Showing posts with label empathy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label empathy. Show all posts

Thursday, October 11, 2012

Finding joy beyond self

One of my readers suggested that the exchange between Tinkerbelle and Daniel Birdick here should get its own post. I agree. The thing I particularly like about this exchange is Birdick's description of finding joy and meaning. It's in particular conceptions of self as "good" or even "bad" or anything in particular. It's in other, external things. Sometimes the source happens to be oneself, but it's not for the sake of "being" something, but the sake of having done or experienced something -- having made someone laugh so hard they choke, as opposed to "being hilarious." Maybe it's not quite "selfless," but for being so self-involved, the sociopath happens to enjoy a lot of things that have nothing to do with him or how he feels about himself.

Here it is, starting with Daniel Birdick:


This post stayed with me because I believe it encapsulates one of the “sociopath’s” defining characteristics: the inability to believe in self. “Normal’s” have a more or less static sense of self. This sense of self includes but is not limited to beliefs about morality, politics, religion, and of course sexuality and gender. “Sociopaths”, not so much. My theory is that “sociopaths” are unable to believe the story the left hemisphere of the brain constantly spins about who and what the self is the way “normals” do. The aware “sociopath” knows he/she is wearing a mask. The “normals” believe the mask they wear is who they really are. The aware “sociopath” has a better chance of understanding humanity’s true nature as a result of his/her inability to believe while “normals” live and die by the cobweb of illusion their brains ceaselessly spin about the self. Metaphorically speaking, the aware and intelligent “socio/psychopath” is the last of mankind’s prophets. Their very existence serves as a living testimony to the nihilistic truth of the universe. 

Mark Twain said it well, (if a little melodramatically): “you are but a thought -- a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!"

Tinkerbelle:

Mr Birdick....what make's you happy? If sociopaths believe in nothingness and have no sense of self....what do you actually enjoy in life except "ruining" those around you. I did think that your post had a point, i understood your perspective, i really did, however what is there to look forward to in life if the left side of the brains hemisphere doesn't constantly spin a sense of self? Is life pointless?, You have me thinking now.

Daniel Birdick:


Hello Tinkerbelle.

What makes me happy? Jamaica Delights. Watching the sun rise over the ocean. The rich green color of freshly cut grass. Good music. A well delivered punch line. Cheesecake. Brilliant acting. A perfectly cooked T-bone steak. An expertly crafted movie, one where all the elements that go into great filmmaking are there on the screen. Watching my little niece run happily toward me. Devising effective stratagems to deal with the ceaseless power game that passes for “human adulthood”. I could go on and on, but you get the point. I enjoy many of the kinds of things I suspect you enjoy. I just don’t need to indulge in just so stories, like “Daniel is a republican, democrat, straight, gay, bi, would never kill, hates lying, and so on” to experience that enjoyment.

Is life pointless? Yeah, it is. Meaning and purpose are nothing more than products of the human consciousness, which is itself prone to self deception and delusion. (Witness the spectacle of billions of people all over the globe prostrating themselves before their invisible friends for instance.) Fortunately, it isn’t necessary to believe in meaning, purpose, morality or “selfhood” to enjoy the exchange of ideas or take delight in the taste of ice cream on a hot summer day or have great sex.

This may very well be one of the main things that bother “normals” about “sociopaths”. We at least have the potential to enjoy many of the things they enjoy without the baggage of having to negotiate with an inborn conscience. This fact may gall them because it makes a mockery of all their precious beliefs about morality and meaning.


Tinkerbelle:


If life really is pointless we all may as well lay down and die this very second. Why waste one's time? I've often pondered the "point". Sociopaths don't offend me with their views, people are who they are. Besides the topic is a damn good juicy debate!
I just think to myself that its ashame sometimes thats all (not in a condescending manner)...I can only imagine sociopathy to be like only ever watching black and white film's. Beautiful no doubt, yet two tone, empathy is like experiencing a film in burts of technicolour. Creativity stems from emotion. 

Maybe sociopathy misses the "point". Then again maybe not?...who truely knows?


Daniel Birdick:


Hi Tinkerbelle. You're right. These kinds of discussions are fascinating. It gives me an opportunity to exercise my mental muscles. Thanks for being my "spotter", so to speak. ;-) 

Now to address your comments-

Tinkerbelle said: “If life really is pointless we all may as well lay down and die this very second.” 

Is that true? Are you certain that this must be the inevitable outcome of discovering that life is meaningless? That would be akin to a 12 year old deciding that she’s never going to celebrate Christmas again after finding out that Santa Claus doesn’t exist. That would be a valid option, like any other, but not a necessary one. 

“Why waste one's time?” 

Why not? Besides, it’s only a waste if you define it as such. You have far greater power to define your personal experience of life than you know.

“I can only imagine sociopathy to be like only ever watching black and white film's. Beautiful no doubt, yet two tone, empathy is like experiencing a film in burts of technicolour. Creativity stems from emotion.”

