Saturday, July 11, 2015

Song: To the Shoreline

From a reader:

I'm an aspie but I'm very interesting about the subject of sociopathy and find socios fascinating.

Anyway, I was listening to some music from one of my favorite bands when I stumbled upon a song whose lyrics reminded me a lot about what I've read about relationships with sociopaths.

Maybe you'll appreciate it, so here's a link to the song (with lyrics):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3F43IxkXio


Thursday, July 9, 2015

How do you cope?

From a reader:

I have recently come across your blog and it's given me a new perspective. It's interesting, many of your readers seem to be very high-functioning. This is not the case with me. I've had some trouble since early on being a "functional member of society", ergo I can't hold down a job, my family hates me, and I'm quite the drifter. Now don't be fooled, this does not much upset me. 

I found your blog after my psychiatrist (after some time of "therapy") informed me that I qualify for a diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. He also told me that I have a few antisocial traits, but barely don't qualify for a diagnosis of ASPD, the closest official variant of sociopathy. Now after I received this diagnosis, I was really put off because I can't stand narcissists, so I did some digging on NPD with antisocial traits, ended up reading "Mask of Sanity" and your very own enlightening book, "Confessions of a Sociopath." I don't believe in self-diagnosis, but I believe I would fit more into Dr. Robert Hare's depiction of psychopathy.


Tuesday, July 7, 2015

Psychology Survey - MBTI

A request:

I was interested to see if there could be any correlation between any MBTI facets and sociopathy, so I created a survey to investigate.  It's only 3 short questions, so it will take about a minute.  As the experiment is looking only at sociopathy, I would ask empaths to not particpate.   I will share with you the results provided that a reasonable number of people submit answers.

Here is the survey:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ZH68SNC

Here is a personality test that is generally reliable:
http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/jtypes2.asp

Sunday, July 5, 2015

Psychopaths excel at deceptive facial expressions

A reader sent me a link to the article "Would I lie to you? ‘'leakage’' in deceptive facial expressions relates to psychopathy and emotional intelligence."  In the study, researchers tested the ability of psychopaths and those with high emotional intelligence ("EI") in emotional deception.  Here are some fascinating highlights (citations omitted):
  • Emotional deception via the alteration of facial expressions can occur in three ways : simulating an expression involves adopting an expression in the absence of any real emotion; masking an emotion involves replacing a felt emotion with a different emotional expression; and neutralizing an expression involves concealing a felt emotion with a neutral face.
  • Some psychopathic individuals are chameleon-like actors and appear to use their acting skills to effectively manipulate others in various interpersonal contexts. In corporate settings, white-collar criminals with psychopathic characteristics, such as Bernard Madoff, often find easy victims by appearing trustworthy, empathetic, and kind. Psychopathic offenders can readily feign remorse and a pro-social attitude to manipulate their way into lower sentences (i.e., manslaughter rather than murder), permissions to appeal their sentences, and undeserved conditional release. Despite their much longer criminal histories and poorer conditional release histories, psychopaths are 2.5 times more likely than non-psychopaths to be released when they apply for parole . Further, these decisions are faulty; psychopathic offenders in both studies spent fewer successful days on release compared to non-psychopaths released. In fact, extended interpersonal contact with a psychopath can lead to less accurate perceptions of psychopathic traits.  
  • Despite evidence that psychopathic individuals are successful manipulators, the manner in which they deceive and manipulate others is open to question. Psychopathy arguably is associated with effective emotional deception. The psychopath’s distinctive lack of emotional experience may prevent emotional ‘‘interference’’ in feigning emotional displays. That is, because of the lack of real emotion, there may be less genuine emotion ‘‘leaking’’ onto the false face during a fabricated emotional display. In support of this prediction, Herpetz et al. (2001) found that psychopathic offenders exhibited fewer and less intense facial expressions in response to pleasant and unpleasant emotional images relative to controls. We predict that psychopathic individuals, particularly those with strong interpersonal-affective features of the disorder, will have an advantage when attempting to control their facial expressions during deception because of their lack of emotion; such individuals may express less ‘‘leakage’’ of genuine emotion during deception. However, due to emotional recognition deficits and a lack of understanding of what a sincere expression ‘‘looks like’’, these individuals will not necessarily be proficient at creating a facial expression consistent with the feigned emotion.
  • As predicted, psychopathic traits – specifically, high levels of interpersonal manipulation – were related to shorter durations of unintended emotional ‘‘leakage’’ during deceptive expressions. In contrast, the erratic lifestyle element of psychopathy predicted greater emotional inconsistency during deceptive displays.  Individuals higher in EI – specifically, the ability to perceive and express emotion – feigned emotions more convincingly than others but were not more immune to emotional leakage.
In other words, psychopaths are the best at not letting other actual emotions interfere with the feigned emotion (presumably because the psychopath does not have strong feelings to suppress), but that people with high EI did a better job mimicking actual emotion (presumably because they know better what those emotions look/feel like).

Friday, July 3, 2015

House of Cards

I've just started watching this show. I don't know why I haven't started before. I guess because I'm not really that interested at all in politics? Anyway, I'm still in the first season so I don't think these are going to be terrible spoilers, but I was a little surprised at how realistic the depiction of a high functioning sociopath seems to be for Frank Underwood.

There are the obvious things: obsessed with power, crafty, manipulative, duplicitive (spell check tells me that's not an actual word), has few intimates and the rest of his acquaintances are just pawns in his chess game. But there are also some of the less obvious things: bisexual, oddly friendly and helpful without any seeming motive and just as oddly vindictive in a way that seems to far exceed the original offense. He often does things that are generous with little hope of the good deed being reciprocated in kind, but he feels like "generosity is its own form of power". He's not delusional, but he also has random beliefs that don't seem entirely rational either, like a faith/belief in karma. If he respects you, he's not going to bullshit you, which may be nice for the open marriage he has with his wife (the marriage and love angle also seems like a pretty realistic depiction of the sort of partnership built on respect and admiration rather than love that you would expect), but he also clearly has impulse and rage problems and his crazy risks don't always pan out well for him. He's the type of person that you would love to have for a friend if you needed any of his prodigious skills, but also would need to watch yourself around, which maybe isn't that bad of a trade off?

Any way, I hope the subsequent seasons stay true to this character and for those of you who haven't seen this show yet, I would recommend it. Netflix.
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