Iconoclasts

One of my favorite comedy skits is this SNL version of the old Iconoclasts show with Bjork and Charles Barkley: http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/iconoclasts/n12169

Perhaps the thing that people are most often jealous of, regarding a sociopath's life, is the way a sociopath doesn't care about so many things other people in the world care about. Or I should say more accurately, doesn't care about things in the same way that others care about them. Like I guess I care about money and power and things to a certain extent, but not in the same way that I see others caring about them. I don't identify with them, or feel like I need them to be happy, or get really worried about not having them. I have no emotional attachment to them at all. Of course this distance from the status quo rat race life that most people are so deeply embedded in they're not even aware there is an alternative, this distance comes with costs. Costs like not understanding why everyone else in the world is so stressed out or unhappy about certain things. Or maybe not being able to care enough to actually do something in certain situations (although I have such a low threshold for impulsively doing stuff, that I hardly need a reason at all to do something, much less to have an emotionally compelling reason to do it.)

I've been thinking about that a lot this past week or so, my ability to not care and what a relief that is as the world seems to get more and more farcical.

Also this poem:

she was not 
like everyone else,
simply because 
she didn't care
about things. 
instead, her heart
yearned for new places,
people, and experiences 
that would inspire her
to become greater 
in spirit, 
and live as freely,
as her heart loved.

Jose Chavez (?)

Why bullies are bad for everyone

"In Germany, the Nazis came for the Communists and I didn't speak up because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the Jews and I didn't speak up because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists and I didn't speak up because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics and I was a Protestant so I didn't speak up. Then they came for me … By that time there was no one to speak up for anyone."

 Martin Niemöller

48 Laws of Power, animated

This was educational:

Sesame Street on Empathy

I saw this interesting Sesame Street clip defining empathy. Curiously, they never define it as feeling what another person is feeling -- only understanding or imagining what another person is feeling. I guess we would call that cognitive empathy, perhaps even just perspective taking. If that is all that is needed, then I think each sociopath here passes the Sesame Street standard? If anything, it's the autism spectrum that struggles to perspective take?

An Introduction to Psychopathy

I am still surprised by the amount of disagreement about psychopathy, sociopathy, antisocial personality disorder, etc. that you'll get from any source -- academic, pop psychology, etc. With that small caveat (nothing is definitive), I found this article on psychopathy to be a good overview with academic cites (and links in the original). Here are some selections:

While it is past antisocial behavior that is particularly important in predicting future criminal activity (Walters, 2003), it is CU (callous unemotional) traits that are at the core of developmental trajectory associated with psychopathy (Frick and White, 2008). The disorder is developmental. It has been shown that CU traits in particular and the psychopathy more generally are relatively stable from childhood into adulthood (Lynam et al., 2007; Munoz and Frick, 2007). In addition, the functional impairments seen in adults with psychopathy (e.g., in responding to emotional expressions, aversive conditioning, passive avoidance learning, reversal learning, extinction) are also seen in adolescents with psychopathic tendencies (see later).
***
Psychopathy is not equivalent to the psychiatric conditions of conduct disorder (CD) or antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) as defined by DSM-5 or their ICD-10 counterparts. The diagnostic criteria for these disorders focus on antisocial behaviors rather than on etiological factors such as the emotion dysfunction seen in psychopathy (Blair et al., 2005). As such these psychiatric conditions describe individuals with difficulties in executive dysfunction (Moffitt, 1993), as well as individuals with symptoms stemming from CU traits. Consequently, individuals with psychopathy are a more homogenous group than those individuals meeting the criteria for CD and ASPD (Karnik et al., 2006). It should be noted, however, that DSM-5 includes the specifier for CD ‘with limited pro-social emotions,’ which stem directly from research on youth with CD and CU traits (Pardini et al., 2010; Pardini and Fite, 2010). Furthermore, the diagnosis of ASPD now includes components of psychopathy (APA, 2013). While the disorder of psychopathy will still not be equivalent to the DSM-5 diagnoses of CD and ASPD, there will be greater overlap in diagnostic conceptualization.

Psychopathy is characterized by an increased risk for antisocial behavior (Frick and Dickens, 2006; Hare, 2003). While several psychiatric disorders and neurological conditions, including CD and ASPD (APA, 2013), confer an increased risk of reactive aggression (Anderson et al., 1999; Leibenluft et al., 2003), psychopathy is unique in that it conveys increased risk for instrumental aggression (Frick et al., 2003). 

Interestingly, an article that was cited included this assessment of treatment options: "While treatment recommendations are currently sparse, recent work has shown that previous assessments of treatment amenability in this population may have been overly pessimistic."

Also, because I had to look this up too:
"A classic measure of stimulus-reinforcement learning is aversive conditioning -- the individual learns that a particular stimulus is associated with threat. Individuals with elevated CU traits show marked impairment in stimulus-reinforcement learning. Indeed, an individual's ability to perform aversive conditioning at 15 years has predictive power regarding whether that individual will display anti-social behavior 14 years later (Raine et a., 1996)."