Sociopaths = vampires?

Does this seem familiar? The plot of the Swedish film "Let the Right One In":

A fragile introverted boy, 12-year-old Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant), is regularly bullied by his stronger classmates but never strikes back. His wish for a friend comes true when he meets Eli (Lina Leandersson), also 12, who moves into the apartment next door with a man who is presumably her father. But coinciding with Eli's arrival is a series of disappearances and macabre murders—a man is found strung up in a tree, another frozen in the lake, a woman bitten in the neck.

Captivated by the gruesome stories and by Eli’s idiosyncrasies (she is only seen at night, and unaffected by the freezing cold), it doesn't take long before Oskar figures out that Eli is a vampire. Nevertheless, their friendship strengthens, and a subtle romance blossoms as the youngsters become inseparable. In spite of Oskar’s loyalty to her, Eli knows that she can only continue to live if she keeps on moving. But when Oskar faces his darkest hour, Eli returns to defend him the only way she can...

Based on the best-selling novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, Swedish filmmaker Tomas Alfredson weaves friendship, rejection and loyalty into a haunting and darkly atmospheric, yet poetic and unexpectedly tender tableau of adolescence.

The connections between sociopaths and vampires are obvious. Sociopaths are sometimes described as emotional vampires, and modern day vampire covens seem to be all about the psychopath. Some think that the vampire myth originates from vampires. It makes sense: life-sucking, preternaturally powerful, charming, seductive, dangerous... and somehow always falling in love with or befriending normal humans. Hard to know why that is, but I hope all the vampire love will spill over a little onto the sociopaths.

Sociopaths don't understand sarcasm

I think this conversation with a friend is interesting because it illustrates how completely oblivious I am to sarcasm. I frequently get accused of blaming every trait of mine on being a sociopath, but I think this one is actually true because aspies and other empathy-challenged individuals also supposedly struggle with understanding sarcasm. Although I don't understand how one's ability to feel for another would lead to being able to correctly interpret hidden meanings behind words. Uh... actually, after having just typed that out, it does seem to make some sense.

Friend: I just read on facebook that [a mutual friend] is a sociopath.
M.E.: What?! Really?!
Friend: Or actually, he replied this way to a question regarding his most embarrassing moment: "None, because I'm a sociopath."
M.E.: Whoa! That's crazy. I never would guessed.
Friend: Ok, sorry I thought you would realize that he was kidding and would laugh at it. I keep forgetting that you don't understand sarcasm.
M.E.: ? How do you know he was kidding?
Friend: Well, think about it this way: only neuro-typical people would say they are a sociopath. Sociopaths wouldn't want to out themselves and they wouldn't risk even joking about it for fear of accidentally outing themselves.
M.E.: Hmm, well, you got my hopes up for nothing then.

DSM-5 vs. PCL-R

A reader comments about the differences between the proposed DSM-5 and the PCL-R:

As far as sociopathy goes, the DSM-IV diagnosis was woefully inadequate. It provided no real insight into the disorder and lacked strong empirical evidence; that is why scholars such as Robert Hare and Theodore Millon have said that sociopathy and antisocial personality disorder are two independent constructs and why Hare went further to create the psychopathy checklist. While the psychopathic checklist is a much more accurate diagnostic tool, it also lacks empirical evidence. For one, it looks at personality as a binary construct. You either you have it or not and if not. It says psychopaths are both quantitatively and qualitatively different from non-psychopaths. But personality is not that clean cut. Everyone has psychopathic traits to a greater or lesser degree. It also doesn’t take into account the heterogeneity within psychopathy. According to Hare for and individual to receive a diagnosis in psychopathy they would have to score relatively high on factor 1 and 2, but that is far from true. Some patients would score high on the disinhibited component others on the antagonistic component and while some score high on both. There is abundant evidence that the impulsive-antisocial (disinhibited-externalizing) and affective-interpersonal (boldness-meanness) components of psychopathy differ in terms of their neurobiological correlates and etiologic determinants according to the work group of the DSM 5. So as far as the DSM and sociopathy researchers go, yes, there has been a disagreement between the two and up until now I think the PCL-R was the most useful when comparing it to antisocial personality disorder, but in all honesty, the DSM 5 seems to have a stronger scientific and empirical basis to not only psychopathy but personality as a whole. 