You could be right. Even if you are right, even if “normals” greater facility for empathy is makes their experience of life richer, that doesn’t make it any truer and that’s my “point”. Emotions are no more an indicator of truth than speaking in tongues is an indicator that god exists. Being honest with myself is my highest value. Truth is what matters to me, not pretty lies. Even if I wanted to believe the fairytales others guide their lives by, I’ve discovered that I am incapable of it. Take empathy for example. Empathy literally means to vicariously experience the feelings of others. Your brain calculates what it might be like to feel what someone else is feeling and creates that experience within you. The literal experience of empathy is an evolutionary adaptation which I believe stems from the human drive to bond with other humans. But here’s the rub. You can’t really experience another person’s subjective state. You can only ever experience yourself and your own projections. So in a sense, empathy is as deceptive as morality is. Which again, is my point. The aware “sociopath” doesn’t miss the point because there isn’t one to miss.

Monday, October 8, 2012

Good cocktail conversation tidbits

For that social function you have coming up soon at which it might be fun to subtly suggest that sociopaths are not as bad as people think they are, Wisdom of Psychopathy author Kevin Dutton shares
Some Surprising Things You Never Knew About Psychopaths:
  • Psychopaths can sometimes be more empathic than the rest of us. This is especially the case in sadistic serial killers. As one senior FBI profiler told Dutton: “Sadistic serial killers feel their victims’ pain in exactly the same way that you or I might feel it. They feel it cognitively and objectively, and emotionally and subjectively too. But the difference between them and us is that they commute that pain to their own subjective pleasure.” Studies have also shown that some psychopaths have more ‘mirror neurons’ (empathy brain cells) than normal people.
  • They can be more altruistic than the rest of us. Studies have shown that psychopaths are quicker to offer help to people in need than everyday folk.
  • They don’t take things as personally as the rest of us. Research in the field of neuroeconomics has shown that psychopaths make more money than the rest of us in negotiation games because they are more willing to accept unfair offers.
  • As well as taking lives, they can also be better at saving lives than the rest of us—especially in knife-edge situations when the chips are down. 
  • Psychopaths make really good customs officers. In one experiment Dutton ran, psychopaths were better at picking out people with contraband concealed about their person than were non-psychopaths.
  • James Bond is a psychopath. A recent study shows that James Bond epitomizes the profile of the successful psychopath: ruthless, fearless, charming, persuasive, non-conformist, extraverted, thrill-seeking, philandering, and decidedly lacking in the conscience department.

Saturday, September 15, 2012

Moral judgment without emotions

A recent experiment about the impact of emotions in decisionmaking with some lofty aspirations:

The study's answer will inform a classic philosophical debate on whether humans make moral judgments based on norms and societal rules, or based on their emotions.

The test basically required people to perform different versions of the trolley problem, asking them to hurt/kill one person in order to save multiple people. Most people have trouble pulling the trigger. The people with damage to a part of the frontal lobe that makes them less emotional "make a less personal calculation." "The logical choice, they say, is to sacrifice one life to save many." Most people are torn between the two choices, but the emotionless people "seem to lack that conflict." Instead, they behave perfectly rationally:


"What is absolutely astonishing about our results is how selective the deficit is," he said. "Damage to the frontal lobe leaves intact a suite of moral problem solving abilities, but damages judgments in which an aversive action is put into direct conflict with a strong utilitarian outcome."

It is the feeling of aversion that normally blocks humans from harming each other. Damasio described it as "a combination of rejection of the act, but combined with the social emotion of compassion for that particular person."


Surprise! This time the sociopaths is not the bad guy.

The study holds another implication for philosophy.By showing that humans are neurologically unfit for strict utilitarian thinking, the study suggests that neuroscience may be able to test different philosophies for compatibility with human nature.

It turns out that utilitarian judgments are sometimes valuable and important and that it's the normal people who have the deficit in making them and the sociopaths who excel.

Friday, August 31, 2012

Volume and nuance of emotions

Once upon a time I was discussing music over lunch with a graduate school advisor. I mentioned to him that my biggest strength as a musician was having a highly tuned ear, being able to distinguish between slight changes in intonation that most people would not be able to perceive, much less know in what direction the pitch moved and by how much. Later in the conversation I asked him to repeat himself and explained that I have a hard time hearing in crowded, noisy places. He looked confused.

"I thought you just told me that you have good hearing."

I was about to explain when I saw him understand, "Oh, you have bad hearing, but it is nuanced." 

Yes! Exactly. I have bad hearing but it is extremely nuanced. In fact, sometimes I have wondered if my hearing became nuanced to compensate for my hearing being bad. 

I was remembering this story recently and thinking, maybe this is a good analogy for how I interpret emotional cues. People always wonder, how is it that sociopaths are so mind-blind about somethings but can be so uncannily perceptive about others. I've had a hard time explaining it myself. But maybe it is just this: that it's difficult for me to hear certain things and not others because they are actually unrelated in a way that is not obvious to the average observer. Maybe the emotional cues I am picking up on use a different sort of perception, like less empathy, more sheer observational skills. Or it's more something that can be learned with practice, like reading people's microexpressions

Or maybe it's hard for me to pick up on big picture things, like which emotion, and it's easier for me to pick up on small emotional nuances, like how that emotion is affecting a person's motivation in that moment. Maybe it's like Newman says, that sociopaths can do quite well with emotion as long as their attention has been directed to it (e.g. talking with a person one on one), but if there is too much background noise distracting, it will go completely over my head? 

