Female Psychopathy

Chu said:
In case some of you haven't watched it, one of the best portrayals of the female psychopath I've ever seen is in Mildred Pierce, with Joan Crawford. I don't want to spoil it, but just look at her daughter's behavior!

Another movie that comes to mind is All about Eve, which I tend to confuse with the Three faces of Eve, but that's about a different psychological condition. Anyway, in All about Eve the female psychopath is portrayed as this "fragile", "helpful" and subservient girl, who slowly slowly makes her way from the sidelines to the center, with lies, manipulation, "working" people and causing them to lose their wits, until it all becomes about her so that she gets what she wants. It's a classic with great casting and performances, if any of you haven't watched it.
 
Chu said:
In case some of you haven't watched it, one of the best portrayals of the female psychopath I've ever seen is in Mildred Pierce, with Joan Crawford. I don't want to spoil it, but just look at her daughter's behavior!

Synopsis: Whatever Veda wants, her mother, Mildred Pierce provides. Even if Mildred must end her marriage, climb atop the male-dominated business world and marry a wealthy man she doesn't love.

That's interesting. Years ago my sister told me about this book 'Mommie Dearest', written by Joan Crawford's adopted daughter, who depicted another side of Crawford, a side the public never saw. My sister told me about it, as the actress reminded her of our mother.
One of Crawford's traits was promiscuity. She cut her daughter out of her will and she experienced violent outbursts of anger. Psychopathic traits?
It was said that she suffered from Borderline Personality Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and that she was an alcoholic.
That would be the ultimate (pity) ploy, wouldn't it, a female psychopath (assuming she is one) that plays the role of a victim/the mother of a female psychopath.

_http://www.theguardian.com/film/2008/may/25/biography.film

_http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mommie_Dearest

Added:
Crawford sent her daughter Christina to boarding school when she was 10 years old. That's another way of abandoning one's kids.
 
This makes it harder to understand psychopathy. It's not as simple as I thought, actually it fits the description of the cs'. Psychopaths are just people that lack the capacity of being stable, responsible human beings. Most of them can pretend to be good at everything, but for some reason they lack responsibility with their peers, and if something define all of these people, is not only their unstable nature but their crave for provoking others, as if feelings of victory or the defeat of others assures their illusions, and that makes them feel good and it looks that all of that happens unconsciously, the process, the beliefs.

Understanding psychopathy only from the psychiatric and psychological point of view is very hard, but taking into consideration the concept of a soul and ethereal realms make it even harder. Maybe psychopaths are people that rely so much on illusions they loose their humanity, or maybe the lack of humanity makes them rely on illusions.

Thanks for sharing.
 
Now I want to add something more of a personal experience. Sometimes I go for the research on the net about personal experiences from others, so I just looked "diagnosed female psychopath" in google and found these:

female psychopaths meet Toxy
_http://www.psychopathicwritings.com/2011/04/female-psychopaths-meet-toxy.html

and IAmA Diagnosed Psychopath. I'm Female. AMA
_http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/otl8z/iama_diagnosed_psychopath_im_female_ama/

a supposed interview with that person
_http://neurologicalcorrelates.com/wordpress/2012/09/19/redditiama-diagnosed-psychopath-im-female-ama/

I’ve not had much experience with males psychopaths that provide for some food for thought, the typical bullies were always male but they are easy to deal with eventually. I want to share some personal experience about fourth cases as I call them with odd females, and I call them odd because they are some of the most annoying people ever. Hate been talkative, but feel like these experiences may come of help if someone meets someone like this.