The DSM 5 seems to have a stronger scientific and empirical basis to not only psychopathy but personality as a whole. In contrast to the PCL-R, the DSM 5 derived its criteria from scientific data not theory. In a contested article by Skeem and Cooke, "Is Criminal Behavior a Central Component of Psychopathy? Conceptual Directions for Resolving the Debate," the two colleagues posit that the field of forensic psychology has prematurely embraced Hare's Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) as the gold standard for psychopathy, due in large part to legal demands for a tool to predict violence. Yet the PCL-R's ability to predict violent recidivism owes in large part to its conflation of the supposed personality construct of psychopathy with past criminal behavior, they argue: 

“[T]he modern justice context has created a strong demand for identifying bad, dangerous people…. [The] link between the PCL and violence has supported a myth that emotionally detached psychopaths callously use violence to achieve control over and exploit others. As far as the PCL is concerned, this notion rests on virtually no empirical support…. [T]he process of understanding psychopathy must be separated from the enterprise of predicting violence.” 

Criminal behavior weighs heavily in the PCL's 20 items because the instrument emerged from research with prisoners. But using the PCL-R's consequent ability to predict violence to assert the theoretical validity of its underlying personality construct is a tautological, or circular, argument, claim Skeem and Cooke. Or, as John Ellard put it more directly back in 1998: 

"Why has this man done these terrible things? Because he is a psychopath. And how do you know that he is a psychopath? Because he has done these terrible things." 

All in all, the PCL- R tends to do a better job measuring criminality. Not psychopathy, which is a personality disorder and can’t be adequately recognized by a set of twenty criteria combined with an arbitrary diagnostic threshold. (That threshold being 30). 

Connect the dots

Remember those games you used to play in primary school where the teacher would give you a bunch of clues and you had to guess what the person or thing was?  From a reader:

I'm wondering where I fall on the sociopathic spectrum, and what if anything I should do about it.
I was born into a troubled family - mother is was paranoid schizophrenic & father is narcissistc. Grandfather was a sociopath (he was sadistic, transgressive and super low-empathy). I spent most of my childhood (mildly) abused or neglected. I was a bedwetter. 

I tend to interpret peoples' actions the way a paranoid would, although I know rationally that I'm often wrong. 

I'm low-empathy. I have trouble reading the emotions of others. I often say things that bother people. Unless I'm paying a lot of attention, it is easy for me to offend people. When I offend people, I try to make amends (as a practical matter).

I tend to take things literally. I have a hard time with jokes. I speak bluntly. 

I'm generally quite honest, although when I want to lie, I take great delight in saying something that is literally true, but misleading.

In general, I'm bold. If I want stuff, I'll try to get it. I very much feel like my life is slipping away; there's no time to waste. I get bored easily.

As a kid, I didn't abuse mammals, but I was tough on slugs and snails. I took them apart, tortured them, etc. In my adult years, my job had me doing terrible things to mammals. They'd scream for a long time. I didn't like hearing the screams, it bugged me. If anything, they pissed me off with their screaming, because I had a job to do. Sometimes I'd get so pissed at them for screaming at me that I'd hurt them more. My sense is, I don't abuse animals for fun, but if I've got goals and to reach them I have to hurt stuff, I'll do it. If the things I'm hurting make my job difficult, I'll hurt them more after I get angry at them.

I've got something of a conscience, but not like most people. I do feel bad if I hurt people I love. I don't steal. But I do trespass, snoop, cheat on my taxes, smuggle contraband when it suits me, etc. I regularly do things that could get me arrested. 