I haven't refined the theory yet, but I feel there is something to it.

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Biological origins of empathy

Hopefully people aren't sick of reading about empathy by now, but I recently found this interesting Wall Street Journal article discussing how animals possibly feel (or don't feel) empathy, including humans.  First the article discusses recent studies on animals that suggested that animals have altruistic traits. Initially this animal altruism was claimed to be related to empathy, but it has since been downgraded to being merely "pro-social":


In one, scientists at the University of Chicago put two rats in an arena, one held by a restrainer, the other free. They found that the free rat learned to "intentionally and quickly open the restrainer and free the cagemate." They interpreted this result as "providing strong evidence for biological roots of empathically motivated helping behavior."

In the other case, Drs. Hollis and Nowbahari themselves did a very similar experiment with ants. They found that ants were prepared to rescue fellow ants held in a nylon snare and showing obvious distress. Just like the rats, the hero ants would chew at the restraints (though not if the victims were anesthetized or from different colonies or species). Happy to describe such behavior as "pro-social," they did not go so far as to attribute empathy to the ants. There was no reason to think that the hero ants were motivated by a wish to alleviate the suffering of the victims. More likely, they possessed a self-interested instinct to help get a co-worker back to work.

How does this differ from humans? Humans would probably behave in similar ways if we put them in similar situations, but is the psychological motivation different?  Adam Smith seems to think so:

In his 1759 book the "Theory of the Moral Sentiments," philosopher Adam Smith argued that empathy (he called it sympathy) was motivated by the capacity to imagine being another person. "When I condole with you for the loss of your only son, in order to enter into your grief, I do not consider what I, a person of such a character and profession, should suffer, if I had a son, and if that son was unfortunately to die; but I consider what I should suffer if I was really you; and I not only change circumstances, but I change persons and characters. My grief, therefore, is entirely upon your account, and not in the least upon my own. It is not, therefore, in the least selfish."

The article concludes that either we think that rats are capable of this Smithian imagination (which the author concludes is absurd), or we assume that animals must have different motivations than humans.  OR!!!!  And this was what I was thinking this whole time, but the author finally admits at the end a big OR to this whole thing is that maybe humans don't have the psychological motivations that they think they do. Maybe the humans are doing things for the same reasons as the rats: "Can we be so sure it is fellow-feeling rather than instinct that drives us to our virtuous as well as our vicious actions?"

If we are really the empathy equivalent of rats, maybe we invented empathy to give ourselves a nice story. In other words, maybe humans give a positive spin on their "choices" after the fact, the same way they do with free will (or should I say, free won't). I feel like I just discovered the necessary plot device to make the Matrix IV relevant.

Thursday, August 16, 2012

Theory of empathy

This may sound completely idiotic, completely obvious, completely redundant, or all three, but reading people's responses to the post on using babies to teach empathy, I thought maybe for the first time I have a theory about what empathy is:

  • Empathy is you feeling an emotion you have previously experienced in response to seeing someone else experience something that looks similar enough to remind you viscerally and poignantly of your own experience.  In a way, you are re-living the previous experience, not necessarily feeling what the other person is feeling.  
  • Empathy requires some degree of attention to the emotional cues of others to trigger your recollection of your own experience.  
  • People who are particularly observant of or in tune with the emotions of others and people who have had a greater breadth and depth of emotions are more likely to feel empathy. 
  • To the extent that sociopaths seem to lack empathy, it may be attributed to the fact that they are both (1) relatively oblivious to social cues and that (2) they have a different emotional palette that is triggered less frequently by the emotions of neurotypicals.  
  • Sociopaths do have infrequent feelings of empathy when the stars align and the sociopath is both paying attention to the cue and has previously experienced the emotion himself.  

Thoughts?  It's primarily based on Newman's work with sociopath emotions and attentional issues, but I wonder if I am misunderstanding what empaths (or sociopaths) feel.

Saturday, August 11, 2012

Using babies to teach empathy

A friend sent me this older NY Times article about teaching at risk youth empathy by exposing them to and asking them to consider the well-being of babies.  Why this works, no one knows for sure, but it seems to trigger in them a natural inclination to help altruistically, also shared by primates:

We know that humans are hardwired to be aggressive and selfish. But a growing body of research is demonstrating that there is also a biological basis for human compassion. Brain scans reveal that when we contemplate violence done to others we activate the same regions in our brains that fire up when mothers gaze at their children, suggesting that caring for strangers may be instinctual. When we help others, areas of the brain associated with pleasure also light up. Research by Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello indicates that toddlers as young as 18 months behave altruistically. (If you want to feel good, watch one of their 15-second video clips here.)