1st Abused old Hag
My mother has this tendency of attract some of the nastiest people in the country, because of bad parenting and she’s very empathic. This woman came to her was capable of getting in my mother’s life, only because my mother was very afraid this woman could commit suicide as she used to say, and because my mother was lonely by the time. My mother never thought bad about her, and trusted her a lot of things, they were close friends for a period and then everything went down. This woman has made my mother cry because she’s totally nuts, and obsessed with her. I feel so bad, because her name is Laura, and I think she barely fills that tittle. She has the capacity of having minions from everywhere; they all are ignorant or hurt people from past experiences.
List of odd behavior
- My mother used to bring food and money to her, as she pulled the strings of compassion crying on phone about being alone, depressed and forgotten by her family. The truth is that nobody likes her.
- Her husband cheated on her because she is a control freak so to speak.
-She lives in a private neighborhood for soldiers and their family.
- She was abused when child, her mom used to tie her and torture her.
- She works with spirits. 3 supposed spirits enter into her body and then they talk to whoever pays for the services and then they give them certain information that she could not be able to get by herself, private information. She believed to be some special messiah and new age teacher, and she was part of a spiritual group where the purpose is to serve as a vessel of higher spirits and heal people. Pure lies, all of those women are broken.
- Because she's a soldier’s wife, and lives in a private neighborhood she uses her protection and the excuse of her husband being a soldier, to manipulate a lot of people and being literally out of everyone's reach.
- She uses to give phone calls to women she hates (she only focus her hate on women), and swear or tell lies about them like "she cheated on you, she's a -jezebel-".
- She used to use my mother empathy to manipulate her, and then stabbed her back by trash talking her with her close friends.
- She used private pictures from her to manipulate her too.
- She tried to isolate my mother, but everybody realized this old hag is crazy.
- She's ugly, I mean in all aspects she's ugly as a person and physically and I don't use to call people ugly, but she has some of the weirdest eyes and face ever, when she puts make up on her eyes her stare is totally creepy. Also I've noticed she only hate women, she never attacks any male.
- My mother was so tired about her she payed some cops to go and scare her, the cops use to deal with very angry folks and that type of people, but they came back jaw dropping and told us what happened: “We told her she needed to pay us 50 thousand pesos, or we would abduct her child rape it, kill it and then torture her, and she answered with - you can take her and do whatever you want with her, and I pay you 20 k instead. Just bring her back without too much arm." !!!!! Her child is 17 or 18 years old, and the cops were lying they have children too.
- She's lonely, very lonely and this is weird for women. I mean I know women that are not a social butterfly but have a bunch of good friends, this women does not, nobody calls her because they want but because they have to. She fought every female neighbor close to her, she stolen a lot of money from them.

Body language or nonverbal cues:
- She copies everything that is popular or that attracts attention. She hates my mother because she's a natural leader and has a lots of friends, and that's not an interpretation that is literally what she said she hates about her, and she envies she gets the attention from men so she start saying she's a -jezebel- and other nonsense
- Socially inept, she may pretend to be charming or cute or something like that, but she can't fit it right.
- Very submissive, she avoids a lot of eye contact and prefers to look down. She likes to appear fragile.
- She appears dominant only when backed up by others, one of my mom's friends was her next victim after she couldn't touch my mother. What she did was follow her in the dark with her daughter and some male friends from her. This other woman was going to her house, and this hag appeared with the group of people, and started bullying her and telling her she was going down. The old hag never touched her, she was shielded by her minions.
 
2nd case Abused and bullied girl
This girl is very weird. So I don't know if she's a psychopath or just likes finding ways to defend herself in her own way. This is what was my step sister, or the daughter of my third dad’s wife.

List of odd behavior
- Attention seeking, she likes and adores attention. She used to hug my father in front of me with the purpose of making me jealous.

- She pretends to be emotional and victim of bad parenting and it is partially, she is the daughter of a drug dealer that abused extremely her mother while she was watching the whole thing, and I bet he abused sexually of her daughter too. The thing here is, that she uses this as an excuse and then behaves very irresponsible. She’s only responsible in school because she wants to go from her house.

- She once asked to her mom: Mother if I die will you cry for me, will you feel pain? Her mother said “why would you ask me that of course?”, she then smiled and said “I just want to know”. She tried to blackmail one day with suicide, but it was only once because her mom gave her the beaten of her life after she did, she didn’t like at all the pain so she forgot the idea.

- After pretending to be emotional, she then goes and has the most shallow life ever, is like outside the house she puts the mask of being charming, of worrying about others, then she comes back home and is very irresponsible, it brought me a lot of problems because she was using my sometimes cursing words as a teenager I used to say with my lil 4 yrs old brother, then my brother talks with those words and they spanked me believing it was me, and she lack personal hygiene and leave everything dirty in the bathroom and dirty clothes and trash around the house.
- She adores making people feel bad, especially if she has sized the consequences and knows that nothing wrong would happen. Every time she made me or someone inside the house mad, she had this smile in her face while she gave the back to the annoyed person, acquire a posture of sadness while her face at the other side was expressing total joy. One day I was feeling so angry and she noticed, so she started to behave passive aggressive to provoke me to the point I destroyed the door of her room with brute force, I went nuts and of course they spanked me. She tried to play the victim, but since then she thinks very carefully about molesting me.