If people cross a line, I consider extra-legal retribution essential. I've broken the law, repeatedly, to get revenge. It involved killing animals. I did it without remorse. I've gotten good at it.
I enjoy internet trolling, particularly by expressing un-PC thoughts. 

I'm sadistic. I really enjoy hurting my enemies. 

I've got ethnocentric/racist sensibilities. I think the world would be a better place if we got rid of people not in my racial group. If making that happen required me to volunteer, I'd do it happily. In this way, I'm altruistic. I'm not totally selfish. Then again, I don't love everyone in my racial group (or family, etc). If there were important enough goals, I'd think it reasonable to kill them for the cause.

If I could kill people and get away with it (or get approval, by being on a death squad), I'd jump to sign up. I'm kinda hoping we'll get a race war before I'm dead, so that I can hunt some humans.
I'm very manipulative and calculating. I lie. I do this even with the people closest to me. I kind of delight in doing it.

I transgress. When I do "bad" things, I don't have remorse. I do have fear of getting caught, and a deep hatred of authority figures. I know that if I was in the middle of a crime and a lone law enforcement officer caught me, I'd kill him in an instant if it meant the difference between getting away or being punished.

That said, there are some transgressions I feel are wrong, so I don't do them. If I do them, I feel guilty. Yet for someone who hates authority, when people disregard my wishes or authority, I feel they deserve the maximum punishment.

I get lonely. Rejection hurts and pisses me off. I want to be adored. When I've been rejected, I've thought of stalking, attacking or trespassing the person rejecting me. Or I think of re-seducing them, so that I can dump them to punish them.

My general sense is that I can't be a sociopath; I have something of a conscience. But then there's only about 5 people in the world I care about in non-abstract terms.

Fictional sociopaths: Hurt Locker

A psychologist suggests a fictional depiction of a psychopath is the protagonist from the Hurt Locker:

Patrick Bateman in the film American Psycho inserts a chainsaw into a prostitute. Alex in A Clockwork Orange fantasizes about torture and slaughter while listening to music. 

But psychopaths can wreak havoc in workplaces without stabbing, or eating, their colleagues.
"It's a much more ordinary condition than those movies portray. They aren't more intelligent than the rest of us," Dr Polaschek said. 

She suggested another movie character for a different look at psychopaths: Sergeant First Class William James in The Hurt Locker. 

James joins a bomb disposal team in Iraq and quickly earns the distrust of his comrades through his lack of care. 

"He could well be a psychopath, but he doesn't do anything to hurt anybody. He's a bit of a cowboy and does a fearless kind of work tracking those improvised explosives, and he doesn't work well in a team."

The researcher goes on to opine:

Dr Polaschek said it was a complex disorder - there was no clear line dividing a common and commendable display of boldness from full-blown psychopathy. 

"But there probably isn't such a thing as a harmless psychopath. People who live for themselves and for the day will tend to blunder around, causing harm to people - because that's not how society works." 

I think this sign represents his character well (and the awkwardness of a sociopath trying to deal with someone's very emotional state, rather unsuccessfully):



Sergeant JT Sanborn: I'm ready to die, James.
Staff Sergeant William James: Well, you're not gonna die out here, bro.
Sergeant JT Sanborn: Another two inches, shrapnel zings by; slices my throat- I bleed out like a pig in the sand. Nobody'll give a shit. I mean my parents- they care- but they don't count, man. Who else? I don't even have a son.
Staff Sergeant William James: Well, you're gonna have plenty of time for that, amigo.
Sergeant JT Sanborn: Naw, man. I'm done. I want a son. I want a little boy, Will. I mean, how do you do it, you know? Take the risk?
Staff Sergeant William James: I don't know. I guess I don't think about it.
Sergeant JT Sanborn: But you realize every time you suit up, every time we go out, it's life or death. You roll the dice, and you deal with it. You recognize that don't you?
Staff Sergeant William James: Yea... Yea, I do. But I don't know why.
[sighs]
Staff Sergeant William James: I don't know, JT. You know why I'm the way I am?
Sergeant JT Sanborn: No, I don't.