Without Conscience - Psychopaths

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Re: Without Conscience - Psychpaths

Post: # 155621Unread post Gary Oak »

I hope that I wouldn't do to well on the psychopathy test. I will have to watch this video when I have a chance to. I imagine that Robert Hare has learned a bit more since he wrote the book Without Conscience.

Born to kill? How to spot a psychopath
Tom Chivers,The Telegraph 1 hour 59 minutes ago
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Anders Breivik, the Norwegian gunman who killed 77 people in a bomb and shooting rampage in 2011
We think of psychopaths as killers, alien, outside society. But, says the scientist who has spent his life studying them, you could have one for a colleague, a friend – or a spouse

There are a few things we take for granted in social interactions with people. We presume that we see the world in roughly the same way, that we all know certain basic facts, that words mean the same things to you as they do to me. And we assume that we have pretty similar ideas of right and wrong.

But for a small – but not that small – subset of the population, things are very different. These people lack remorse and empathy and feel emotion only shallowly. In extreme cases, they might not care whether you live or die. These people are called psychopaths. Some of them are violent criminals, murderers. But by no means all.

Professor Robert Hare is a criminal psychologist, and the creator of the PCL-R, a psychological assessment used to determine whether someone is a psychopath. For decades, he has studied people with psychopathy, and worked with them, in prisons and elsewhere. “It stuns me, as much as it did when I started 40 years ago, that it is possible to have people who are so emotionally disconnected that they can function as if other people are objects to be manipulated and destroyed without any concern,” he says.


Our understanding of the brain is still in its infancy, and it’s not so many decades since psychological disorders were seen as character failings. Slowly we are learning to think of mental illnesses as illnesses, like kidney disease or liver failure, and developmental disorders, such as autism, in a similar way. Psychopathy challenges this view. “A high-scoring psychopath views the world in a very different way,” says Hare. “It’s like colour-blind people trying to understand the colour red, but in this case ‘red’ is other people’s emotions.”

At heart, Hare’s test is simple: a list of 20 criteria, each given a score of 0 (if it doesn’t apply to the person), 1 (if it partially applies) or 2 (if it fully applies). The list in full is: glibness and superficial charm, grandiose sense of self-worth, pathological lying, cunning/manipulative, lack of remorse, emotional shallowness, callousness and lack of empathy, unwillingness to accept responsibility for actions, a tendency to boredom, a parasitic lifestyle, a lack of realistic long-term goals, impulsivity, irresponsibility, lack of behavioural control, behavioural problems in early life, juvenile delinquency, criminal versatility, a history of “revocation of conditional release” (ie broken parole), multiple marriages, and promiscuous sexual behaviour. A pure, prototypical psychopath would score 40. A score of 30 or more qualifies for a diagnosis of psychopathy. Hare says: “A friend of mine, a psychiatrist, once said: ‘Bob, when I meet someone who scores 35 or 36, I know these people really are different.’ The ones we consider to be alien are the ones at the upper end.”

But is psychopathy a disorder – or a different way of being? Anyone reading the list above will spot a few criteria familiar from people they know. On average, someone with no criminal convictions scores 5. “It’s dimensional,” says Hare. “There are people who are part-way up the scale, high enough to warrant an assessment for psychopathy, but not high enough up to cause problems. Often they’re our friends, they’re fun to be around. They might take advantage of us now and then, but usually it’s subtle and they’re able to talk their way around it.” Like autism, a condition which we think of as a spectrum, “psycho­pathy”, the diagnosis, bleeds into normalcy.

We think of psychopaths as killers, criminals, outside society. People such as Joanna Dennehy, a 31-year-old British woman who killed three men in 2013 and who the year before had been diagnosed with a psychopathic personality disorder, or Ted Bundy, the American serial killer who is believed to have murdered at least 30 people and who said of himself: “I’m the most cold-blooded son of a bitch you’ll ever meet. I just liked to kill.”

The American serial killer Ted Bundy, who is believed to have murdered at least 30 people
The American serial killer Ted Bundy, who is believed to have murdered at least 30 people
But many psychopathic traits aren’t necessarily disadvantages – and might, in certain circumstances, be an advantage. For their co-authored book, “Snakes in suits: When Psychopaths go to work”, Hare and another researcher, Paul Babiak, looked at 203 corporate professionals and found about four per cent scored sufficiently highly on the PCL-R to be evaluated for psychopathy.

