I nave a complementary (albeit speculative) hypothesis to your proposed sociopathic enlargement of the amigdala, which I refer to as the reversal of the moral compass.
I suspect this situation could unfold as a defensive mechanism for people who go through extended periods of intense emotional pain - they become so consumed by affective suffering... they simply learn to enjoy it, for self-protection.
They especially enjoy to provoke it in others, as a sort of misguided attempt to foot the emotional bill. At the same time, they start to regard happinness as a prelude to pain (everything that rises must fall) so begin to shudder at it.
This reversal of the moral compass could make up for the malignant layer in NPD and ASPD. Its malignancy doesn't necessarily manifest explicitly as a criminal type, and sometimes seems to express more subtly as the miserable type of person who absolutely loves making other miserable - a sadistic temper, simply put. The very antithesis to emotional empathy, this makes the person prone to "feeling against" rather than "feeling with".
"The hypothesis that I have is that sadistic psychopaths were horrifically abused, which caused their amygdala to become slightly larger than that of a normal psychopath. In that transition, and with the rest of the emotional processing not available, and as a response to the abuse (psychopaths don’t internalize abuse, we externalize it) they become sadistic..."
I believe this could very well be the case. As childrens brains are still developing it is very possible for the brain to make adjustments.
I was also thinking, being that psychopathy is on a scale, like everything else, that some may naturally have a small unnoteable amount is empathy, due to a slightly larger amygdala, naturally, then add abuse to that and you could have a very dangerous person. Idk, what do think?
I agree that you'd have to have empathy to be sadistic, just because what else would motivate such action?
I also wonder if he was including secondary psychopaths in this study, or do we know?
You said, "psychopaths don’t internalize abuse, we externalize it." What do you mean by "externalize it"? (And also please correct me if I am wrong, I think "internalizing abuse" means sort of absorbing or putting the voice of the abuser inside one's own head??)
And also, great post btw. Conflating psychopaths and sadists just makes for a more confusing world.
I think there is an unbreachable gulf between your experience and neurotypicals when it comes to physical pain. You experienced this as a dancer. Dancers are very hardcore tough nuts. You were even more so. It is a mistake to look for an EMOTIONAL reason why people cannot function in the throes of a cluster or migraine, which for a regular sufferer has no emotional dimension, its just here we go again, physical suffering again, no danger. I think the obvious answer is just that they HURT MORE for other people. Like maybe as much as your meningitis. Reflect on your extreme agony deranged experience. Maybe that's how these pains feel to some people. We have pains we can disregard, and pains that incapacitate, that's just how it is. I have always striven to manage pain as a point of, I dunno, what? I'm not sure why, but I did. But after a point, I can't.
There is a curious and anomalous example of someone with congenital insensibility to physical pain. Usually, these people destroy their bodies in infancy and later live careful lives very compromised by past multiple injuries. But there is a British woman who apparently feels no pain but remains uninjured and empathic and has had a very normal life. She just thought other people must somehow feel more than she does. Her childbirths were pain free. She cared for her partners and children with great understanding, but not with the same fierceness that would be typical.
These oddball examples just point out the complexity of the situation. I believe it is a mistake to look for an emotional component to pain when wondering why other people are incapacitated and you are not. Emotional pains, sure, that is a given when you are psycopathic, but non-deathly physical pains, no. Until we have some gadget that is able to transfer pain brain to brain just for the hell of it, there will always be gulfs in understanding. Even with no fear or dread, the neurotypicals pain may be way in excess of yours. Obviously I can't KNOW this for sure. But your writings about your experience very much suggest so. Looking to fear and emotion here I believe is a mistake.
Meanwhile, it makes sense what you say that the average psycopath has no interest in sadism, but that the terribly abused might just go that way. It is generally true that in all neurotypes that cruelty CAN result in a perpetuating of that. For myself, as an abused person, there was a time when I was a nasty and vengeful price of work, though it was mostly in my head and I did little actual harm beyond snarkiness. I can imagine myself into a brainspace where sadism felt like something natural and indifferent, but somehow necessary, even though psychopathy prevented a full appraisal of the suffering inflicted on the victim.
How does this discussion of sadism tie in with your saying that you by admission have a cruel streak? Is that something that was purely pragmatic and tactical at the time and which you thought had no emotional weight? Or something that you deployed against someone for whom vengeance seemed deserving? Or you just not getting it at all because emotional pain equals zero and its too easy to be 'nasty'?
So something that is seldom discussed is that masochists recruit and train their tormentors. Steven Pinker pointed this out in one of his books though I can't recall what it is off the top of my head. It's not the new, fresh, prison guards who are the worst it's the seasoned veterans etc.
So about masochist recruiting, I've had that happen and I will say it was sort of fun at first. the thing is that the girl and later multiple girls were having a GREAT time. I was scrupulous about things like safe words and obvious physical conditions but I wasn't getting much in the way of arousal from scenes. So, I left. I still don't get what drives a real masochist and I've long since lost interest in them.
