Do Psychopaths Understand Emotions?

Part two...

Are you all ready for part two? Let’s see how fast this falls right off a cliff. Hopefully that won’t be the case. Let’s find out…

Again, here is the article link:

Do Psychopaths Really Understand Emotions? It may depend on their childhood.

When you hear the word psychopath, some scary people come to mind. In the extreme, psychopathy can be associated with torture, murder, and an utter disregard for the well-being of others.

Can it be, though? I don’t think that is a fair thing to be associating psychopathy with. It’s lending to stereotypes, not reality. Come on, dude, you have a PhD. You’re supposedly smart. How about we start off by debunking things, not continuing bad information. Maybe he will right the ship in the next paragraph.

An open question, however, is why psychopaths do not show empathy or remorse for the suffering they cause in others. One possibility is that they have low emotional awareness. In other words, they could fail to show empathy simply because they don’t recognize or pay attention to how others are feeling; that is, they may not really know about or understand others' emotions.

Nope, he didn’t even try. He just ran with it.

Sigh, I hate repeating myself, but here we are again. It’s not that psychopaths don’t show emotional empathy, we do not have emotional empathy. Also, I don’t know what the mechanics of remorse are, and maybe I should look it up, but I am guessing that it has to do with something like oxytocin. Let me see if I’m right.

Go figure:

The hormone oxytocin can increase feelings of guilt and shame when someone intentionally harms others. Oxytocin is also known as the "love hormone" and can promote empathy, trust, and bonding. The brain processes regret-related outcomes based on both objective and subjective aspects of responsibility. The amygdala is especially important in this process, with a stronger response to regret when the outcome is associated with high responsibility. Guilt can also cause stress, which can lead to health issues like headaches, backaches, cardiovascular disease, and gastrointestinal disorders. Guilt can also negatively impact the immune system over time.

Dude with a PhD apparently can’t be bothered with looking up what causes those emotions to be capable of being felt and why, therefore, a psychopath is incapable of experiencing them. Why am I not surprised?

We fail to understand things that we can’t feel. I mean, that’s a reasonable, logical, and prudent thing to assume. However, this guys is like, “Nah, they just aren’t paying attention.” I suppose that I have no choice but to bring forth the florbow.

An open question, however, is why neurotypicals do not show florbow for the suffering they cause in others. One possibility is that they have low emotional awareness. In other words, they could fail to show florbow simply because they don’t recognize or pay attention to how others are feeling; that is, they may not really know about or understand others' emotions.

You neurotypicals and your lack of paying attention to florbow. The lack of self awareness is astounding.

Are you bothered that you don’t feel florbow?

I am guessing that the answer to that is no, you are not. You have no concept of florbow, you have no idea what florbow is, or whatever feeling florbow would feel like, so then you can’t be bothered that you don’t feel it, right?

Now, let’s go even further. You have lived a few decades on the planet, and you come to realize fairly early on that florbow is something that people around you do feel, but it is something that seems to be a waste of time. You have observed florbow in those around you, but it seems to make them crazy. You can’t find any value in the emotion, but for some reason everyone that feels it says that it’s great. They think florbow is the very basis for qualifying as a human. If you don’t feel it, you aren’t one.

Who are you going to believe? Them, or your lying eyes? You are a human, aren’t you? Florbow or not, you still qualify, I would guess. Everyone else says that florbow is valuable, they swear that it makes them better people, but you have watched their actions, and they really paint a much different image that what these people are telling you.

You have gotten along great in your life, and have yet to find anything of merit in florbow’s existence, so would you feel lacking because you can’t experience florbow?

No. You’re going to look at florbow and say, “well, I am certainly glad I dodged that bullet”, and when everyone sings florbow’s praises, about how it makes humans, humans, you just nod your head and smile.

Sure it does.

That is basically what he’s saying to psychopaths. “You don’t feel this emotion that we believe is important, and therefore we have deemed it so that you are just not paying attention, and that because of that, you are evil.”