Hare says that this wasn’t a proper random sample (claims that “10 per cent of financial executives” are psychopaths are certainly false) but it’s easy to see how a lack of moral scruples and indifference to other people’s suffering could be beneficial if you want to get ahead in business.

“There are two kinds of empathy,” says James Fallon, a neuroscientist at the University of California and author of The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist’s Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain. “Cognitive empathy is the ability to know what other people are feeling, and emotional empathy is the kind where you feel what they’re feeling.”

Autistic people can be very empathetic – they feel other people’s pain – but are less able to recognise the cues we read easily, the smiles and frowns that tell us what someone is thinking. Psychopaths are often the opposite: they know what you’re feeling, but don’t feel it themselves. “This all gives certain psychopaths a great advantage, because they can understand what you’re thinking, it’s just that they don’t care, so they can use you against yourself.” (Chillingly, psychopaths are particularly adept at detecting vulnerability. A 2008 study that asked participants to remember virtual characters found that those who scored highly for psychopathy had a near perfect recognition for sad, unsuccessful females, but impaired memory for other characters.)

Snakes in suits: When Psychopaths go to work
Snakes in suits: When Psychopaths go to work
Fallon himself is a case in point. In 2005, he was looking at brain scans of psychopathic murderers, while on another study, of Alzheimer’s, he was using scans of his own family’s brains as controls. In the latter pile, he found something strange. “You can’t tell just from a brain scan whether someone’s a psychopath,” he says, “but you can make a good guess at the personality traits they’ll have.”

He describes a great loop that starts in the front of the brain including the parahippocampal gyrus and the amygdala and other regions tied to emotion and impulse control and empathy. Under certain circumstances they would light up dramatically on a normal person’s MRI scan, but would be darker on a psychopath’s.

“I saw one that was extremely abnormal, and I thought this is someone who’s way off. It looked like the murderers I’d been looking at,” he says. He broke the anonymisation code in case it had been put into the wrong pile. When he did, he discovered it was his own brain. “I kind of blew it off,” he says. “But later, some psychiatrist friends of mine went through my behaviours, and they said, actually, you’re probably a borderline psychopath.”

Speaking to him is a strange experience; he barely draws breath in an hour, in which I ask perhaps three questions. He explains how he has frequently put his family in danger, exposing his brother to the deadly Marburg virus and taking his son trout-fishing in the African countryside knowing there were lions around. And in his youth, “if I was confronted by authority – if I stole a car, made pipe bombs, started fires – when we got caught by the police I showed no emotion, no anxiety”.

Yet he is highly successful, driven to win. He tells me things most people would be uncomfortable saying: that his wife says she’s married to a “fun-loving, happy-go-lucky nice guy” on the one hand, and a “very dark character who she does not like” on the other. He’s pleasant, and funny, if self-absorbed, but I can’t help but think about the criteria in Hare’s PCL-R: superficial charm, lack of emotional depth, grandiose sense of self-worth. “I look like hell now, Tom,” he says – he’s 66 – “but growing up I was good-looking, six foot, 180lb, athletic, smart, funny, popular.” (Hare warns against non-professionals trying to diagnose people using his test, by the way.)

“Psychopaths do think they’re more rational than other people, that this isn’t a deficit,” says Hare. “I met one offender who was certainly a psychopath who said ‘My problem is that according to psychiatrists I think more with my head than my heart. What am I supposed to do about that? Am I supposed to get all teary-eyed?’” Another, asked if he had any regrets about stabbing a robbery victim, replied: “Get real! He spends a few months in hospital and I rot here. If I wanted to kill him I would have slit his throat. That’s the kind of guy I am; I gave him a break.”

And yet, as Hare points out, when you’re talking about people who aren’t criminals, who might be successful in life, it’s difficult to categorise it as a disorder. “It’d be pretty hard for me to go into high-level political or economic or academic context and pick out all the most successful people and say, ‘Look, I think you’ve got some brain deficit.’ One of my inmates said that his problem was that he’s a cat in a world of mice. If you compare the brainwave activity of a cat and a mouse, you’d find they were quite different.”

It would, says Hare, probably have been an evolutionarily successful strategy for many of our ancestors, and can be successful today; adept at manipulating people, a psychopath can enter a community, “like a church or a cultural organisation, saying, ‘I believe the same things you do’, but of course what we have is really a cat pretending to be a mouse, and suddenly all the money’s gone”. At this point he floats the name Bernie Madoff.