I imagined there could be curiosity as motivation. Toying with people and seeing how they will react. You are bothered by drama. Could someone in theory see squirming breaking person as entertaining, as a challenge - finding a way to crack them, finding a way to play them in this and that direction, finding how different people are played differently. What ordinary and not so ordinary poking will do what. Shaping clay, taking apart a machine, testing limits of something.
Your interest is more in perspectives, talking and observing will do. And driving someone to insanity would be too easy and not so informative (beside all the drama).
Can curiosity induce fixation? You say you are stubborn. Passion is wrong word. But how about relentless want to achieve something. And that wouldn't be about power and control and self aggrandizement. Merely that challenge occupies mind that wants its stimulation.
I'd think of sadism to overlap more with traits of borderline personality disorder or sociopathy. SPD was a thing in the DSM-III but it got scratched in later editions and was never properly clustered and I have a pretty straightforward answer for it - physical or emotional sadism is pretty much just bullying. At least with psychopathy or any other personality disorder there's some kind of aspect that the individual is missing out on (ex: lack of empathy, isolation, identity disturbance) but I don't see the same thing with sadists. Overly toxic or aggressive people just come across as arseholes to me, I don't look at them and think "oh, they must have (insert personality disorder)" because usually that's not the case and there's plenty of people who are just unpleasant to be around and never went through any trauma.
From what I can gather sadists seem rather cowardly and bogus, their venom is entirely counterphobic to that heightened anxiety they feel which sociopaths and psychopaths don't. For ASPD, manipulation is a modus operandi whereas for sadists it's a means of picking on powerless scapegoats which I personally find rather pathetic.
The only place I can see this being productive is some kind of law enforcement job, where they possess the "right" to control and punish those who won't submit to them.
One thing I have to nitpick about the 2012 study though is that it somehow implies that sociopaths can feel guilt or remorse, lol? As if that's not one of the criteria for ASPD. Though Robert Hare said the difference is that sociopaths lack empathy compared to an average person and it doesn't exist for psychopaths I'm more prone to viewing the two as mostly the same but sociopath is better for semantics due to the unfortunate confusion between psychopathy and psychosis.
I dunno, I get that there's two different dimensions and that the affective/interpersonal facet of psychopathy is separate for impulsive and antisocial behaviors but I have both facets do differentiating the two can be irrelevant for my purposes sometimes. I'm yet to come across one person formally diagnosed with psychopathy or ASPD that doesn't have traits of both regardless of the subtle differences in brain structure and I can't say I've really met anyone with ASPD who experiences strong anxiety/depression or PTSD symptoms, co-morbid drug abuse is a different story.
I nave a complementary (albeit speculative) hypothesis to your proposed sociopathic enlargement of the amigdala, which I refer to as the reversal of the moral compass.
I suspect this situation could unfold as a defensive mechanism for people who go through extended periods of intense emotional pain - they become so consumed by affective suffering... they simply learn to enjoy it, for self-protection.
They especially enjoy to provoke it in others, as a sort of misguided attempt to foot the emotional bill. At the same time, they start to regard happinness as a prelude to pain (everything that rises must fall) so begin to shudder at it.
This reversal of the moral compass could make up for the malignant layer in NPD and ASPD. Its malignancy doesn't necessarily manifest explicitly as a criminal type, and sometimes seems to express more subtly as the miserable type of person who absolutely loves making other miserable - a sadistic temper, simply put. The very antithesis to emotional empathy, this makes the person prone to "feeling against" rather than "feeling with".
"The hypothesis that I have is that sadistic psychopaths were horrifically abused, which caused their amygdala to become slightly larger than that of a normal psychopath. In that transition, and with the rest of the emotional processing not available, and as a response to the abuse (psychopaths don’t internalize abuse, we externalize it) they become sadistic..."
I believe this could very well be the case. As childrens brains are still developing it is very possible for the brain to make adjustments.
I was also thinking, being that psychopathy is on a scale, like everything else, that some may naturally have a small unnoteable amount is empathy, due to a slightly larger amygdala, naturally, then add abuse to that and you could have a very dangerous person. Idk, what do think?
I agree that you'd have to have empathy to be sadistic, just because what else would motivate such action?
I also wonder if he was including secondary psychopaths in this study, or do we know?
As always, well written and interesting.
You said, "psychopaths don’t internalize abuse, we externalize it." What do you mean by "externalize it"? (And also please correct me if I am wrong, I think "internalizing abuse" means sort of absorbing or putting the voice of the abuser inside one's own head??)
And also, great post btw. Conflating psychopaths and sadists just makes for a more confusing world.
I think there is an unbreachable gulf between your experience and neurotypicals when it comes to physical pain. You experienced this as a dancer. Dancers are very hardcore tough nuts. You were even more so. It is a mistake to look for an EMOTIONAL reason why people cannot function in the throes of a cluster or migraine, which for a regular sufferer has no emotional dimension, its just here we go again, physical suffering again, no danger. I think the obvious answer is just that they HURT MORE for other people. Like maybe as much as your meningitis. Reflect on your extreme agony deranged experience. Maybe that's how these pains feel to some people. We have pains we can disregard, and pains that incapacitate, that's just how it is. I have always striven to manage pain as a point of, I dunno, what? I'm not sure why, but I did. But after a point, I can't.
