is expressing genuine distress as most people are.”
Psychopaths had difficulty with the emotions related to distress, Dr Dawel said:
“For other emotions such as anger, disgust, and happy, high psychopathy individuals had no problems telling if someone was faking it.
The results were very specific to expressions of distress.”
It is clear that psychopaths do not respond to emotions in the same way other people do.
Dr Dawel said:
“There seems to be a genetic contribution to these traits, we see the start of them quite early in childhood.
Understanding exactly what is going wrong with emotions in psychopathy will help us to identify these problems early and hopefully intervene in ways that promote moral development.”
The study was published in the journal Personality Disorders: Theory, Research, and Treatment (Dawel et al., 2018).
The study is based on data from a personality survey conducted across the US.
Psychopaths do not particularly like classical music — no matter what film portrayals of psychopaths like Hannibal Lecter might suggest.
Psychopaths do not particularly like classical music — no matter what film portrayals of psychopaths like Hannibal Lecter might suggest.
Psychopaths prefer rap music, a new study finds.
Songs like “No Diggity” by Blackstreet and “Lose Yourself” by Eminem were both linked to higher psychopathy scores.
In contrast, pop songs like “My Sharona” by The Knack and “Titanium” by Sia were linked to the lowest levels of psychopathy.
The conclusions come from research in which 200 people were played 260 songs, along with taking tests of psychopathy.
Psychopaths are actually harder to spot than their media portrayal would have you believe.
The researchers hope this type of musical test will help with the identification of psychopaths.
Dr Pascal Wallisch, the study’s first author, thinks it may be possible to root out psychopaths from their playlists.
The team will be conducting a larger study to verify their findings.
The study, conducted by researchers at New York University is currently unpublished.
Join the free PsyBlog mailing list. No spam, ever.