- One day I was alone with her and I was sitting on the couch, she put herself on me and opened her legs and put her crotch on my head and started to supposedly, fight me or something but noticed she was rubbing to much her vagina against my back, then I moved and she said it felt weird. Then minutes later, I had to bring something to her room, she put herself on knees and looked at my private parts and told me she wanted to take my pants off :scared: Be aware, she was 14 or 15 years old by the time.

- Everybody was able to forgive her, but I was getting paranoid, I was so totally disgusted by this kid I just avoided her. As she noticed I wouldn't take excuses anymore, she like the challenge and was always trying to gain my trust and affection, she was like stalking me and hunting me whenever she could and it always had this sexual touch in it. The way she dressed and the way she looked at me creeped the hell out of me.

Body language
- She's not submissive, at the contrary she was very sexual in the way she dressed and the way she talks to some boys and men. I can't believe I'm saying this, because she was very young but she acted like a mature women sometimes. She had this natural love for makeup, I'm not saying this is bad but most of little girls at that age like make up but do not use it daily, she like to do it daily she like to put lipstick and eyeliner a lot.

- When we had visits she always looked for opportunities to play the victim, and make everyone look as the abusers. Being honest everyone in that house were put under stress, his kid was never put under stress anywhere, the only time she was put under stress was when she had to do the house chores, she didn’t like it at all. She used to take pieces of food from others, or put a lot of food on her plate, eat two or three pieces and then throw it to the can as if we were rich. She likes to play a lot of unnecessary dramas, and always as the victim role or the only moral role in the play.
 
3rd case Promiscuous mother

After my mom broke up with her boyfriend, after he cheated like 10 times on her she went into deep depression to the point of almost suicide. So I came back to home, she took back energies and some motive to be alive again and she was looking for new friends, she was pretty alone by the time. And then she meet this woman, this woman is a lawyer, has been divorced once and has one daughter... nothing suspicious right, she's also very charming. but here’s the list:

- She used her cleverness and friends to intimidate others, she knows federal cops, people with a lot of money, and she has no problem sleeping with them if they give her what she needs.

- She sleeps with married man, and then sends anonymous pictures of them to their wives, and she likes to bully their wives in secret while they are not aware at all. Causing divorces, and family problems, she really adores this hobby of hers.

- She has at least 3 or 4 partners at the same time, and none of them know it. The fewer has been 2 partners at the same time, and when they realized what was going on, heartbreak all the way. She moved away without any remorse, she also told my mother she can’t think of her as loyal to one man. Before she got married, she wanted to marry a soldier, but at the same time she was attracted to this other guy who never fell completely for her, until she was able to take him to bed and become pregnant from him. That led him or being more specific, forced him to get married to him. And read this, she used to say he made her jealous and probably cheated on her, and that’s why she divorced.

- She always got jealous of my mother, it was as if my mother was a possession for her so she trash talked about my mother's friends whenever she could. Mom used to provide the family she never had, because this odd female is lonely too and has not a lot of friends.

- She used to be since the beginning extremely friendly with me, and I'm experienced enough to know this is not a good thing. So lot of times I caught her staring at me like she was trying to read me, like she was trying to figure out what I was. I always behaved gentle with her though I could never trust nor respect someone like her.

- We believe she caused all the trouble between my mom and the old hag, because the old hag was before of her my mom’s best friend, because she was the one that told my mother the old hag was trash talking about her, only she heard about it and nobody else. This brought my mom to start being resented and then as any immature woman, indirectly joke about her. She tried to steal my mother's new boyfriend because he's a millionaire. She used to play with him but when she heard he fell in love for my mother her mask was taken off.

- She likes to inscribe her daughter in a lot of activities so she has not to deal with her through the day. She said it; she prefers to put her away than playing with her.