There is a curious and anomalous example of someone with congenital insensibility to physical pain. Usually, these people destroy their bodies in infancy and later live careful lives very compromised by past multiple injuries. But there is a British woman who apparently feels no pain but remains uninjured and empathic and has had a very normal life. She just thought other people must somehow feel more than she does. Her childbirths were pain free. She cared for her partners and children with great understanding, but not with the same fierceness that would be typical.
These oddball examples just point out the complexity of the situation. I believe it is a mistake to look for an emotional component to pain when wondering why other people are incapacitated and you are not. Emotional pains, sure, that is a given when you are psycopathic, but non-deathly physical pains, no. Until we have some gadget that is able to transfer pain brain to brain just for the hell of it, there will always be gulfs in understanding. Even with no fear or dread, the neurotypicals pain may be way in excess of yours. Obviously I can't KNOW this for sure. But your writings about your experience very much suggest so. Looking to fear and emotion here I believe is a mistake.
Meanwhile, it makes sense what you say that the average psycopath has no interest in sadism, but that the terribly abused might just go that way. It is generally true that in all neurotypes that cruelty CAN result in a perpetuating of that. For myself, as an abused person, there was a time when I was a nasty and vengeful price of work, though it was mostly in my head and I did little actual harm beyond snarkiness. I can imagine myself into a brainspace where sadism felt like something natural and indifferent, but somehow necessary, even though psychopathy prevented a full appraisal of the suffering inflicted on the victim.
How does this discussion of sadism tie in with your saying that you by admission have a cruel streak? Is that something that was purely pragmatic and tactical at the time and which you thought had no emotional weight? Or something that you deployed against someone for whom vengeance seemed deserving? Or you just not getting it at all because emotional pain equals zero and its too easy to be 'nasty'?
Sadism yeah.
So something that is seldom discussed is that masochists recruit and train their tormentors. Steven Pinker pointed this out in one of his books though I can't recall what it is off the top of my head. It's not the new, fresh, prison guards who are the worst it's the seasoned veterans etc.
So about masochist recruiting, I've had that happen and I will say it was sort of fun at first. the thing is that the girl and later multiple girls were having a GREAT time. I was scrupulous about things like safe words and obvious physical conditions but I wasn't getting much in the way of arousal from scenes. So, I left. I still don't get what drives a real masochist and I've long since lost interest in them.
I still like playing with bullwhips though :P
I imagined there could be curiosity as motivation. Toying with people and seeing how they will react. You are bothered by drama. Could someone in theory see squirming breaking person as entertaining, as a challenge - finding a way to crack them, finding a way to play them in this and that direction, finding how different people are played differently. What ordinary and not so ordinary poking will do what. Shaping clay, taking apart a machine, testing limits of something.
Your interest is more in perspectives, talking and observing will do. And driving someone to insanity would be too easy and not so informative (beside all the drama).
Can curiosity induce fixation? You say you are stubborn. Passion is wrong word. But how about relentless want to achieve something. And that wouldn't be about power and control and self aggrandizement. Merely that challenge occupies mind that wants its stimulation.
I'd think of sadism to overlap more with traits of borderline personality disorder or sociopathy. SPD was a thing in the DSM-III but it got scratched in later editions and was never properly clustered and I have a pretty straightforward answer for it - physical or emotional sadism is pretty much just bullying. At least with psychopathy or any other personality disorder there's some kind of aspect that the individual is missing out on (ex: lack of empathy, isolation, identity disturbance) but I don't see the same thing with sadists. Overly toxic or aggressive people just come across as arseholes to me, I don't look at them and think "oh, they must have (insert personality disorder)" because usually that's not the case and there's plenty of people who are just unpleasant to be around and never went through any trauma.
From what I can gather sadists seem rather cowardly and bogus, their venom is entirely counterphobic to that heightened anxiety they feel which sociopaths and psychopaths don't. For ASPD, manipulation is a modus operandi whereas for sadists it's a means of picking on powerless scapegoats which I personally find rather pathetic.
The only place I can see this being productive is some kind of law enforcement job, where they possess the "right" to control and punish those who won't submit to them.
One thing I have to nitpick about the 2012 study though is that it somehow implies that sociopaths can feel guilt or remorse, lol? As if that's not one of the criteria for ASPD. Though Robert Hare said the difference is that sociopaths lack empathy compared to an average person and it doesn't exist for psychopaths I'm more prone to viewing the two as mostly the same but sociopath is better for semantics due to the unfortunate confusion between psychopathy and psychosis.
I dunno, I get that there's two different dimensions and that the affective/interpersonal facet of psychopathy is separate for impulsive and antisocial behaviors but I have both facets do differentiating the two can be irrelevant for my purposes sometimes. I'm yet to come across one person formally diagnosed with psychopathy or ASPD that doesn't have traits of both regardless of the subtle differences in brain structure and I can't say I've really met anyone with ASPD who experiences strong anxiety/depression or PTSD symptoms, co-morbid drug abuse is a different story.
Do you find that you have a shorter temper when you're in pain?