This was something that I didn't know, that we are programmed to help.  The clips are fascinating, for instance this first one, where the researcher drops a clothespin just out of his reach.  The 18 month old child crawls over to the clothespin, picks it up, works himself to a standing position so he'll be tall enough to give the researcher back his clothespin, which he does (to his own apparent delight).

I wouldn't necessarily call it altruism, though, at least not from my superficial understanding.  To me, the impulse seems rooted more in a drive for efficiency (am I projecting my own thoughts here?).  In each of these videos, the toddlers help out in a task that obviously requires cooperative effort for success -- a situation in which it is obvious that someone needs help with something, for instance opening a door when someone has their arms full.  Without the toddler's help, the door never gets opened and that person never gets to their location, or they do so with much greater cost in terms of time and effort.  By helping the researcher, even where there is no immediate promise of reward, the toddler is still engaging in value maximizing behavior that he can hope to benefit from in kind in the future.

This is clearly an evolutionarily advantageous trait, particularly to help out within a particular group or tribe of people.  It expands the our ability to consolidate resources in order to scale particular operations.  Just like the modern legal fiction of a corporation allows us to pool resources (via stock purchases) to create business entities that no one of us could finance independently, a natural inclination to participate in cooperative tasks promotes the overall well-being of society, which improves our own lives.

Maybe I'm reading too much into all of this, but I've always wondered where my compulsion for efficiency comes from, which will override almost any other impulse.  Could it be related to this?

It could also be that the toddler is just trying to pull his own weight, starting to realize that he is a suck on social resources, and wants to avoid getting left in the jungle to die.  Which is actually a risk for us all, in some ways.  So be good everyone!  Or else!

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Almost a psychopath

From illustrious reader Daniel Birdick, regarding the book Almost a Psychopath: Do I (or does someone you know) have a problem with manipulation or lack of empathy?, in which people are apparently psychopathic without necessarily rising to the level of diagnosis:

I skimmed through the the Almost a Psychopath book. They adhere to the Hare definition of psychopathy and then label the "almost psychopath" as someone who behaves like a diagnosed psychopath, only less so. Very scientifically precise, no?~
This spectrum issue reminds me of the 2nd James Fallon video from one of your recent posts. Here this guy is, with the DNA and the brain of a serial killer, yet instead of becoming a murderer he instead becomes a neuroscientist. He is clueless about the impact of his own behavior on others up until the point when he sees the results of the brain scans, although his family is completely unsurprised by his discoveries. So, by virtue of his utter lack of caring and his genetic and neurological makeup, can we call him an almost psychopath? Or does the absence of antisocial or criminal behavior (relative to diagnosed psychopaths) indicate that he is not at psychopath at all, in any way that matters? Some, like good old Dr. Robert, base their notions of psychopathy entirely on what does or does not happen on the inside. The Hare checklist on the other hand is behaviorally based, with a few exceptions. I think the checklist assumes, to paraphrase the ultimate paragon of passivity, that you shall know a tree by its fruits. What you experience on the inside only matters when it expresses itself on the outside. I am inclined to agree. What you do matters more than what you don't feel. So what if you feel callous and unemotional on the inside. What matters is how you actually treat people. Right? Why then all the blather about empathy and emotional responses to social faux pas, like guilt and shame? Is it the whole authenticity thing? I find that to be another red herring. What self are we being authentic about? Where is this ghost in the machine and why won't it show up on a PET scan? Is it really "virtuous", whatever the hell that means, to be honest and admit that you don't give a flying fuck about whatever sob story some clueless twat wants to lay on you, or is it in fact more moral to pretend to care by aping the right facial expressions and body language?
Went on a bit of a rant there. Anyway...

Friday, July 6, 2012

I feel you

This Scientific American article discusses the link between mirror neurons, which allow us to vicarious experience particular sensations like feeling pain while watching someone hit their finger with a hammer, and empathy -- the ability to vicariously experience someone's emotional state.

First the sensory part:


When a friend hits her thumb with a hammer, you don't have to put much effort into imagining how this feels. You know it immediately. You will probably tense up, your "Ouch!" may arise even quicker than your friend's, and chances are that you will feel a little pain yourself. Of course, you will then thoughtfully offer consolation and bandages, but your initial reaction seems just about automatic. Why?

Neuroscience now offers you an answer: A recent line of research has demonstrated that seeing other people being touched activates primary sensory areas of your brain, much like experiencing the same touch yourself would do. What these findings suggest is beautiful in its simplicity—that you literally "feel with" others.


The comparison with the emotions part:

Despite the lack of a universally agreed-upon definition of empathy, the mechanisms of sharing and understanding another’s experience have always been of scientific and public interest—and particularly so since the introduction of “mirror neurons.” This important discovery was made two decades ago by  Giacomo Rizzolatti and his co-workers at the University of Parma, who were studying motor neuron properties in macaque monkeys. To compensate for the tedious electrophysiological recordings required, the monkey was occasionally given food rewards. During these incidental actions something unexpected happened: When the monkey, remaining perfectly still, saw the food being grasped by an experimenter in a specific way, some of its motor neurons discharged. Remarkably, these neurons normally fired when the monkey itself grasped the food in this way. It was as if the monkey’s brain was directly mirroring the actions it observed. This “neural resonance,” which was later also demonstrated in humans, suggested the existence of a special type of "mirror" neurons that help us understand other people’s actions.