Body language or nonverbal cues

- Whenever she has to deal with her daughter, this lacks of total affection, is like she try to modify a little bit her voice tonality but never express that natural mom affection towards her children. She talks to her like a little pet she needs to control, and I don't know what she does to her but she once told her "if you do not behave, remember what happened when we got back home the other day", what's weird is that she never said "Behave or I take off your doll, or I will hit you" or any of those things moms use to say, she was very secretive about what she did to her back in home. After this, that girl went from hyper active to a total obedient child.

- Whenever she is in public, she now pretends to love a lot her daughter and talk about her as the love of her life. When she’s not, she clearly do not care about expressing a lot of affection towards her.

- She says yes to everything to everyone, she plays dumb and feminine, she smiles in a charming way and agree with what everyone says. This way I've noticed she gains the trust of almost everyone, pretends to be putting attention and then forget what you just said. My mother noticed this and told me.

- She flirted with me through intense eye contact (creep the hell out of me again).

- Uses a lot of make up to the point she looks totally different.

- None of her sisters like her and vice versa.
 
4rd Case My teacher
Now this is a total new case I found since 2012, she was my teacher in university and I still have my doubts, even if she’s not a psycho I don’t trust her.

Let me give you a description of events. She was a new teacher in college, and she is very very attractive and least with make up, I will explain why I say this in a moment. I looked at her because she was naturally pretty, she attracted a lot of eyes and well I thought it was normal for her. She caught me looking at her, I thought she was a new mate or something as she appears very young but when I found out she was a new teacher I felt so ashamed so I forgot about it. It seemed she didn't care, so I was ok with it and nobody had I problem.

The problem came when I found that as the other girl, she started chasing me, she tried so hard to have eye contact and pull my attention. At first I was confused. In one occasion I caught her scanning me, I didn’t recognized who was it till I did and then looked at her expressing doubt, she reacted looking down and then ignored me. She made it obvious she was flirting with me after doing it repeatedly. I thought she was nuts because it's prohibited in my college and because she’s 10 years older than me, but I thought I could give her a try (fool me). I found out she was getting married in a month, her husband is like a teddy bear, he loves her so much, he pays for everything, buys her a dress every once in a while, and he seems to be a very nice person, and also to have a lot of money in the bank. When I found out I didn’t felt devastated, I felt 100% rage, so disappointed a psychologist would be doing this kind of thing. I actually got angry for him not so much for me. So I tried to avoid her so hard that I guess made her try harder. The problem became worse that I got a class with her so I had to be patient, I knew it was gonna be quite a challenge.

- She changed the way she dressed; whenever she had class day with me she dressed different. She changed of dressing like a professional to a, naughty way? I can't describe it, but it was clothes that fitted her body in a way that she appeared to be looking for a partner. I'm not kidding you here, I remember I had a class when I had to expose about the concept of verbal reading (ironic), and she put a dress with a low-cut, with the complete intention to almost take out her large breast. Who in the world dresses like that to go teach at university? By this point I was feeling tired of her.

- She knows a lot about psychology and brags about it, to the point she talks to those who lack that level of knowledge as inferior beings.

- I guess she never had to use a lot of the other types of manipulation, like blackmailing or something, but she has no problems controlling people: 1) her physical appearance works wonders, she just has to smile to everyone and everyone will do whatever she asks for, even when she addresses in a rude way to them 2) she’s super intelligent 3) she appears non treating, fragile and submissive.

- She told us she's a bit paranoid. This may be due to her attractiveness, so she feels everyone’s looking at her, and yes at first but nobody gives her that much importance anyways.

- She told us "I know I look very nice, but that's because you don't know me" lol !

- She likes to be in places of high status.

- I talked about her with my schoolmates, as we realized that she was not being as honest as she says.

- At the end of the semester she heard one of my friends saying she had been hiding her tummy to appear fit - for some reason she was getting very puffy, maybe a marriage symptom or sign of depression. She thought it was me without even verifying, and she put me a lower grade, and then to my friend that did a worse work put almost the highest grade. I couldn’t brag about it, because she was not going to listen.

