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 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The study, conducted by researchers at New York University is currently unpublished.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 2 Ways A Psychopath’s Brain Is Really Unusual

Brain scans of 49 criminals predicted how many crimes they had been convicted of.

Brain scans of 49 criminals predicted how many crimes they had been convicted of.

Psychopaths are not ‘aliens’, but people who make bad, short-sighted-decisions, argues a Harvard neuroscientist.

They are everyday human beings whose brains are wired differently to the rest of us.

Just how differently is revealed in a new study published in the journal Neuron.

The study found that psychopaths:

  1. focus mostly on reward,
  2. and don’t think much about the consequences of their actions.

This is quite different to most people whose natural response is to consider:

  1. what they can lose above what they can gain,
  2. and what the consequences will be of their actions.

For the research, Dr Buckholtz and colleagues scanned the brains of 49 prison inmates.

Dr Josh Buckholtz, explained:

“For years, we have been focused on the idea that psychopaths are people who cannot generate emotion and that’s why they do all these terrible things.

But what what we care about with psychopaths is not the feelings they have or don’t have, it’s the choices they make.

Psychopaths commit an astonishing amount of crime, and this crime is both devastating to victims and astronomically costly to society as a whole.

And even though psychopaths are often portrayed as cold-blooded, almost alien predators, we have been showing that their emotional deficits may not actually be the primary driver of these bad choices.

Because it’s the choices of psychopaths that cause so much trouble, we’ve been trying to understand what goes on in their brains when the make decisions that involve trade-offs between the costs and benefits of action.

In this most recent paper…we are able to look at brain-based measures of reward and value and the communication between different brain regions that are involved in decision making.”

What the scans showed was that the brains of criminals were highly sensitive to rewards.

Dr Buckholtz said:

“So the more psychopathic a person is, the greater the magnitude of that striatal response.

That suggests that the way they are calculating the value rewards is dysregulated — they may over-represent the value of immediate reward.”

The ventral striatum is key in how we respond to rewards, Dr Buckholtz explained:

“We mapped the connections between the ventral striatum and other regions known to be involved in decision-making, specifically regions of the prefrontal cortex known to regulate striatal response.

When we did that, we found that connections between the striatum and the ventral medial prefrontal cortex were much weaker in people with psychopathy.”

What this means is that psychopaths don’t think very hard about the consequences of their actions: they are mostly focused on the rewards.

It turned out that the response in this area of the brain actually predicted the number of crimes the inmates had been convicted of.

Dr Buckholtz said:

“They’re not aliens, they’re people who make bad decisions.

The same kind of short-sighted, impulsive decision-making that we see in psychopathic individuals has also been noted in compulsive over-eaters and substance abusers.

If we can put this back into the domain of rigorous scientific analysis, we can see psychopaths aren’t inhuman, they’re exactly what you would expect from humans who have this particular kind of brain wiring dysfunction.”

The study was published in the journal Neuron (Buckholtz et al., 2017).

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?

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:

  1. CEO
  2. Lawyer
  3. Media (TV/Radio)
  4. Salesperson
  5. Surgeon
  6. Journalist
  7. Police Officer
  8. Clergyperson
  9. Chef
  10. Civil Servant

And here are the professions with the least psychopaths:

  1. Care Aide
  2. Nurse
  3. Therapist
  4. Craftsperson
  5. Beautician/Stylist
  6. Charity Worker
  7. Teacher
  8. Creative Artist
  9. Doctor
  10. 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

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