The interesting part is that they seem to be related in that people who self report high empathy also show stronger mirror neuron activity:

Michael Schaefer and his colleagues also scanned their participants’ brains while they were watching movie clips of touches applied to human hands. Consistent with earlier results, participants’ primary somatosensory cortex (the brain’s representation of the body surface) responded vicariously to the observation of touch. However, participants also completed the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI), a paper-and-pencil test measuring four specific dimensions of our ability to empathize with others. And guess what? The higher participants scored on the “Perspective taking” subscale of the IRI, the stronger their primary somatosensory cortex reacted to observed touch. These data suggest that the brain’s mirroring responses are in fact associated with personal empathic ability. How much you empathize with other people seems to reflect how strongly your brain—your primary somatosensory cortex—“feels with” them when you see them being touched.

It's interesting how little we understand the concept of empathy, including what role our physical sensations have in the process (and perhaps in feeling our own emotions?).  The whole thing sort of reminds me of studying music and honing my skill of audiation, which is the process of imagining (or basically hearing) pitches in one's head.  You can try it too -- sing a song to yourself without making a sound and you are audiating.  What I noticed about myself is that there is a physical connection with my audiating.  Specifically, when I audiate, my vocal chords, throat, and some muscles in my mouth and face adjust as if I were about to sing or hum the pitch I'm imagining.  When I think of a high pitch, my eyebrows and soft palate go up.  For a low note, my throat expands.

I know that I do other small physical manipulations like this to affect my mental state, for instance purposefully yawning to make myself more tired or making my face slack like I am already asleep to fall asleep more quickly.  I also do this with emotions, like smiling to be happy.  Sometimes I try them in response to a curiosity of other people's emotions.  But just like how I can't seem to imagine a pitch without being able to sing it (e.g. if it is out of my singing range), I can't seem to imagine an emotion without having experienced it once myself.  Do all forms of empathy have this limitation?   

Saturday, June 16, 2012

Mentalizing

This was an interesting article about how people who have a harder time imaging what others are thinking are less likely to believe in God.  More interesting than this (at least to me) was the distinction that the article made between empathy and "mentalizing," which was the first time I had actually heard this term, at least used with this particular meaning:

The ability to infer the thoughts and feelings of other people is called "mentalizing" and it appears to play an important role in religious belief, according to researcher Ara Norenzayan.

Interestingly it was this mentalizing, or ability to imagine what others are thinking, that was more likely to lead to a belief in God and those without it showed less inclination to be religious:


"When adults form inferences about God's mind, they show the same mentalizing biases that are typically found when reasoning about other peoples' minds," the study authors wrote. Religious believers have an idea of God as an intentional being who responds to human beliefs and desires.

The researchers found that people who rate highest on the autistic spectrum — those with an inability to respond accurately to the mental states of other people — are least likely to believe in God.

Men typically are not as good as women at reasoning about other people's states of mind and are more likely than women to score high on the autism spectrum, which may help explain why men are less likely to believe in God than women.

Maybe I'm just late to the party about this distinction between mentalizing (apparently the psychological  version of philosophy's theory of mind).  Interestingly mentalization based treatment has been used with success for borderline personality disorder, although after reading the wikipedia article, I'm still not clear how and why.

How is mentalizing related to empathy?

"The empathy quotient measures the degree to which an individual thinks about and is concerned with the mental states of other people, their beliefs, wishes and emotions," Norenzayan wrote.

So it's still not clear to me.  I guess it's that there is a difference between mentalizing (imagining the internal world of others) and empathizing, this vicarious feeling of emotions that others are feeling. Sociopaths clearly do the former, but do not do the latter.  But I don't know.  Every time I explore the concept of empathy, I feel like I'm talking about something like Santa Claus.  I always half wonder if empathy is real, or maybe the product of fantasy or self-deception?

Friday, June 15, 2012

Selectively caring more

I thought this was a very interesting comment left on this post about empathy and becoming sensitized to certain things, among others:


I used be able to watch videos/view images of the goriest and most explicit nature: brain avulsions, total dismemberment, horrific murders. In fact, I craved viewing them. There was something in there that was fascinating to me. This was when I was much younger. As I got older, these pictures began to bother me. Not because I felt guilt or empathy, but because I had suffered accidents/injuries of my own, and they served to remind me of them. Now I avoid them, for the most part, because in each body I see the inevitability of my own mortality, and I always end up relating them to my own situation. 

The same holds true for emotional pain: just yesterday a girl related a story about a woman who's mother was killed by a distracted drive. I laughed when I heard the specifics; it sounded like such a glorious explosion of metal. Everyone else was horrified, and some were holding back tears, but I couldn't stop grinning--I had such fun recreating the scene in my mind. I couldn't empathize. But if another person's emotional pain reminds me of the few, and I mean 2-3, things left from childhood that are still painful to me, I am distracted and lost in my own pain. This gives the appearance of empathizing; it's not. I don't cry for the other person; I cry for myself. 