Lovely. And this is just the first part of this article.

Well, we might as well ride this sinking ship straight to the bottom. Who’s with me?

But another possibility is that they truly don’t care. In other words, they might be very aware that another person is suffering, but simply feel no desire to help them (and perhaps even enjoy it).

In a recent study, we tried to answer this question by measuring both emotional awareness and psychopathic tendencies in the same individuals. This allowed us to test whether higher psychopathy scores were associated with lower emotional awareness scores, or whether high-psychopathy individuals were just as aware of emotions as anyone else.

I hate to break this to you, guy, but we literally cannot feel what you feel, and we do not understand it, because it’s florbow to us. Also, I looked at this “study”.

A convenience sample of 177 students (40 male) at the University of Arizona (mean age = 19.07, SD = 1.82 years), was recruited from Tucson, AZ. Participants gave informed consent and received course credit for their participation. This study was approved by the University of Arizona Institutional Review Board (protocol # 1811122058). As no prior studies evaluated EA and psychopathy, we were unable to anticipate expected effect sizes on which to conduct a power analysis. Therefore, our study initially aimed to recruit 200 participants as a reasonable pilot sample size. All participants without complete data were excluded before conducting analyses, leading to the final sample size stated above. This final sample of 177 participants would afford 80% power to detect a small-to-moderate effect size (ρ = .21) relationship between EA and psychopathy, given a significance threshold of p < .05.

Seriously, the Scar quote comes to mind here:

If this is your cohort, you just wasted your time, their time, my time, and my reader’s time. If someone should be ashamed, it should be you. You should be smarter than this, better than this, more disciplined than this, and have better dedication to detail than this. Go do a stint over in Japan, learn their work habits, and attention to detail, and then maybe, maybe you can try again.

You asked a bunch of college students about their emotional experience, when they literally do not have the brain development present to be able to engage with what you are testing. Why are you so dumb? Why? It’s like, two weeks before Christmas. It’s supposed to be a happy time of year, but here you are, whipping out your pecker, pissing on the parade, and are pretending that yellow snow is normal. Sigh…

What did we find? As is often the case in research, the answer wasn’t a simple “yes” or “no.” Instead, as I will explain below, it appeared to depend on whether an individual experienced childhood maltreatment, such as abuse or neglect.

Is this… entire article going to be based on this “study”? Please say no. Another article that is based on a study that has no value. Also, of course, the answer isn’t a simple yes or no, because the people in your study do not have developed brains, and the part that is required for your “study” is the part that they DO NOT HAVE YET. At this point, specialists are getting too specialized. Y’all need to speak to a neuroscientist once in a while. Or, and this is just a thought, read. Read for five minutes a day about a subject that you apparently are totally uneducated in. The brain. I have written about the brain and psychopathy so, so many times. If any of you need a link, just ask me and I can give you all you ask for.

Before conducting the study, we weren’t sure what we might find. This is because some psychopathic traits seem to indicate high emotional awareness, while others suggest low emotional awareness.

You didn’t conduct a study on anything other than what underdeveloped brains are and are not capable of. This has nothing to do with psychopathy. Under twenty-five, there is no such thing as a psychopath. It is only after the brain is developed, after twenty-five, that you can even consider it. How irresponsible can you be?

For example, some psychopaths can be very charming and manipulative. This suggests they know how others are feeling and are good at exploiting that knowledge for their own gain. These so-called “successful psychopaths” can also attain corporate leadership positions that require good social and emotional skills.

Why is this always the two options? Psychopaths are always, apparently, criminals or CEOs? This is a ridiculous stereotype. Most of us are neither. Also, most of us are charming, but this has more to do with how we are perceived, than how we decide to act. It is what neurotypicals enjoy about our personalities, that they often lack, that they find so charming. We are all manipulative, but here’s a revelation for the PhD, so is every single neurotypical alive. All of them, including him.

This article is going to be a slog. I can feel it.