Body language
This is hard, because I still have my doubts. Maybe she’s just a human being stressed out by job and marriage, maybe she’s just shy and has problems connecting with people and repressing emotions. And if she became attracted to me, well then maybe she just tried to appear in front of class as interesting and trustful, using these typical methods of attraction people use these days. The problem is that she’s immature, she gets into these total contradictory behaviors it doesn’t match her words. Mature women do not like to cheat, they do not think about others in particular younger than them, nor do they flirt with others in particular her students at months before marriage. I knew this other girl who was 15 and had a boyfriend, and she preferred to break up instead of lying to him. That single clue for me is enough to doubt about how much you can trust that person, psychopath or not. This woman married and kept craving my attention.

- People that are closer to her, they've told me she's first very charming and talks to you very nicely. Then she takes you for granted forgets about you and move on to the next experience, if you do not do as she says or give her little amount of problem she then acts irritated, as if she does not want to deal with you. She starts being passive aggressive and appearing as if bored of you.

- She talks fast.

- She presents herself highly moral, but then goes to drink with her students of another group and flirts with them.

- She's a loner, she doesn't seem very interested about people. If she needs something she talks to that person, but only in those cases. She's good being alone playing with her cellphone, "reading" supposedly, or using facebook.

- She moves her hands a lot while she talks, especially when she talked about her emotional problems it was as if she was indeed, reading the expression and trying to imagine it, whenever she expressed some word that is supposed to be emotional she opened her hands towards others. . Like trying to say “do you get it?” nobody needs to break their head to understand depression because it’s part of human life. She had a hard time describing those scenarios, and by the content of what she said, it never fitted her emotional expression or voice tonality.

- The only time I've seen her express something it always needs to work best for her, when it doesn't she just does not express at all.

- Blank face and stare. As if she's either thinking deeply on the moon or she's just not there.

- Very submissive and fragile, but when nobody is looking at her or she's not in front of someone it changes fast to a very dominant body language, she walks like a male, chest out, open arms, shoulders down. She also sits like a male when she can, when she was in front of me or the school director she put a more feminine posture.

- She misunderstands everything, is like she's hypersensitive to an extreme.

- She also said she thinks so fast she then loses the trail of thought.

- She flirts with every male in college not only with me. After she flirts and they give her what she needs, she forgets them, and all of them end confused. Some of them have even told me she likes them, yeah, I thought the same thing buddy.

- One day I was talking with a female friend, and she gave us this look of pure hatred, whenever in class one female friend came to sit with me, she didn't like it at all. She would either treat my friend badly or me, the problem is that she was my teacher and I depended on the grades. She would find an excuse to separate me for some dumb excuse, and I had to submit.

After she gave us that look, it was totally different to that fragile look she portrays when she needs something, that stare was like she was ready to throw a knife. We thought we were talking loudly so we stopped, she was writing on the board everybody was talking, no reason to look at us that way. She smiled and then expressed victory lifting her face and putting her chest out.

- Once I needed help about a psychometric test she was teaching us about, she tried to touch my hand and I moved away, I looked at her wedding ring and then just focused on my work. I looked up and when nobody was looking, she was staring down at me with her eyes shining so much and with very scary eyes, like the eyes of a perverted, plus the type of smile of someone enjoying. By that moment I had an expression of total disgust, and she liked it, it was as if looking that I was affected made her happy, I guess she thought I was in love with her or something and that when I looked at her ring I felt bad.

- I was disappointed she didn’t look as what I perceived about her, but one day she went to school without make up. Her face is totally full of marks, more or less like a broken mask, totally different to how she looks with all that make up.

- The way she looked at me sometimes was scary, and I'm not to be scared unless is the devil or a spider, but this was totally odd, totally out of context. Every time she seemed to put me under pressure or under control, her face expressed joy.

- Uses a lot of perfume.

- She tried to bully me, because in one class my mates were exposing but they did such a bad job I didn't learn a thing, and then she tried to put me down. I have a lot of experience dealing with bullies so I found a way to throw her on a curve; she then looked at me confused and angry.

I am not scared of females; I adore certain traits of women. To me the real leaders are women just look at families, the healthiest the family the more they trust in the mother and the female members of it (there are exceptions of course). I've had girlfriends, and I know they are not perfect, yes I know some of them, but most of the pretty women I’ve met have morals and rules about it, they know the power they may have and they use it carefully, none of them really needs the excitement of it, they don’t crave for affection from everyone, but their families and close friends.
All that they share is that they like to have sort of minions, only the old hag did not showed sexual behavior towards me (because I know about her through my mother and her friends), they use to their advantage the victim role and the fragile appearance of women. Looks like the worse the treatment they got when children, the level of dysfunction in society. The fourth case had never been in a bad scenario, she comes from a high class family and went to the best colleges.
 
