Some psychopath speculation

[Approaching Infinity]

An interesting subject came up in my psychology class yesterday. We're talking about child development, and my prof mentioned Ainsworth's "strange situation test" where a child is with its mother, a stranger enters the room, talks with the mom, then the mom leaves and the stranger offers comfort to the mother, then the mother re-enters. Depending on the child's emotional reactions, it is labeled secure, insecure, or insecure ambivalent. Secure children are fine with the stranger when the mother is in the room, uncomfortable when she leaves, and happy when she returns. Insecure children are shy around the stranger, uncomfortable when mom leaves, and are mad at her when she returns. Insecure ambivalents are sociable with the stranger, are not upset when the mom leaves, and don't react positibely when she returns. I asked my prof what percent of children exhibited this third type (secure=~76%), and she said between 5 and 10%.

Now, this could just be coincidence (there may not even by a statistical correlation between the 6%'s), but I found it interesting. Also, this was my prof's description, so she may not be talking about Ainsworth's specific study. It's possible I'm missing some important data in the observations.

However, if psychopaths have to LEARN to mimic emotional responses, it seems to me that as infants they may not know the proper 'etiquette' yet. Just like they aren't nervous about the shock coming as the timer counts down (Hare's study), perhaps as children they do not feel normal anxiety without their caregivers?

Any thoughts?

 

[anart]

That definitely seems to fit the profile, or so it seems. I wonder if subtle autism or another brain ailment would affect it? Either way, it is an interesting observation.

 

[Laura]

Very interesting.

I've been working on updating our psychopathy pages since a number of people have been sending me both links and articles. See sidebar of links here: http://www.cassiopaea.com/cassiopaea/psychopath.htm

One of the new ones is entitled: "Construct Validity of Psychopathy in a Community Sample". It's a pdf file, but I have put it on the server: http://www.cassiopaea.com/cassiopaea/psychopathy_in_a_community.pdf

It's a bit tedious to wade through, but here's the gist of it from the discussion toward the end:

"Psychopathy, as originally conceived by Cleckley (1941), is not limited to engagement in illegal activities, but rather encompasses such personality characteristics as manipulativeness, insincerity, egocentricity, and lack of guilt - characteristics clearly present in criminals but also in spouses, parents, bosses, attorneys, politicians, and CEOs, to name but a few. (Bursten, 1973; Stewart, 1991). Our own examination of the prevalence of psychopathy within a university population suggested that perhaps 5% or more of this sample might be deemed psychopathic, although the vast majority of those will be male (more than 1/10 males versus approximately 1?100 females).

"As such, psychopathy may be characterized ... as involving a tendency towards both dominance and coldness. Wiggins (1995) in summarizing numerous previous findings... indicates that such individuals are prone to anger and irritation and are willing to exploit others. They are arrogant, manipulative, cynical, exhibitionistic, sensation -seeking, Machiavellian, vindictive, and out for their own gain. With respect to their patterns of social exchange (Foa & Foa, 1974), they attribute love and status to themselves, seeing themselves as highly worthy and important, but prescribe neither love nor status to others, seeing them as unworthy and insignificant. This characterization is clearly consistent with the essence of psychopathy as commonly described.

"The present investigation sought to answer some basic questions regarding the construct of psychopathy in non forensic settings... In so doing we have returned to Cleckley's (1941) original emphasis on psychopathy as a personality style not only among criminals, but also among successful individuals within the community.

"What is clear from our findings is that (a) psychopathy measures have converged on a prototype of psychopathy that involves a combination of dominant and cold interpersonal characteristics; (b) psychopathy does occur in the community and at what might be a higher than expected rate; and (c) psychopathy appears to have little overlap with personality disorders aside from Antisocial Personality Disorder. ...

"Clearly, where much more work is needed is in understanding what factors differentiate the abiding (although perhaps not moral-abiding) psychopath from the law-breaking psychopath; such research surely needs to make greater use of non forensic samples than has been customary in the past."

As the authors of this study say, a lot more work is needed.

Do check out some of the new links and if you find any others that are relevant (I don't want any psychopathy apologetics!) post them here and let's see if we can't get a really good collection.

Of course, it seems that a lot of material is not publicly available or is written in such obscure terms that the average person can't grok it. But maybe we can do something about that.