Category: Psychopathy

The two strongest signals that someone is a psychopath.

Two key personality traits of a psychopath are being callous and unemotional, research finds.

Being callous means having a cruel disregard for others.

Callous people lack compassion, are cold-blooded and heartless.

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

For example, psychopaths tend to show no feeling when they see others in pain.

However, some psychopaths use an unemotional exterior to hide inner turmoil.

Professor Tim Stickle, who led the study, explained that a sub-group of psychopaths do experience strong emotions:

“They appear callous and unemotional to others but their own emotional experience is that they’re very distressed, have high levels of anxiety, higher levels of depression, higher levels of emotion.

We think of these harmful, antisocial, aggressive kids as being immune to fear, immune to negative feelings, but in fact we’re showing a whole group of them are not only not immune, but are very susceptible.”

The conclusions come from a study of 150 adolescents held in juvenile detention centres.

All were classified as callous and unemotional and most conformed to this stereotype — but not all.

A small group fell into a category the researchers label “low psychopathy delinquents”.

Other studies have also shown that among adults there is a group who look like psychopaths, but actually experience strong emotions.

Professor Stickle said:

“It’s not just one characteristic that allows clear identification of who falls in which group; it takes a wide range of traits.

These traits are particularly prevalent in adolescent females in the juvenile justice system.

Untreated callous unemotional traits put these youth at risk for becoming lifelong criminals.”

The researchers hope that identifying and treating this sub-group can help save them from a lifetime of antisocial behaviour — and society from its consequences.

The study was published in the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology (Gill & Stickle, 2015).

People in the study rated how much they liked various foods and beverages and took a personality test.

Having a preference for bitter tastes is linked to psychopathy, narcissism and everyday sadism, a study finds.

A predilection for tonic water or coffee, therefore, could indicated some psychopathic tendencies in a person’s personality.

In contrast, people who dislike bitter tastes tend to be more agreeable, the researchers discovered.

For the study 500 men and women were shown a list of foods, some of which were salty, sour, bitter and sweet.

Some common bitter foods and drinks included were radishes, unsweetened cocoa and vinegar.

People rated how much they liked each food or beverage and took a personality test which measured:

• aggression,
• selfishness,
• psychopathy,
• and narcissism.

Seeking sensation

Bitter tastes may be particularly attractive to those with darker personalities because they enjoy sensation-seeking.

Darker personality types have a greater preference for the ups and downs of life.

They may even have a greater sensitivity to bitter foods, as the authors write:

“Supertasting, that is, having a high sensitivity to bitter compounds, has been consistently linked to increased emotionality in humans.

Nontasters, in contrast, report being more relaxed and placid than tasters.”

Caffeine and spicy foods have already been linked to sensation-seeking:

“…people high in sensation seeking tend to have an increased preference for spicy food.

Caffeine consumption is positively correlated with other facets of sensation seeking behavior, such as experience seeking and disinhibition.”

The authors describe their results:

“…bitter taste experiences are causally linked to hostile thoughts and behavior…

Particularly robust associations were found for everyday sadism, which was significantly predicted by general bitter taste preferences…”

The study was published in the journal Appetite (Sagioglou & Greitemeyer, 2016).

Brain scans on 14 convicted psychopathic individuals reveals the criminal traits of their brain activity.

A lack of self-control and a focus on rewards is strongly linked to criminal behaviour, research finds.

Brain scans have revealed this is the critical difference between an ordinary psychopath and a criminal psychopath.

Despite popular belief, being a psychopath does not automatically make someone a criminal — although it does help.

Many criminals have psychopathic traits, such as impulsive and antisocial behaviour.

However, many people with psychopathic traits never commit criminal offences.

The research used brain scans to investigate what turns an ordinary psychopath into a criminal psychopath.

Dirk Geurts, the study’s first author, explained the research:

“We carried out tests on 14 convicted psychopathic individuals, and 20 non-criminal individuals, half of whom had a high score on the psychopathy scale.

The participants performed tests while their brain activity was measured in an MRI scanner.

We saw that the reward centre in the brains of people with many psychopathic traits (both criminal and non-criminal) were more strongly activated than those in people without psychopathic traits.

It has already been proved that the brains of non-criminal individuals with psychopathic traits are triggered by the expectation of reward.

This research shows that this is also the case for criminal individuals with psychopathic traits.”

Mr Geurts explained the results:

“There is a difference in the communication between the reward centre and an area in the middle of the forebrain.

Good communication between these areas would appear to be a condition for self-control.

Our results seem to indicate that the tendency to commit an offence arises from a combination of a strong focus on reward and a lack of self-control.

This is the first research project in which convicted criminals were actually examined.”

Both impulsivity and very antisocial, egocentric behaviour are key to criminal psychopathy, said Professor Robbert-Jan Verkes, who led the research:

“Especially [these] traits seem to be connected with an excessively sensitive reward centre.

The presence of these impulsive and antisocial traits predict criminal behaviour more accurately than a lack of empathy.”

The study was published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (Geurts et al., 2016).

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.”

Psychopaths fearless dominance

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).