By the way the fourth case my teacher had a second semester with my group, but I couldn't resist to put her on the spot. By the second semester she got married, and she asked the director to not give her this group. Kinda of a coincidence uh?
 
This is a case of a broken family by a female psychopath. Is a whole documentary about the tragedy.

Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father
_http://youtu.be/Coois9FDui0
 
Chu said:
l apprenti de forgeron said:
It's like psychopathic women really have nothing real female. Only to generate the appearance of being more in touch with their emotions, mimicking normal women.

Yeah. Like male psychopaths have nothing really "male". That is, if we speak about healthy traits. The problem is that they can fake so well!

Why I can't edit my posts?

I think the case is that psychopaths are incomplete humans, we have a psychic construct capable of giving us the power to grow and change for the better. Psychopaths resemblance that description of the chimera lacking the emotional center, to them the union of intellect and motor or body sensations is emotion maybe.

So maybe is about gender roles and parenting. When a normal human being goes suffers trauma in childhood grows dysfunctional, most of the aggressive people i've read about that are classified as psychopaths that had poor and twisted childhoods. The gender role of a male and female may become twisted in these individuals.
 
Prometeo said:
Why I can't edit my posts?
From what I understand is that, you just have 30 minutes to be able to edit/modify, passing those minutes, you can't. At certain point is good. :P
 
Cleckley and others have reported what is called an emotion paradox in psychopaths. Tests indicate that psychopaths are as good as normal subjects in recognizing and appraising emotional cues but they are unable to utilize these emotional cues to control their response in laboratory settings. Such experimental findings correlate with real life where psychopaths are found to demonstrate normal level of understanding of emotional cues and situations during abstract verbal discussions, but they are not able to apply such information to influence their judgments and behavior in actual life situations.

Newman and others have proposed a response modulation hypothesis (RMH) to account for the observed emotion paradox phenomenon.

Source:
Deficient Response Modulation and Emotion Processing in Low-Anxious Caucasian Psychopathic Offenders: Results From a Lexical Decision Task
Amanda R. Lorenz and Joseph P. Newman
APA , 2002

[quote author=Lorenz and Newman]
Response modulation is defined as a brief and highly automatic shift of attention that enables individuals to monitor and, if relevant, use information that is peripheral to their dominant response set (i.e., deliberate focus of attention).
According to the RMH, the impulsivity, poor passive avoidance, and emotion-processing deficits of psychopathic individuals may all be understood as a failure to process the meaning of information that is peripheral or incidental to their deliberate focus of attention.

Consistent with the RMH, psychopathic individuals display adequate passive avoidance (this refers to inhibition of responses that would lead to punishment) when avoiding punishment is their primary (i.e., sole) task but manifest performance deficits when avoidance requires them to process nondominant (i.e., secondary or latent) information.

Moreover, there is evidence that psychopaths are insensitive to secondary neutral as well as secondary emotional cues (Newman, Schmitt, & Voss, 1997).
[/quote]

Psychopaths are strongly goal driven and have a rather one track mind over a short term. The media efforts to glorify psychopathy exploit this focused goal centeredness in white collar psychopaths and the "results" such a focus can achieve in various fields of human activities including the corporate and military sectors. If RMH is on the right track, psychopaths are unable to process information (emotional or otherwise) that is not directly relevant to their goal. This inability is not an impairment of conscious processing but rather an impairment of the adaptive unconscious.

[quote author=Lorenz and Newman]
Newman and Lorenz (in press) recently proposed that psychopaths’ deficits in emotion processing may be understood as a failure to process the associative networks primed by secondary emotion cues. Although emotion processing may operate effortlessly and automatically to influence the behavior of most individuals (e.g., Bower, 1981), we proposed that emotions are less likely to influence the behavior of low-anxious psychopaths because their
emotion processing is more dependent on deliberate processing (i.e., less automatic).

Restated, psychopaths may be less likely to activate and/or use the associative networks primed by peripheral emotional cues that other individuals use automatically.
.......................