On the other hand, many psychopaths have trouble paying attention to things that aren’t helpful in serving their own selfish goals. So, you might think they are simply unaware of others’ emotions due to a lack of attention. Psychopaths show other traits linked to low emotional awareness as well, such as impulsivity and lack of reflective thinking.

Sigh, I love how this is article is a perfect example of lacking empathy and low emotional awareness. It’s like a case study in it.

“I don’t understand how psychopaths think, and can’t be bothered to actually ask and learn without my head up my rear end, so I am going to make a bunch of ridiculous assumptions, and then “study” these assumptions in a group of people that could never be considered psychopathic, in the first place, but it confirms my assumptions, so yay me.”

Just wow. There is such a total lack of cognitive empathy. Maybe there should be a Psychopath University, so people like this dude could learn how to think outside of his own internal chorus of, “I’M SO AWESOME AND SMART!!!” It would serve him, and the public, well.

Also, I self-reflect more than almost anyone I know, so again, incorrect assumptions.

Also, also, impulsivity has to do with boredom. Not whatever blah blah blah that you listed.

Next.

But there is also a third possibility: that some types of psychopathy are associated with low emotional awareness, while others are not. Although less frequently discussed outside of research settings, psychologists actually distinguish between two types of psychopathy: so-called “primary” and “secondary” psychopathy. A major difference between these two types of psychopathy is in how a person’s traits were acquired.

Oh good lord, this again? Sociopathy has nothing to do with psychopathy. Nothing. It is not “acquired psychopathy”. It is sociopathy. It is created, not born, and the traits are totally different. So, this dude thought to himself, meh, it’s fine. We’ll do a “study” that conflates psychopathy and sociopathy, and then be surprised that we didn’t get any clear answers. Of course, you freaking didn’t, numskull. You also wouldn’t get clear answers if you conflated borderline personality disorder and the growth habits of cedar trees. What is happening right now? Who are these people giving out PhDs for this nonsense. This, above all else, has demonstrated to me what a scam college and universities have become. How much did this dude pay for that degree. Too much. Way too much.

We are skipping the part where he defines psychopathy and sociopathy, of course, calling them “psychopathy and secondary psychopathy”. There is no reason to go through it, as it’s pretty simple.

Psychopathy- Born. Always.

Sociopathy-Possible genetic roots. Caused by severe abuse, neglect and/or prolonged trauma.

That’s it. It doesn’t need five paragraphs in the midst of an article regarding something else entirely. Also, it’s going to be as accurate as the rest of this writing has been so far. I don’t need my readers eyes to melt out of their heads, so we’re skipping it.

The Role of Childhood Abuse and Neglect

Our findings showed that emotional awareness was lower in people with stronger psychopathic tendencies, but only if they had experienced childhood abuse/neglect. This and other results suggested that emotional awareness was only lower in those with secondary psychopathy. In contrast, many people with primary psychopathy (i.e., high psychopathy without childhood trauma) still showed high levels of emotional awareness.

You mean… psychopaths and sociopaths are totally different. Oh, no, you don’t say. How can that be true…?

Good lord. You know he isn’t going to be self-aware enough to admit that his article debunks his own article and that his study is garbage. You know he’s going to pretend this is some kind of profound finding. It isn’t. Anyone with a cursory understanding of either of these things would have known that.

These results help make sense of certain aspects of psychopathy that might seem contradictory. For example, one might ask how a psychopath can be skilled at manipulating others’ emotions but also unaware of those emotions. Our study suggests that both of these things probably aren’t true for any single psychopath, and that the specific type of psychopathy matters.

Sociopathy is NOT psychopathy. It is not a type of it, it isn’t related to it, it is nothing like it. This is like comparing a blanket to a swimming pool. Your study suggests that you don’t know what you’re talking about, don’t care, and wrote about it anyway. There is one type of psychopathy. Psychopathy. That’s it. There’s not a second one. There aren’t types of psychopathy. It’s just one thing. Why do people insist on making things unnecessarily complicated by conflating things, and then being shocked when things don’t make any sense?