This brings up the issue of treatment. “Psychopathy is probably the most pleasant-feeling of all the mental disorders,” says the journalist Jon Ronson, whose book, The Psychopath Test, explored the concept of psychopathy and the mental health industry in general. “All of the things that keep you good, morally good, are painful things: guilt, remorse, empathy.” Fallon agrees: “Psychopaths can work very quickly, and can have an apparent IQ higher than it really is, because they’re not inhibited by moral concerns.”

So psychopaths often welcome their condition, and “treating” them becomes complicated. “How many psychopaths go to a psychiatrist for mental distress, unless they’re in prison? It doesn’t happen,” says Hare. The ones in prison, of course, are often required to go to “talk therapy, empathy training, or talk to the family of the victims” – but since psychopaths don’t have any empathy, it doesn’t work. “What you want to do is say, ‘Look, it’s in your own self-interest to change your behaviour, otherwise you’ll stay in prison for quite a while.’ ”

The Psychopath Test
The Psychopath Test
It seems Hare’s message has got through to the UK Department of Justice: in its guidelines for working with personality-disordered inmates, it advises that while “highly psychopathic individuals” are likely to be “highly treatment resistant”, the “interventions most likely to be effective are those which focus on ‘self-interest’ – what the offender wants out of life – and work with them to develop the skills to get those things in a pro-social rather than anti-social way.”

If someone’s brain lacks the moral niceties the rest of us take for granted, they obviously can’t do anything about that, any more than a colour-blind person can start seeing colour. So where does this leave the concept of moral responsibility? “The legal system traditionally asserts that all people standing in front of the judge’s bench are equal. That’s demonstrably false,” says the neuroscientist David Eagleman, author of Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain.

He suggests that instead of thinking in terms of blameworthiness, the law should deal with the likelihood that someone will reoffend, and issue sentences accordingly, with rehabilitation for those likely to benefit and long sentences for those likely to be long-term dangers. The PCL-R is already used as part of algorithms which categorise people in terms of their recidivism risk. “Life insurance companies do exactly this sort of thing, in actuarial tables, where they ask: ‘What age do we think he’s going to die?’ No one’s pretending they know exactly when we’re going to die. But they can make rough guesses which make for an enormously more efficient system.”

What this doesn’t mean, he says, is a situation like the sci-fi film Minority Report, in which people who are likely to commit crimes are locked up before they actually do. “Here's why,” he says. “It's because many people in the population have high levels of psychopathy – about 1 per cent. But not all of them become criminals. In fact many of them, because of their glibness and charm and willingness to ride roughshod over the people in their way, become quite successful. They become CEOs, professional athletes, soldiers. These people are revered for their courage and their straight talk and their willingness to crush obstacles in their way. Merely having psychopathy doesn't tell us that a person will go off and commit a crime.”


It is central to the justice system, both in Britain and America, that you can’t pre-emptively punish someone. And that won’t ever change, says Eagleman, not just for moral, philosophical reasons, but for practical ones. The Minority Report scenario is a fantasy, because “it's impossible to predict what somebody will do, even given their personality type and everything, because life is complicated and crime is contextual. Once someone has committed a crime, once someone has stepped over a societal boundary, then there's a lot more statistical power about what they're likely to do in future. But until that's happened, you can't ever know.”

Speaking to all these experts, I notice they all talk about psychopaths as “them”, almost as a different species, although they make conscious efforts not to. There’s something uniquely troubling about a person who lacks emotion and empathy; it’s the stuff of changeling stories, the Midwich Cuckoos, Hannibal Lecter. “You know kids who use a magnifying glass to burn ants, thinking, this is interesting,” says Hare. “Translate that to an adult psychopath who treats a person that way. It is chilling.”

At one stage Ronson suggests I speak to another well-known self-described psychopath, a woman, but I can’t bring myself to. I find the idea unsettling, as if he’d suggested I commune with the dead.

• This article originally stated that autism was a "personality disorder". It is in fact a neurodevelopmental disorder. This has been corrected; apologies for the error. Tom

Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go To Work (RRP £10.99) is available to order from Telegraph Books at £10.99 + £1.35p&p. Call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk

https://ca.yahoo.com/style/psychopaths- ... 46121.html


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Without Conscience - Psychpaths

Post: # 156896Unread post Blue Frost »

Well dah !
[video][/video]
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Without Conscience - Psychpaths

Post: # 156920Unread post Gary Oak »

This is very interesting. Hillary may actually be a psychopath. I can't help but notice that this is a British university and the Brits tend to hate Americans. Now I like both Americans and the Brits but I do believe they tend to be unfairly "bad" towards someone if they are American. I am not sure if Hillary is a psycho. I am not sure that she does not have a conscience.
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Post: # 156926Unread post Blue Frost »