With regard to the emotion paradox, then, the RMH is consistent with the hypothesis that psychopathic
individuals
(a) display normal emotion processing when instructed to attend to emotion stimuli and

(b) are less influenced by emotion cues that are peripheral to their dominant response set (i.e., directed attention).
[/quote]

For female psychopaths, it has been observed that
- female psychopaths display similar psycho-physiological abnormalities in emotion processing as their male counterparts eg measuring eye blink reflex while looking at unpleasant pictures (Emotion among women with psychopathy during picture perception )

BUT

- female psychopaths show better behavior regulation than their male counterparts in and their performance in behavior regulation tasks is similar to non-psychopathic females. ( Response perseveration in psychopathic women )


Response perseveration refers to continuing behavior to get a reward despite being punished for it. Female psychopaths do not exhibit the response perseveration seen in male psychopaths during a typical test that has been used in conjunction with the traditional psychopathy checklist PCL-R.

There is debate among researchers whether the PCL-R is adequate for assessing female psychopathy. Carefully conducted tests to evaluate female psychopaths with RMH show some interesting results.

Source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3136379/

Abnormal Selective Attention in Psychopathic Female Offenders
Jennifer E. Vitale, Chad A. Brinkley, Kristina D. Hiatt, and Joseph P. Newman
Neuropsychology 2007

In these studies, we tested the hypothesis that specific abnormalities in selective attention predicted by the RMH and characteristic of low-anxious, psychopathic males would be manifested among low-anxious, psychopathic females.
....
This study provides support for the RMH proposal (Hiatt et al., 2004; MacCoon et al., 2003; Newman et al., in press) that psychopathic individuals' response modulation deficit is manifested in response to both emotionally neutral and emotionally valenced stimuli. Moreover, the results are consistent with recent characterizations of the RMH that associated the information-processing deficits of psychopathic individuals with difficulty integrating bottom-up information into a top-down mediated focus of selective attention.

These data also suggest that the deficit in response modulation exhibited by psychopathic individuals is somewhat different from behavioral impulsivity. Although early investigations relied on paradigms designed to elicit impulsive responding (e.g., passive avoidance tasks, the card perseveration task) to test the RMH, recent examinations such as the current study show that this deficit can be detected in paradigms that do not evoke such responses. Further, these tasks help to clarify the role of motivation in psychopathic performance. Specifically, the deficit observed on tasks such as the PW and PW Stroop actually results in better performance (i.e., responses with less interference) by psychopathic participants than by nonpsychopathic participants.

Although the specifications tested here increase the predictive specificity of the RMH for psychopathy, further refinement is needed. Whereas psychopathic individuals appear less able to accommodate information that is peripheral to their dominant response set (i.e., top-down focus of selective attention), the exact content of any individual's dominant response set can be difficult to specify. In the absence of such specifications, the content of these sets can be determined only post hoc, on the basis of what information did not appear to be used or processed on a particular task. However, this problem is not unique to the RMH for psychopathy. Gray and McNaughton (2000) noted a similar problem in their discussion of passive avoidance learning in animals. Specifically, they noted that an organism's goals are “defined by the subject and not always recognizable by the experimenter” (Gray & McNaughton, 2000, p. 268). The exact content of an individual's dominant response set may be determined by a number of biological, experiential, and situational factors. Thus, the top-down focus of selective attention may not be “absolutely predictable” (Gray & McNaughton, 2000, p. 268). However, recent formulations of the RMH represent progress towards clarifying when and how the content of the individual's dominant response set—regardless of the specific content—will be modulated by bottom-up influences.

In other words, what exactly is the primary goal of a subject that determines this "dominant response set" in a given situation is difficult to predict - despite setting things up in a particular way in a lab experiment. Generally speaking, it appears that male and female psychopaths differ in what their goals are as well as in the dominant behavior sets adopted to achieve these goals in different situations.

The analytic strategy used in the present study also highlights the possibility that, just as the symptoms associated with psychopathy may be less pronounced among females, so too might the behavioral expressions of underlying etiological processes. This would be consistent with the difficulty researchers have had replicating passive avoidance deficits among psychopathic women and would also be somewhat consistent with the current data. Specifically, although the psychopathic women in this study demonstrated selective attention deficits similar to those demonstrated by psychopathic males, comparison of the effect sizes across studies suggests that these deficits may be less pronounced among women.