One type of psychopath may have high emotional awareness, and this may help them ruthlessly “manipulate their way to the top” in corporate positions through charm and deceit (primary psychopathy). Another type of psychopath may have low emotional awareness, act on their own emotions without reflecting on them, and make risky/impulsive choices that land them in prison (secondary psychopathy).

Again, stereotypes on both sides here. It seems that he is trying to say that psychopaths are the CEOs, and sociopaths are the criminals. Not how any of that works. There are psychopaths in prison, and sociopaths that are very successful in life. None of this is helpful in understanding anything.

Our findings also link together with other work to highlight ways low emotional awareness in secondary psychopathy could result from early learning processes. If a child is left alone all day (parental neglect), or if they most often observe anger and feel fear/shame (in the context of abuse), then they would be expected to have trouble understanding emotions. This is because they simply wouldn’t get to see and experience a wide enough range of emotions in themselves and others to learn from.

This entire article is asinine. What happens to a person to create sociopathy is not something that should be overshadowed by trying to lump it in with psychopathy. Can we just take a moment and step back? Can we just look at what happens to create sociopathy and comment on that alone, instead of trying to loop it into the apparently “more interesting” term of psychopathy? So often I hear how emotional empathy is so damn important, and I lack it totally. However, in my preferred state of having cognitive empathy alone, I can see that this is one more process of dismissing the agony that builds sociopathy from the ground up in an unwilling child, subjected to the horrors cooked up in their primary caregivers mind.

You would think that these “psychologists” would have enough wherewithal to see this for what it is. It is the further disregard for the person that already went through hell on earth. It’s interesting. It seems like their need to make sociopathy into psychopathy is victim blaming. Now, usually I hate that term. I think it’s nonsense. I think that there is responsibility to be had when bad things happen to someone because they make bad decisions. Nope. Don’t care. Should have been smarter.

However, sociopaths are made prior to the age of six according to research. Children can’t make those choices, and have no responsibility in what is created in them through a wretched environment. Now, do I think if a sociopath commits crimes later on, their sociopathy should be a mitigating factor? No. You committed the crime, deal with the consequences. However, this sort of conflation seems to be intentional.

You see, psychopaths are born. We are wired standardly without the emotions that he is speaking about. Sociopaths, on the other hand, have these emotions essentially beaten out of them. You can see what he thinks about psychopathy in his article. He stated:

…psychopathy can be associated with torture, murder, and an utter disregard for the well-being of others.

There is no, “Psychopaths are usually normal people with lives, jobs, and families.” Nope, the only mention is how we are apparently torturers, murders, and all around d*cks. And sociopaths are the same thing. I think there is something to be said for sociopaths being shafted in terms of research, but this makes it clear that they are also shafted in terms of consideration. You don’t become a sociopath because you had a great life and watched too many gore videos. That’s not how it works.

Our findings also link together with other work to highlight ways low emotional awareness in secondary psychopathy could result from early learning processes. If a child is left alone all day (parental neglect), or if they most often observe anger and feel fear/shame (in the context of abuse), then they would be expected to have trouble understanding emotions. This is because they simply wouldn’t get to see and experience a wide enough range of emotions in themselves and others to learn from.

Wow, it seems that there might be a hint of what I was talking about in this paragraph. I think that this article would have been far better served by addressing sociopathy on its own, without a singular mention of psychopathy. There might have been some progress made in terms of understanding. I don’t know how well sociopathy can be diagnosed prior to the brain developing, and frankly, it is unlikely that we will get an answer on that any time soon. Sociopathy is simply not discussed on its own. It gets no attention without the more “glamorous” psychopathy, which is quite unfortunate, if you ask me.

However, I don’t think that a cohort of 177 people is going to have nearly enough people that were abused, let alone likely even one abused to the point that sociopathy would develop. In other words, yet again, this study was trash.