She has no conscious for sure, look how shes did people, the people of Haiti for one, the remarks about the men in Bingazi, and their families, laughing about the little girl who was raped in which she got the man off who did it.
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Post: # 156945Unread post Gary Oak »

I stand corrected. :scratch: Hillary laughing about that girl getting raped is solid evidence that she has no conscience. One of us posted an article on that outrageous episode.
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Post: # 156946Unread post Blue Frost »

Shes worse than Obama, and many others, worse than her Hubby even I think.
Shes really worse than a psychopath, megalomaniac even.
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Post: # 156947Unread post Gary Oak »

She must be one cold c*not. It's no wonder Bill's always screwing around on her.
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Post: # 156948Unread post Blue Frost »

I think they have always had an open relationship, and Hillary swings towards the lezbo side from what I have read over the years.
Bill was just a step stool, and to Bill she was the same.
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Post: # 156956Unread post Gary Oak »

This is very interesting. I have met many charming at first people who later it turns out are actually horrible.

The Charming Psychopath

Jeffrey Dahmer. Ted Bundy. Hannibal Lecter. These are the psychopaths whose stunning lack of conscience we see in the movies and in tabloids. Yet, as this report makes abundantly clear, these predators, both male and female, haunt our everyday lives at work, at home, and in relationships. Here’s how to find them before they find you.
She met him in a laundromat in London. He was open and friendly and they hit it off right away. From the start she thought he was hilarious. Of course, she’d been lonely. The weather was grim and sleety and she didn’t know a soul east of the Atlantic.
“Ah, travelers’ loneliness,” Dan crooned sympathetically over dinner. “It’s the worst.”
After dessert he was embarrassed to discover he’d come without his wallet. She was more than happy to pay for dinner. At the pub, over drinks, he told her he was a translator for the United Nations. He was, for now, between assignments.
They saw each other four times that week, five the week after. It wasn’t long before he had all but moved in with Elsa. It was against her nature, but she was having the time of her life.
Still, there were details, unexplained, undiscussed, that she shoved out of her mind. He never invited her to his home; she never met his friends. One night he brought over a carton filled with tape recorders—plastic-wrapped straight from the factory, unopened; a few days later they were gone. Once she came home to find three televisions stacked in the corner. “Storing them for a friend,” was all he told her. When she pressed for more he merely shrugged.
Once he stayed away for three days and was lying asleep on the bed when she came in midmorning. “Where have you been?” she cried. “I’ve been so worried. Where were you?”
He looked sour as he woke up. “Don’t ever ask me that,” he snapped. “I won’t have it.”
“What—?”
“Where I go, what I do, who I do it with—it doesn’t concern you, Elsa. Don’t ask.”
He was like a different person. But then he seemed to pull himself together, shook the sleep off, and reached out to her. “I know it hurts you,” he said in his old gentle way, “but I think of jealousy as a flu, and wait to get over it. And you will, baby, you will.” Like a mother cat licking her kitten, he groomed her back into trusting him.
One night she asked him lightly if he felt like stepping out to the corner and bringing her an ice cream. He didn’t reply, and when she glanced up she found him glaring at her furiously. “Always got everything you wanted, didn’t you?” he asked in a strange, snide way. “Any little thing little Elsa wanted, somebody always jumped up and ran out and bought it for her, didn’t they?”
“Are you kidding? I’m not like that. What are you talking about?”
He got up from the chair and walked out. She never saw him again.
There is a class of individuals who have been around forever and who are found in every race, culture, society and walk of life. Everybody has met these people, been deceived and manipulated by them, and forced to live with or repair the damage they have wrought. These often charming—but always deadly—individuals have a clinical name: psychopaths. Their hallmark is a stunning lack of conscience; their game is self-gratification at the other person’s expense. Many spend time in prison, but many do not. All take far more than they give.
The most obvious expressions of psychopathy—but not the only ones—involve the flagrant violation of society’s rules. Not surprisingly, many psychopaths are criminals, but many others manage to remain out of prison, using their charm and chameleon-like coloration to cut a wide swathe through society, leaving a wake of ruined lives behind them.
A major part of my own quarter-century search for answers to this enigma has been a concerted effort to develop an accurate means of detecting the psychopaths among us. Measurement and categorization are, of course, fundamental to any scientific endeavor, but the implications of being able to identify psychopaths are as much practical as academic. To put it simply, if we can’t spot them, we are doomed to be their victims, both as individuals and as a society.
My role in the search for psychopaths began in the 1960s at the psychology department of the University of British Columbia. There, my growing interest in psychopathy merged with my experience working with psychopaths in prison to form what was to become my life’s work.
I assembled a team of clinicians who would identify psychopaths in the prison population by means of long, detailed interviews and close study of file information. From this eventually developed a highly reliable diagnostic tool that any clinician or researcher could use and that yielded a richly detailed profile of the personality disorder called psychopathy. We named this instrument the Psychopathy Checklist (Multi-Health Systems; 1991). The checklist is now used worldwide and provides clinicians and researchers with a way of distinguishing, with reasonable certainty, true psychopaths from those who merely break the rules.
What follows is a general summary of the key traits and behaviors of a psychopath. Do not use these symptoms to diagnose yourself or others. A diagnosis requires explicit training and access to the formal scoring manual. If you suspect that someone you know conforms to the profile described here, and if it is important for you to have an expert opinion, you should obtain the services of a qualified (registered) forensic psychologist or psychiatrist.
Also, be aware that people who are not psychopaths may have some of the symptoms described here. Many people are impulsive, or glib, or cold and unfeeling, but this does not mean that they are psychopaths. Psychopathy is a syndrome—a cluster of related symptoms.
Key Symptoms of Psychopathy
Emotional/Interpersonal:
Glib and superficial
Egocentric and grandiose
Lack of remorse or guilt
Lack of empathy
Deceitful and manipulative
hallow emotions
Social Deviance:
Impulsive
Poor behavior controls
Need for excitement
Lack of responsibility
Early behavior problems
Adult antisocial behavior
Glib and Superficial
Psychopaths are often voluble and verbally facile. They can be amusing and entertaining conversationalists, ready with a clever comeback, and are able to tell unlikely but convincing stories that cast themselves in a good light. They can be very effective in presenting themselves well and are often very likable and charming.
One of my raters described an interview she did with a prisoner: “I sat down and took out my clipboard,” she said, “and the first thing this guy told me was what beautiful eyes I had. He managed to work quite a few compliments on my appearance into the interview, so by the time I wrapped things up, I was feeling unusually… well, pretty. I’m a wary person, especially on the job, and can usually spot a phony. When I got back outside, I couldn’t believe I’d fallen for a line like that.”
Egocentric and Grandiose
Psychopaths have a narcissistic and grossly inflated view of their own self-worth and importance, a truly astounding egocentricity and sense of entitlement, and see themselves as the center of the universe, justified in living according to their own rules. “It’s not that I don’t follow the law,” said one subject. “I follow my own laws. I never violate my own rules.” She then proceeded to describe these rules in terms of “looking out for number one.”
Psychopaths often claim to have specific goals but show little appreciation regarding the qualifications required—they have no idea of how to achieve them and little or no chance of attaining these goals, given their track record and lack of sustained interest in formal education. The psychopathic inmate might outline vague plans to become a lawyer for the poor or a property tycoon. One inmate, not particularly literate, managed to copyright the title of a book he was planning to write about himself, already counting the fortune his best-selling book would bring.