That erroneous conclusion ("They're crying while I'm crying; they must understand me!") is what, I think, leads empaths, especially those with emotional ties to the sociopath, to insist that they're "not that bad" or that "there's really deep feelings in there." Perhaps. But those deep feelings will always be self-centered. If a sociopath cries because you're breaking up with them, it's not because they've suddenly grown a heart to pine after you with. It's because they've lost control, because their plans have been ruined, and they're thinking about how the break-up will fuck things over. 

I realize they are interesting, and perhaps very fine distinctions to make, but I think that they are actually legitimate distinctions to make between a sensitivity (or lack of sensitivity to things) and the general skill of empathy.  A good example, perhaps, is the one of the typical empath who becomes desensitized to things like violence in times of war.  According to wikipedia, horses, who have a natural fear of unpredictable movement, become desensitized to accept the fluttering skirt of a lady's riding habit.  We sensitize guide dogs to certain human concerns like automobile traffic. 

Everyone can learn to care more or less about a particular thing. It's not that sociopaths are just constantly choosing not to care.  I believe that they are partly incapable of caring, and even more simply unaware of what and when they should be caring.  Once you direct their attention to it or something else happens to make them aware of the seriousness of something (e.g. growing older and having more a sense of one's own mortality), it gets easier to understand why everyone else is upset.  But this does not mean that the sociopath will ever vicariously feel what the other person is feeling.  

Thursday, June 14, 2012

The gendered sociopath

A reader writes about how sociopathic men understand women differently than normal men:


It seems to be common among a good majority of men that, men just "can't understand" women. Like they can't understand why women act certain ways about certain things, or why they feel certain ways of certain things that the men can't seem to understand.

Do you think this applies to sociopathic men? Me, I've always considered myself an abstract thinker, I don't see any big mystery behind women. I understand women are psychologically different and therefore emotionally value certain things in a different manner. Yet, somehow, 'normal' men do not understand this?

Are "normal" men just so involved in their own emotional impulses that it blinds them from understanding the emotional impulses of women? Perhaps sociopaths are not blinded because they are not heavily involved in their emotions, and as a result they can better understand the emotional impulses of others, namely, members of the opposite sex.


I thought it was an interesting theory, and probably accurate. I believe that sociopaths don't project their own mental states on people as often as empaths do (or even other non empaths because narcissists and autism spectrum types also project all the time, with autism spectrum people not having hardly any theory of mind at all).

For the sociopath, it's not any big mystery that men and women think differently and it's as easy to understand the one as the other. It could also have something to do with the fact that sociopaths don't identify as much with their gender, so do not have the same gender specific blindspots as most people do.

Friday, May 18, 2012

Fear of the unknown

Regarding why empaths seem so wary of sociopaths, a theory from a reader:


So I pretty much boiled down why I think empaths are afraid of sociopaths.

It's the fear of the unknown.

Let me explain.

When I was at the zoo a few years ago, I casually asked a zoo keeper why the giraffes don't choose to escape. They don't put up a fence high enough to prevent the giraffes from simply walking out of the enclosure. All there is a little ditch and a tiny wall. The zoo keeper explained to me that the reason the giraffes never leave is because they can't see what's in the ditch. Since they don't know what would happen if they tried to step over it, they choose to stay in their enclosure instead.

This is pretty good analogy for humans and death.

If God were to go “After life you get to be in heaven and it's perfect,” to everyone after they were born, people would throw themselves off of cliffs as soon as they were able to walk.
The reason people generally don't run around killing themselves is because they have no idea what happens after death.

So how does this relate to sociopaths? 

People eventually  had to come up with unspoken rules that would prevent people from hurting each other. Not because they cared about the other people, but because they didn't want to be killed themselves. They didn't want to face the unknown.

And thus we have “empathy” which is really just the fear of something that has happened to someone else either affecting you or happening to you. 

What's really scary to an empath about sociopaths is that they have no idea what they're going to do next. Their thought process is completely foreign, since empaths have always functioned with, well, empathy. 

Even if you explain how a sociopath thinks to an empath, they're still a little bit afraid. They have no idea what a sociopath will do, or maybe do to them, because they do not function under the normal silent rules humanity came up with. The sociopath's thought process is still relatively unknown to the empath. 

So for an empath, trying to understand a sociopath is kind of like the giraffe trying to see what's in the ditch. You can kind of tell what's down there, but because you don't really know what, you'd prefer to stay away.

I hope that makes sense. 

-Thoughtful empath

Empaths, see also this post for the answers to some of these questions. 