In support of this idea, a previous study in our lab specifically showed that emotional awareness was lower in people who had experienced abuse/neglect. In this light, one might even gain a bit of empathy for individuals with secondary psychopathy, as their undesirable traits may stem largely from getting “unlucky” with poor parenting and a lack of opportunities for social/emotional learning.

You don’t need to have empathy for sociopaths in order to properly study them. You could just, you know, study them… properly. You could look at the situation dispassionately and try to backwards engineer how we got here. What you don’t need to do is put them in the psychopathic arena. It makes them seem irredeemable, and it makes them seem inevitable with all the mis/disinformation that this article trades in regarding us.

Key points

Individuals with psychopathic tendencies show a lack of empathy, but they can also be charming and manipulative.

Low empathy could stem from low awareness of others' emotions, while manipulation skills seem to suggest high awareness of others' emotions.

A study shows lower emotional awareness in those with greater psychopathy levels, but only if they also experienced childhood abuse/neglect.

Many high-psychopathy individuals without childhood abuse/neglect had high levels of emotional awareness, possibly helping them be manipulative.

When you hear the word psychopath, some scary people come to mind. In the extreme, psychopathy can be associated with torture, murder, and an utter disregard for the well-being of others.

An open question, however, is why psychopaths do not show empathy or remorse for the suffering they cause in others. One possibility is that they have low emotional awareness. In other words, they could fail to show empathy simply because they don’t recognize or pay attention to how others are feeling; that is, they may not really know about or understand others' emotions.

But another possibility is that they truly don’t care. In other words, they might be very aware that another person is suffering, but simply feel no desire to help them (and perhaps even enjoy it).

In a recent study [1], we tried to answer this question by measuring both emotional awareness and psychopathic tendencies in the same individuals. This allowed us to test whether higher psychopathy scores were associated with lower emotional awareness scores, or whether high-psychopathy individuals were just as aware of emotions as anyone else.

What did we find? As is often the case in research, the answer wasn’t a simple “yes” or “no.” Instead, as I will explain below, it appeared to depend on whether an individual experienced childhood maltreatment, such as abuse or neglect.

Before conducting the study, we weren’t sure what we might find. This is because some psychopathic traits seem to indicate high emotional awareness, while others suggest low emotional awareness.

For example, some psychopaths can be very charming and manipulative. This suggests they know how others are feeling and are good at exploiting that knowledge for their own gain. These so-called “successful psychopaths” can also attain corporate leadership positions that require good social and emotional skills [2].

On the other hand, many psychopaths have trouble paying attention to things that aren’t helpful in serving their own selfish goals [3]. So, you might think they are simply unaware of others’ emotions due to a lack of attention. Psychopaths show other traits linked to low emotional awareness as well, such as impulsivity and lack of reflective thinking [4, 5].

But there is also a third possibility: that some types of psychopathy are associated with low emotional awareness, while others are not. Although less frequently discussed outside of research settings, psychologists actually distinguish between two types of psychopathy: so-called “primary” and “secondary” psychopathy [6]. A major difference between these two types of psychopathy is in how a person’s traits were acquired.

Defining Primary vs. Secondary Psychopathy

People with primary psychopathy may have been “born that way”. In other words, they may have genes that promote psychopathic personality traits, and no specific event may have caused them to start acting the way they do.

In contrast, secondary psychopathy may be caused by childhood trauma, such as abuse/neglect. In other words, psychopathic tendencies in such individuals may develop in response to traumatic events as a coping mechanism. To be clear, the vast majority of people who experience childhood trauma do not become psychopaths, but this does appear to happen on occasion.

People with primary and secondary psychopathy also show important behavioral differences. For example, individuals with primary psychopathy tend to be more socially successful, deceitful, ruthless, and manipulative, and their emotional responses appear dampened.

In contrast, those with secondary psychopathy can experience intense negative emotion (e.g., anger, frustration), they show greater risk-taking, impulsivity, short-term thinking, and antisocial/violent criminal behavior, and they often end up in prison [7]. When considering these differences, one might therefore think secondary psychopathy is more likely to involve low emotional awareness.

