Psychopathy - Page 5 of 5

Psychopaths Lack This Natural Response

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).

Psychopaths Prefer This Type of Music

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.

The Natural Response That Psychopaths Tend To Lack

The connection between psychopathy and contagious yawning.

Psychopaths display less empathy, which is why they are less prone to this normal behaviour.

People with psychopathic tendencies are less prone to ‘contagious yawning’, a new study finds.

Yawning after seeing someone else yawn is linked to empathy and bonding.

But psychopaths are selfish, manipulative, fearless, domineering and, critically, lack empathy.

Mr Brian Rundle, the study’s first author, said:

“You may yawn, even if you don’t have to.
We all know it and always wonder why.
I thought, ‘If it’s true that yawning is related to empathy, I’ll bet that psychopaths yawn a lot less.’
So I put it to the test.”

The study found that people with psychopathic tendencies were less likely to yawn when they saw someone else yawning.

Mr Rundle said:

“The take-home lesson is not that if you yawn and someone else doesn’t, the other person is a psychopath.
A lot of people didn’t yawn, and we know that we’re not very likely to yawn in response to a stranger we don’t have empathetic connections with.
But what we found tells us there is a neurological connection — some overlap — between psychopathy and contagious yawning.
This is a good starting point to ask more questions.”

The study was published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences (Rundle et al., 2015).

Yawn image from Shutterstock

Which Professions Have The Most Psychopaths?

Are there ‘successful psychopaths’ amongst us?

According to a survey conducted by psychologist Kevin Dutton—called the Great British Psychopath Survey—here are the top 10 professions with the most psychopaths:

CEO
Lawyer
Media (TV/Radio)
Salesperson
Surgeon
Journalist
Police Officer
Clergyperson
Chef
Civil Servant

And here are the professions with the least psychopaths:

Care Aide
Nurse
Therapist
Craftsperson
Beautician/Stylist
Charity Worker
Teacher
Creative Artist
Doctor
Accountant

Although people tend to think of psychopaths as killers—indeed about 15-25% of people in prison are psychopaths—in fact many people with psychopathic tendencies are not criminals.

Here are some of the traits of psychopaths:

Self-confident
Cold-hearted
Manipulative
Fearless
Charming
Cool under pressure
Egocentric
Carefree

If you look through the list of professions, then you can see how a few of these traits might be useful.

None of this means that every CEO or lawyer is a psychopath, nor should the suggestion be that having psychopathic tendencies is helpful in any of these jobs (although it may be!).

Rather, there is an overlap between psychopathic personality traits and the types of people who go into those professions.

Successful psychopath?

A few people try to talk up the benefits of psychopathic personality traits, saying that there are such things as ‘successful psychopaths’: people who benefit from being that way.

But many psychologists have questioned whether there really is such a thing as a ‘successful psychopath’.

That’s because research has found that psychopaths generally do worse at the things that are often associated with success: their relationships are worse, they earn less money and do not generally attain high status (research described in Stevens et al., 2012).

Maybe the standard for a ‘successful psychopath’ should be lower. We should simply be amazed that someone with little or no fear response, unlimited confidence and without fellow-feeling can live outside of an institution, let alone become a respected professional.

Image credit: Victor1558