What is a psychopath?
A psychopath is someone who has an antisocial personality disorder and lacks empathy and remorse. Psychopaths often exhibit manipulative, callous, and intimidating behaviors. While the causes are still debated, psychopathy appears to have both genetic and environmental influences. Some key traits of psychopaths include:
- Lack of empathy and remorse
- Superficial charm and charisma
- Impulsivity and poor behavioral controls
- Shallow emotions
- Manipulativeness
- Lying and deception
- Inflated self-esteem
It’s estimated about 1% of the general population meets the criteria for psychopathy, with higher rates among criminal offenders. While psychopaths are often portrayed as violent in popular media, many psychopaths function in society without breaking the law. However, their lack of empathy and exploitative nature can cause harm in interpersonal relationships and other settings.
Emotions psychopaths lack
Psychopaths are widely recognized to have deficits experiencing certain emotions that most people consider fundamental aspects of human experience. Some key emotions psychopaths characteristically lack include:
Empathy
Empathy involves understanding and sharing the feelings of others. Psychopaths show a pronounced lack of empathy and seem unable to understand victims’ pain and suffering. Brain imaging studies reveal abnormalities in regions involved in empathy among psychopathic individuals. When watching videos depicting emotional situations or looking at emotionally evocative pictures, psychopaths display reduced activation in circuits linked to empathy compared to control participants.
Psychopaths can determine what others are feeling but seem disconnected from experiencing empathy themselves. The psychopathic lack of empathy is thought to underlie their tendency for exploitation, manipulation, and other antisocial behaviors, as they pursue their self-interests without regard for inflicting suffering.
Remorse
Closely related to empathy is the capacity for remorse and regret over inflicting harm. While a psychopath may apologize for wrongdoing, they don’t truly feel remorseful. Rather, psychopathic apologies tend to be insincere, serving a self-interested purpose like getting out of trouble.
The emotional detachment and lack of remorse among psychopaths allow them to rationalize and justify their harmful actions. Most people would feel crippling guilt over seriously hurting someone else, but psychopaths lack that sense of moral responsibility and restraint.
Love
The emotional deficits of psychopaths extend to positive emotions like love as well. While they may say “I love you” to romantic partners or family members, psychopaths seem incapable of genuinely loving others.
Rather than love, psychopathic relationships tend to be rooted in a lopsided need for power, control, and ego gratification. When “in love,” the psychopath’s focus remains on what they can get out of the relationship. Their selfishness prevents the kind of selfless emotional bonding that underlies heartfelt love.
Fear
Most people experience healthy fear and anxiety in response to genuine danger or threats. But psychopaths characteristically lack normal fear responses, even showing recklessness and thrill-seeking in the face of peril.
Brain imaging indicates psychopaths have reduced activity in the amygdala and other regions that generate fear reactions. As a result, psychopaths don’t experience protective fear-based aversions to high-risk behaviors like unprotected sex, extreme sports, or criminal acts. Their boldness may aid them in committing crimes or manipulating others.
Guilt
Guilt arises when people believe they have violated their own moral standards. Healthy guilt serves to rein in immoral impulses and regulate behavior consistent with one’s conscience. By contrast, the muted conscience of psychopaths means they are less prone to experience guilt over misdeeds.
Research indicates psychopaths have substantial difficulties recognizing moral violations and generating guilt responses. Their lack of remorse and guilt allows psychopaths to rationalize actions most people would find morally reprehensible. This moral disconnect contributes to psychopathic tendencies like recidivism, fraud, and other criminal behaviors.
Sadness
Psychopaths appear capable of experiencing sadness in certain situations, like the loss of a valued possession or status. However, they display a more limited depth of sadness compared to others. Their sadness also tends to quickly shift to anger or irritability.
The muted experience of sadness may relate to deficits in forming deep emotional attachments to people, places, or things. Consequently, psychopaths have less potential to feel real loss that would evoke profound grief or despair in most individuals.
Emotions psychopaths do feel
While psychopaths show pronounced deficits in experiencing certain emotions, they seem capable of feeling some emotions within a constrained range, including:
Anger
Psychopaths frequently display outbursts of anger and aggression. However, their anger appears driven more by frustration over not getting what they want rather than true upset over perceived injustice or mistreatment. Still, the emotional intensity of their anger episodes can resemble full-blown rage.