To examine this possibility, our study also gathered information about whether individuals had experienced childhood maltreatment, whether they felt intense negative emotions, and whether they showed other traits and behaviors consistent with primary vs. secondary psychopathy.

The Role of Childhood Abuse and Neglect

Our findings showed that emotional awareness was lower in people with stronger psychopathic tendencies, but only if they had experienced childhood abuse/neglect. This and other results suggested that emotional awareness was only lower in those with secondary psychopathy. In contrast, many people with primary psychopathy (i.e., high psychopathy without childhood trauma) still showed high levels of emotional awareness.

These results help make sense of certain aspects of psychopathy that might seem contradictory. For example, one might ask how a psychopath can be skilled at manipulating others’ emotions but also unaware of those emotions. Our study suggests that both of these things probably aren’t true for any single psychopath, and that the specific type of psychopathy matters.

One type of psychopath may have high emotional awareness, and this may help them ruthlessly “manipulate their way to the top” in corporate positions through charm and deceit (primary psychopathy). Another type of psychopath may have low emotional awareness, act on their own emotions without reflecting on them, and make risky/impulsive choices that land them in prison (secondary psychopathy).

Our findings also link together with other work to highlight ways low emotional awareness in secondary psychopathy could result from early learning processes. If a child is left alone all day (parental neglect), or if they most often observe anger and feel fear/shame (in the context of abuse), then they would be expected to have trouble understanding emotions. This is because they simply wouldn’t get to see and experience a wide enough range of emotions in themselves and others to learn from.

In support of this idea, a previous study in our lab [8] specifically showed that emotional awareness was lower in people who had experienced abuse/neglect. In this light, one might even gain a bit of empathy for individuals with secondary psychopathy, as their undesirable traits may stem largely from getting “unlucky” with poor parenting and a lack of opportunities for social/emotional learning.

It's important to keep in mind that this was just a single study and that it recruited volunteer participants from around a university. While some participants had high psychopathy scores, this is still different than studying prisoners or ruthless businessmen. More research is needed to make sure we would see the same pattern when studying such individuals.

Nope. You don’t get to write this whole article about your “study” and then try to sort of side step it’s uselessness by stating, “Well… it’s not a great cohort, or a great study.”

More research is needed to make sure you see the same pattern? You would first have to do research. This study does not qualify. At all.

That being said, it is helpful to see how the puzzle of psychopathy, empathy, and emotional awareness may fit together and how childhood maltreatment may lead to these dangerous patterns of behavior. Exploring ways to improve emotional awareness in individuals with secondary psychopathy, as is done in some psychotherapies, may also be important as we seek ways to minimize its negative impact.

Again, nope. Nothing in this article demonstrated anything about psychopathy, sociopathy, or anything else for that matter. If you want to help sociopaths, great! I commend you. Get after it. God knows they need the help. However, calling them secondary psychopaths, that is just another form of dismissing what they have had to deal with to get where they are. They aren’t psychopaths, and they never will be. This is not some sort of exclusive club that I am gatekeeping. I am pointing out that by calling them secondary psychopaths, you are fundamentally misunderstanding them. You are applying all the myths and nonsense that you already apply to us, and missing a lot of great detail.

That’s deplorable. If you want to be a researcher, do better work.

That’s it. That’s the end of the article. Thank all the heavens. It’s finally over.

Edit:

Oh, my good lord. I knew the dude had a PhD, but he has a masters… in neuroscience. Ignorance is not an excuse. He should be familiar with the very basics of the human brain, and it’s development. It is only reasonable to assume that he does know, and chose to study people who do not have developed brains. Either, he doesn’t believe that brain development matters, or he knows it does, but it’s inconvenient to what he wants to do, despite it making the research garbage, so he doesn’t care. Or, and this is the worst option, he understands that this is how the world of research works, and refuses to buck against the norm, so he instead is continuing the cycle of churning out garbage that has already given us the current state of affairs, that is clearly desperately flawed.