Thursday, May 10, 2012

Psychopath brains differ even from ASPD

Reuters reports on how the brains of psychopathic criminals show distinctly less grey matter in the areas of the brain important for understanding the emotions of others.  These differences in brain structure were different even from other criminals who were diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder (ASPD).  Other interesting selections from the article:

  • Damage to these areas is linked with a lack of empathy, a poor response to fear and distress and a lack of self-conscious emotions such as guilt or embarrassment.
  • Research shows that most violent crimes are committed by a small group of persistent male offenders with ASPD. . . . Such people typically react in an aggressive way to frustration or perceived threats, but most are not psychopaths, the researchers wrote in a summary of their study, which was published in the Archives of General Psychiatry journal.
  • There are clear behavior differences among people with ASPD depending on whether they also have psychopathy. Their patterns of offending are different, suggesting the need for a separate approach to treatment.
  • "We describe those without psychopathy as 'hot-headed' and those with psychopathy as 'cold-hearted'," Blackwood explained.

I love that distinction between "hot-headed" and "cold-hearted."  I'm going to have to start using those terms all of the time when explaining about how I don't quite consider myself to have ASPD.  And our buddy Bob Hare should be happy about this seeing as he is always going on about how the two are quite distinct.



Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Types of love


A reader recently asked me about how I feel the different types of love (e.g. Éros, storge, philia and agápe). When I love someone like a close friend or family member, it is primarily a feeling of gratitude for who they are in my life.  I don't typically "need" anyone, so I do not identify with a desperate, needing sort of love.  To the extent that I feel passionate or intensely for another person, it is because I have become obsessed or fixated with them.  It does not always mean love, though, and love doesn't not always mean intensity, at least to me.

I can connect with people in various ways but I don't have vicarious feelings like empathy.  If I show interest in someone else's suffering or happiness, it is more like a very strong curiosity.  I have always felt like so much of the world is hidden.  There is always a special pleasure for me in hidden things becoming revealed.  It must be why empaths experience voyeurism and schadenfreude.  Actually, one of the main reasons I enjoy longer term relationships is that eventually I can reveal to them all of my machinations from the beginning -- what I did to them, how I engineered particular situations, my foresight and skill throughout the early stages of the relationships during which I was required to keep everything hidden.  There is a very pleasant tension and release aspect to that activity.  It's almost sexual.

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Sociopath - pain = no empathy?

A reader asked this very interesting question:

I learned in a psych class that living things (or mammals, at least), thanks to the magic of mirror neurons, do not distinguish signs of distress in another creature from their own distress. You mention in your one post that you have a very detached stance to pain. What if what we think of as empathy is tied directly to the perception of pain? What if sociopathy is not primarily a lack of empathy, but a greatly altered perception of pain both in oneself and in others? Would it be possible that if an empath's normal neurological responses to pain were tampered with, they would experience less empathy? Could the reverse be true for sociopaths?

I always like these sorts of explanations that somehow tie together different, seemingly unrelated aspects of sociopathy together -- e.g. so insightfully perceptive (enough to be exceptionally manipulative) but lacking empathy?  It's really an odd disorder, with a suite of traits that so consistently present amongst sociopaths and yet seem so scattershot.

One of my favorite unifying theories from a psychologist named Joseph Newman is the idea that sociopathy is largely an attentional disorder, where the sociopath is getting all the right input but is just not paying attention to them in the same way that everyone else is, so they are meaningless to him.

[One of my own pet theories is that a lot of the sociopaths traits (charm, manipulation, lying, promiscuity, chameleonism, compartmentalization, mask wearing, lack of empathy, lack of strong gender, racial, social, sexual or other identity) is largely attributable to a very weak sense of self.  I believe that all personality disorders share a distorted/abnormal sense of self, that that is essentially what makes them a "personality" disorder, and not something else.]  

I also like the one the reader suggested above -- that to the extent sociopaths do not feel things like pain the same way empaths do, the mirror neuron cues are just falling on deaf ears.  But I wonder.  A lot of sociopaths have complained that they have in fact felt something akin to empathy in isolated incidents, particularly if they happen to be feeling something similar at the same moment and happen to recognize that same emotion in others.  This seems to me to be more attentional, but I don't know.

Sunday, April 22, 2012

Narcissists vs. Sociopaths (part 4)

(cont.)


Can Someone Really Be a Very Low Empathy Narcissist and Not Know It?

Yes! Narcissists won't often know much about their state. Just look at Bernie Madoff in this article -- he feels very uncomfortable about the idea that he might be a sociopath.  Sure, he knows he did a  bunch of bad things. But at the same time, he knows that deep down he's good inside. That's that typical narcissist self-deception; he's trying to avoid any shame, or even any awareness of shame.

Malignant narcissists will often do terribly cruel things to others. They'll tell themselves that the other guy had it coming to him. For a classic malignant narcissist, see this story.

Like Madoff, the malignant narcissist in that story, Raucci, thinks of himself as a very good guy. He really puts himself out for his friends. In a sense he's correct, and that should be the clue that he isn't a sociopath. Were he a sociopath, he wouldn't take other people (and whether they are with or against him) so personally.

Sociopaths aren't nearly as dangerous as narcissists. Narcissists get on self-destructive crusades, because it makes them feel good. Sociopaths avoid crusades, because crusades are expensive.

Saturday, April 21, 2012

Narcissists vs. Sociopaths (part 3)

(cont.)


