I have a deep fascination with psychopaths and have educated myself about them over the years. I have also encountered psychopaths and can perhaps help identify persons you might suspect are psychopaths. Shoot.
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I have a deep fascination with psychopaths and have educated myself about them over the years. I have also encountered psychopaths and can perhaps help identify persons you might suspect are psychopaths. Shoot.
They say they don't feel emotion. But then how come they get fun out of killing people?
I was gonna make this thread :(
They can feel emotion just not in the same way because of their undeveloped amygdala. It also changes the way they dream and recall memories. They cannot learn from pain in the same way we do and thus cannot develop the same empathetic capabilities which unconsciously run through our amygdalas but they compensate by consciously acquiring an artificial social sense.
I was just typing out a huge reply to your question, DarkComrade, but I accidentally clicked the back button on my mouse and my reply got lost. I am not motivated to re-write the whole thing.
To answer your question, psychopaths can in fact feel emotion. However, they cannot feel empathy or compassion and feel very little anxiety, if any. This is the defining characteristic of psychopaths. Humans very much like a feeling of power. This manifests in all sorts of ways, from being a hyper-competent soccer player to being a megalomaniac dictator. It also manifests in sadism. It could be said that most humans are sadistic to a degree. Maybe someone likes proving somebody else wrong. Maybe a guy likes performing light practical jokes on his buddies. There are also sadistic urges that everyone feels from time to time. If we get really angry at someone, we may want to cause them pain by hitting them. What prevents a non-psychopath from carrying out such violent impulses is of course their empathy and fear of reprimand. Since the psychopath does not have these emotional barriers, they are far more likely to carry out these urges. A highly sadistic psychopath can reap his pleasures without any emotional consequence.
It should be said that most psychopaths do not become killers. Highly sadistic serial killer type psychopaths are few and far between. Instead, most of them pursue personal gain by manipulating everyone around them with absolutely no regard for the consequences for their victims.
Going along with what Omnis Dei said, read this page and the three pages after it of this book.
Thanks for the answer both of you, I wondered about this pretty long. Not really finding the answer I just figured they were completly dead inside filling it with such doings as killing and the like
Something I'd like to add is that the condition of psychopathy may in fact be a part of the reason why harsher punishments do not deter violent crimes. To a psychopath, the threat of punishment means nothing to them due to their dysfunctional amygdala.
An experiment performed back when electric shocks were still legal had psycho and non-psycho subjects hook up to EEG machines. The Examiner would count down from ten then shock the subject and for both groups there was not much reaction until anxiety levels sky-rocketed during the shock. Then the examiner would repeat the procedure and non-psychos anxiety levels peaked before the actual shock while psychos showed no change until the shock came again.
They also do not unconsciously pick up subtle social queues and must acquire them consciously. Because they have an undeveloped amygdala, they are often able to mimic social skills and lie much easier than people motivated by non-cognitive conditioning from the amygdala. However, like Black Eagle said, this only covers one aspect of the umbrella term we refer to as emotion. I would call the amygdala the closest physical manifestation to a soul. It's the root of higher intuitive Conscience.
A friend of mine told me that psychopaths might be recognised by their speech, but didn't explain. What the features are of a psychopath's speech?
I would say no, there's not much to distinguish the two based on how they talk. There are many problems that can lead to a socially dysfunctional personality and sociopaths usually do not appear dysfunctional. Maybe Black Eagle knows more (hate to jump in on his thread like this) but the truth is sociopaths are usually the last people you suspect because they become so good at mimicking human behavior and they're so socially fearless that they actually come off more charismatic than average people. They don't have to deal with anxiety disorder to even the smallest degree so they aren't burdened by natural human shyness.
Their memories also work differently. People remember events using their amygdala to link the emotion of the event to the memory. This is how learning from pain works and why sociopaths are considered untreatable (since their major dysfunction is the social learning part of the brain itself). While people look back to their emotions in order to draw reference on the past and have difficulty remembering very painful times, sociopaths look back on the past more objectively. They remember details as they happened, without emotional attachment.
Am I a psychopath?
How vividly can you dream?
Extremely vivid
Do you get nervous before injections, riding up roller coasters, talking to strangers or other scary events?
How do psycopaths express themselfes except for murdering someone?
glib and superficial charm
grandiose (exaggeratedly high) estimation of self
need for stimulation
pathological lying
cunning and manipulativeness
lack of remorse or guilt
shallow affect (superficial emotional responsiveness)
callousness and lack of empathy
parasitic lifestyle
poor behavioral controls
sexual promiscuity
early behavior problems
lack of realistic long-term goals
impulsivity
irresponsibility
failure to accept responsibility for own actions
many short-term marital relationships
juvenile delinquency
revocation of conditional release
criminal versatility
When you are an average person (no mental problems) can you still develope anti-social personality disorder turning into psychopathy like you can develope schizotypal personality disorder turning into schizophrenia anytime in your life?