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One possibility is that the behavioral expression of the underlying deficits associated with psychopathy in women differs from the expression of these deficits in psychopathic men as a result of motivational, environmental, or socialization differences across gender that influence behavioral regulation (e.g., Sutton et al., 2003; Vitale & Newman, 2001). For example, societal strictures on female aggression and impulsivity may have contributed to the formation of more effective behavior regulation strategies among psychopathic females relative to psychopathic males.

And in the above context, it would seem that the prototype male psychopath across cultures would display similar characteristics and would not look that different. For the female psychopath, the picture is likely to vary to a much greater degree across cultures due to the difference in societal strictures and cultural mores that shape the environment in which they find themselves. OSIT
 
obyvatel said:
And in the above context, it would seem that the prototype male psychopath across cultures would display similar characteristics and would not look that different. For the female psychopath, the picture is likely to vary to a much greater degree across cultures due to the difference in societal strictures and cultural mores that shape the environment in which they find themselves. OSIT

There may also be an element of genetic modulation IF - as has been suggested - certain genes that predispose toward psychopathy are sex-linked. In that case, environment might have a particularly significant influence on the way the "mode of life" develops.
 
obyvatel said:
The analytic strategy used in the present study also highlights the possibility that, just as the symptoms associated with psychopathy may be less pronounced among females, so too might the behavioral expressions of underlying etiological processes. This would be consistent with the difficulty researchers have had replicating passive avoidance deficits among psychopathic women and would also be somewhat consistent with the current data. Specifically, although the psychopathic women in this study demonstrated selective attention deficits similar to those demonstrated by psychopathic males, comparison of the effect sizes across studies suggests that these deficits may be less pronounced among women.

...........................
One possibility is that the behavioral expression of the underlying deficits associated with psychopathy in women differs from the expression of these deficits in psychopathic men as a result of motivational, environmental, or socialization differences across gender that influence behavioral regulation (e.g., Sutton et al., 2003; Vitale & Newman, 2001). For example, societal strictures on female aggression and impulsivity may have contributed to the formation of more effective behavior regulation strategies among psychopathic females relative to psychopathic males.

And in the above context, it would seem that the prototype male psychopath across cultures would display similar characteristics and would not look that different. For the female psychopath, the picture is likely to vary to a much greater degree across cultures due to the difference in societal strictures and cultural mores that shape the environment in which they find themselves. OSIT
I've been thinking that female psychopaths might be a bit more difficult to spot due to the possibility that their behaviors fall within the spectrum of what's considered socially acceptable for women. Behaviors such as eliciting pity can easily mask as wounding to the average person because we are programmed to view women as weak, submissive, etc.

I'm also wondering if this same programming isn't due, to a large part, to the behaviors of the psychopathic female throughout centuries. This might somewhat explain what's happened with the feminist movement - the societal push to leave one's children (although economics certainly plays/ed a role), the revision of woman as creative force to the hypersexualization of women/-jezebel-, the lack of discernment between and distortion of woman as 'mother bear'/protector to b*tch.

While these roles don't serve the average woman or their families, they do serve pathologicals, particularly the female variety, I think. It may also explain how women oriented societies were brought down. This is not to suggest that men played no part at all, but that maybe psychopathic women had and continue to have just as much, if not more of a hand in the destruction of various women's groups.

Last, perhaps the researchers are having difficulties nailing down the female characteristics not so much because of variety but rather because it's more subtle? This could present problems if they have trouble discerning their own programming/expectations of who women 'should be' (which is pathological by default due to being a part of the same societies) from the behaviors of these women.
 
truth seeker said:
I've been thinking that female psychopaths might be a bit more difficult to spot due to the possibility that their behaviors fall within the spectrum of what's considered socially acceptable for women. Behaviors such as eliciting pity can easily mask as wounding to the average person because we are programmed to view women as weak, submissive, etc.

I was thinking this as well, Truth Seeker. Also, I could never quite understand all the hype around a woman's monthly cycle. It seems to me, we are programmed to accept that once a month, a woman has the right to be irritable and display bad behavior all do to her hormones.
 
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