I'm Low Empathy. Am I a Sociopath or a Narcissist?

If you know you are low empathy, and you just don't care about others finding out, you are a sociopath.
If you do bad things, but think your empathy is just fine, but you've got a nagging fear that maybe there is something wrong with your empathy, but you definitely don't want others to find out - you are a narcissist.

If you don't feel any shame when you get caught, you are a sociopath.
If you feel shame when getting caught, you are a narcissist.

If you do bad things because you are on a crusade, you are a narcissist, or a malignant narcissist. Decide between the two alternatives based on how cruel and impulsive you are.

If do bad things because it is good for you, and don't mind if others know it (except when it gets in the way of you winning) you are a sociopath.

Thursday, April 19, 2012

Narcissists vs. Sociopaths (part 1)

A narcissist writes about the differences between sociopaths and narcissists, from a narcissist's perspective:

In "The Sociopath Next Door", Martha Stout describes several varieties of "sociopaths". They have the following traits - let's call the people with these traits sociopaths:

Sociopaths
almost no affect (very shallow emotions) - with compensatory faking of emotion to fit in
selfish & manipulative
don't bond with other humans
shameless
think they are awesome
treat life like a game (don't take their own lies too seriously)

Some sociopaths have ASPD traits too. So in addition to the "sociopath" traits listed above, they:
take offense easily
love retaliating
are impulsive
tell stupid lies
they don't fear punishment, so they tend to get in trouble repeatedly
don't take criticism from others personally
are glib and superficially charming

In one sense, sociopaths are like selfish, immoral robots (cool and rational). The sociopaths with ASPD traits are hotheads.

Some people assume that if someone behaves immorally and without concern for the welfare of others, he fits the above pattern. That's too simple. There are some very low empathy people with a different pattern. We'll call them narcissists.

Narcissists
have shallow emotions
are relatively unaware of their emotions and thoughts
are full of shame and controlled by it (but mostly unaware of it)
believe their own lies
are selfish and manipulative
fantasize of being rich, attractive and powerful (but may be relatively unaware of this)
love to hear positive things about themselves
deep down, dislike themselves tremendously
deceive themselves about their strengths and weaknesses
create a false "self" and spend a lot of effort getting people to admire it
are hypersensitive to criticism
don't make realistic plans
are glib and superficially charming

Some narcissists have ASPD traits too (take offense easily, love to retaliate, are impulsive and sadistic), making them "malignant narcissists".

Note: we're calling them "sociopaths" and "narcissists" - but other people might just call them "sociopaths" (because they are both very low empathy) or even "narcissists" (because they both treat others like objects). Even medical personnel who specialize in these people don't agree on terms.

Saturday, March 31, 2012

Theory of mind

A reader sent me a link to this Psychology Today blog post discussing how those in the dark triad (narcissists, Machiavellians, psychopaths) experience theory of mind.  The wikipedia definition of theory of mind is "the ability to attribute mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc.—to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires and intentions that are different from one's own."  It seems to overlap a little with cognitive empathy (which the article gets into a little).  The blog author further distinguishes between the social-perceptual component of theory of mind ("the ability to determine the mental states of others using immediately available non-verbal cues (e.g., eyes, face, hand gestures)") and the social-cognitive theory of mind ("involves the ability to reason about the mental state of others, and use that reasoning to predict or explain their behavior"), the former of which is tested by this "Mind in the Eyes" emotional recognition test (I scored 30).

The article itself is a little long and all over the place, but it makes some interesting points and some even more interesting conclusions.  One of which is that Machiavellians do more "mentalizing" than other people, "cognitively strategizing, scheming, and trying to infer the intentions of others," presumably to stay one step ahead.  Another seems suspect:

For most of our evolution, it payed to be cooperative and empathic. But during the course of our evolution, there were also selfish individuals who learned how to manipulate others to get what they wanted. They lacked empathy, perspective taking, and self-awareness (i.e., metacognition). Still, they had in tact lower-level perceptual theory of mind abilities that were good enough for them to manipulate others. In fact, their lower levels of empathy and higher levels of strategizing and spontaneous mentalizing worked to their advantage: whereas most people intuitively felt as though they were doing something wrong when they hurt others, these Machiavellian individuals didn't recieve [sic] the same emotional signals so they persevered toward their short-term selfish goals. In the process, they obtained more quantity of mates. Therefore, they remained in the human gene pool, along with their short-term mating orientation.

I can see that narcissists lack self-awareness, but what about Machiavellians and psychopaths?  I'm sort of underwhelmed by this guy's reasoning.  And he is a cognitive psychologist at NYU.  So credentials in the psychology world don't mean much?

But here's something else interesting I didn't know:

Andrew Whiten and Richard Byrne argue that primate intelligence stems from "Machiavellian Intelligence" -- the ability to manipulate and deceive others in the competition for scarce resources.


Join Amazon Prime - Watch Over 40,000 Movies

.

Comments are unmoderated. Blog owner is not responsible for third party content. By leaving comments on the blog, commenters give license to the blog owner to reprint attributed comments in any form.