Check this out: IAmA Clinically Diagnosed Sociopath. AMAA. : IAmA
Not really. When the amygdala develops, that's it. It's almost like asking if someone can go back to being prepubescent. But your amygdala can become desensitized and sort of shut down from intense situations. An easy example of this is a soldier in combat but another less obvious example are those hotlines that work for those shock-talk shows but market themselves like help-lines for people with emotional problems. The stuff they hear all day on the phone is so depressing if your amygdala were functioning normally you would kill yourself. They use humor as a defense mechanism to generate distance between them and subject material. If you listened to these people talk about their callers, you would think they were the sickest bunch of freaks ever born.Quote:
Originally Posted by DarkComrade
Drug addiction can also arrest the development of the amygdala (because you cant learn from pain when you have a fuck it button) but usually by the time your child starts using drugs their amygdala has developed enough that they may display many asocial symptoms but they're not a full blown sociopath.
But the opposite of psychopathy is not schizophrenia, even though they dream in a way that makes you think that. The opposite of a psychopath is someone with anxiety disorder. In a way, we all tame our amygdalas which does not judge conditioning based on logic but based on the intensity of previous consequences (thus turning us all into natural cowards requiring reason to motivate us to courage). A psychopath does not receive those kinds of unconscious warning signals caused by past difficulty. A psychopath must instead consciously develop a means to appear candid the way our empathetic complexes make us appear automatically.
In theory one could become a psychopath if the amygdala were catastrophically damaged. But I doubt one could become a psychopath without brain damage. It is possible to be brought up in a manner that obscures social learning and instead places emphasis on machiavellianism and individualism, but I would think that would result in only narcissism. Granted, psychopaths are narcissists, but narcissists who aren't psychopaths lack that particular bit of dysfunctionality that would make them psychopaths. In fact, now that I think about it, narcissism is probably the closest an individual can get to becoming psychopathic.
So Omnius (yes I'm still going to call you Omnius), why don't we swap stories of encounters with psychopaths. I've got one story of a confirmed psychopath.
Honestly I'm more on the research side of things and haven't dealt with many, certainly none that I considered dangerous. I've only ever met one person (former roommate) who made enough slips to show that every ounce of empathy they had for people was fake. I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt. It's a LOT easier to pick out a narcissist because of their general inability to accept responsibility but psychopaths are tacticians and predators and will say anything as long as it proves useful, including humbling themselves before others. A narcissist is usually less apt at developing fake empathy because their unconscious social behavior developed by the amygdala gets in the way. They simply view everything as an attack against them. They are distinct psychoses but they share a few symptoms, such as an inability to accept responsibility. The reason they are distinct is because they have two different causes.
I too have a interest in psychopaths(more of the Serial Killer type though) but I'm wondering do they understand Right from Wrong? Do they fear less than normal humans or more? Any known "symptoms" to identify a psychopath?
Omnis, come back to us!
I have a question about a real-life situation, and how it pertains to being a psychopath, but I'd prefer to know someone was still reading this thread before I typed it all out. It's rather intense.
Psychopathy is simply a lack of interest in, or care for, the sanctity of human life.Quote:
Originally Posted by MrBlonde
What differs between a Psychopath and a Sociopath?
Sociopathy is the lack of care for the rules of a society.Quote:
Originally Posted by MrBlonde
All world leaders are, they have to be. I am, I think, but I lack the necessary drive to fulfill my destiny, so maybe I'm just arrogant beyond my means:
- I could kill, but only if it was absolutely necessary.
- I would rather hurt a person, than an animal.
- I like to fight, win or lose.
- There are very few people I can tolerate.
- I like women, but only for 15 or 20 minutes at a time.
- I fantasize about Armageddon, a lot.
- I have no problem talking down to people online, even 'friends'.
- Intelligence, meh?
- I hate hippies.
Sociopathy isn't actually a well defined condition. Use it to refer to a 'disregard for societal rules' if you want to, but you won't be using a general definition. Generally sociopathy and psychopathy both refer to what is referred to in a modern technical context as 'antisocial personality disorder'.
My question would be if there is any link between psychopathy and autism. In particular, are psychopaths inclined to have an undeveloped or underdeveloped theory of mind; do they tend to fail at things like the false belief test?
It doesn't seem like any psychological conditions are well defined unless they can be traced to specific neurological causes. Does psychopathy entail a neurological cause? Otherwise, I know plenty of people who are psychopaths.
Unless you're a dualist, mental abnormalities are the same thing as neurological abnormalities.
Yeah, that's why I find it so strange that so many official psychological classifications seem like shallow labels for general symptoms. Who knows how many neurological factors can cause symptoms of "A.D.D" for example, no neuroimaging is done. Yet, they give every kid who exhibits them the same medication.