Joy
Psychopaths appear capable of taking pleasure in rewards like making money, achieving fame, having sex, and besting an opponent. However, their joy seems centered around shallow gratification rather than deeper fulfillment. In essence, psychopathic joy comes from getting what they want in the moment.
Contempt
The antisocial orientation of psychopaths underlies tendencies to view others with hostility, disgust, and superiority. Psychopaths seem adept at generating emotions like contempt that separate themselves from others deemed inferior or worthless. Their contempt facilitates their exploitative tendencies.
Boredom
Seeking continual excitement appears to be a major motivator for psychopaths. They easily feel bored and restless when not engaged in thrilling or rewarding activities. Unfortunately, their need for stimulation leads to pursuits like substance abuse, sexual misadventures, gambling, and criminal endeavors regardless of risks.
Surprise
Psychopaths seem capable of normal surprise reactions, like when witnessing an unexpected event or receiving an unanticipated reward. Surprise reflects a basic startle response present even among animals. The relatively unimpaired experience of surprise in psychopaths may relate to its primitive neural circuitry.
Reasons for psychopaths’ emotional deficits
Researchers propose several explanations for the diminished emotional capacities observed in psychopaths:
Genetic factors
Twin and family studies indicate psychopathic traits have a substantial genetic basis. Certain gene variants may give rise to differences in brain areas governing emotional function. For example, the warrior gene MAOA appears linked to underactivity in circuits related to emotion regulation.
Hormonal influences
Testosterone and cortisol levels have been associated with psychopathic tendencies. High testosterone combined with low cortisol may contribute to fearlessness among psychopaths. These hormonal influences likely exert effects by altering brain development.
Neurobiological abnormalities
Structural and functional brain imaging studies consistently identify abnormalities in regions controlling emotion among psychopaths. Key differences are found in the prefrontal cortex, amygdala, hippocampus, and connecting circuitry. These neural deficits are thought to directly impair emotional capacities.
Environmental factors
Adverse developmental experiences like childhood abuse, neglect, trauma, or insecure attachments are linked to higher psychopathy risks. Early stressors may impact emotional development through effects on the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis and associated brain changes.
Cognitive-emotional disconnect
Some researchers propose psychopaths have an underlying deficit integrating cognitive and emotional processes. This prevents emotional memories from informing decision-making as they normally would, enabling callous, antisocial acts.
Implications of psychopaths’ lack of emotion
The absence of core human emotions has profound implications for the inner experience and outward behaviors of psychopaths:
Vulnerability to manipulation
Lacking empathy, love, guilt, and remorse, psychopaths relate to others as objects to be exploited rather than as human beings with their own needs and desires. This creates risks for manipulation, deception, and victimization of others.
Recurring antisocial behavior
Undeterred by guilt, psychopaths are prone to lie, cheat, steal, and commit violent crimes and sex offenses without hesitation. Their lack of conscience means they readily repeat these behaviors, failing to learn from punishment.
Inability to form deep relationships
Relationships with psychopaths tend to be superficial and centered around what benefits the psychopath. Genuine emotional intimacy is elusive, given the psychopath’s selfishness and limited capacity for love and attachment.
Failure as parents
The challenges psychopaths have feeling empathy, love, and guilt mean they often prove unfit parents. At best, they are cold and detached. At worst, psychopathy gives rise to parental neglect, abuse, family abandonment, and other outcomes harmful to children.
Resistance to treatment
Standard psychotherapy aims to evoke emotions like guilt, remorse, and fear to promote change. The inability of psychopaths to experience these feelings renders treatment difficult. Without the capacity for profound change, they tend to reoffend when not incarcerated.
Conclusion
In summary, psychopaths characteristically lack the capacity to experience certain emotions considered central to humanity. Key emotional deficits found in psychopaths involve empathy, remorse, love, fear, guilt, and sadness. While psychopathy has genetic underpinnings, adverse developmental factors may also contribute to emotional impairments. The deficient emotions of psychopaths hold meaningful implications for their relationships, parenting, self-control, and treatability. However, some rudimentary emotions like anger, joy, and surprise appear partially spared among these individuals. Ongoing research aims to better understand the causes of psychopathic emotional abnormalities and develop more effective interventions to manage affected individuals.