Category: Psychopathy

Psychopathy affects around 1 percent of the population.

Care givers who are unresponsive to a child’s distress help turn them into psychopaths, research finds.

The study found that children placed in orphanages — where they generally received less sensitive care — were more likely to grow up with with callous-unemotional traits.

Being cruel and disregarding other people’s feelings, along with lack of guilt or empathy are all markers of psychopathy.

The study compared these institutionalised children with those brought up in foster care.

Foster carers were much more empathic to the child’s distress and, in turn, those children grew up more sensitive and empathic with others.

Dr Kathryn Humphreys, the study’s first author, said:

“If we can intervene early to help kids in their development, it not only helps them but also the broader society.

The best way to do that is making sure children are placed in homes with responsive caregivers and helping caregivers learn to be more responsive to their child’s needs.”

The study was published in the journal  Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry (Humphreys et al., 2015).

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).

Psychopaths use these words twice as often as non-psychopaths.

Psychopaths use words related to food, sex and money twice as often as non-psychopaths, a study finds.

Psychopaths are also less likely to use words related to family, religion and social needs.

The trends in word use reflect how psychopaths display excessive selfishness, detachment and emotional flatness.

The results come from an analysis of stories told by 14 psychopathic murderers in Canadian prisons.

They were compared with 38 convicted murderers who were not psychopaths.

Each criminal talked about their crime in detail and then the words they used were analysed.

Along with words related to money, sex and food, psychopaths were also more likely to explain their crimes using explanatory words like ‘because’, ‘since’ and ‘so that’.

Professor Jeff Hancock, the study’s first author, said:

“Previous work has looked at how psychopaths use language.

Our paper is the first to show that you can use automated tools to detect the distinct speech patterns of psychopaths.”

Psychopaths were found to be less fluent in their speech, perhaps to frame their story in the most positive way possible.

The study was published in the journal Legal and Criminological Psychology (Hancock et al., 2011).

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).