Lack of Remorse or Guilt
Psychopaths show a stunning lack of concern for the effects their actions have on others, no matter how devastating these might be. They may appear completely forthright about the matter, calmly stating that they have no sense of guilt, are not sorry for the ensuing pain, and that there is no reason now to be concerned.
When asked if he had any regrets about stabbing a robbery victim who subsequently spent time in the hospital as a result of his wounds, one of our subjects replied, "Get real! He spends a few months in hospital and I rot here. If I wanted to kill him I would have slit his throat. That's the kind of guy I am; I gave him a break."
Their lack of remorse or guilt is associated with a remarkable ability to rationalize their behavior, to shrug off personal responsibility for actions that cause family, friends, and others to reel with shock and disappointment. They usually have handy excuses for their behavior, and in some cases deny that it happened at all.
Lack of Empathy
Many of the characteristics displayed by psychopaths are closely associated with a profound lack of empathy and inability to construct a mental and emotional "facsimile" of another person. They seem completely unable to "get into the skin" of others, except in a purely intellectual sense.
They are completely indifferent to the rights and suffering of family and strangers alike. If they do maintain ties, it is only because they see family members as possessions. One of our subjects allowed her boyfriend to sexually molest her five-year-old daughter because "he wore me out. I wasn't ready for more sex that night." The woman found it hard to understand why the authorities took her child into care.
Deceitful and Manipulative
With their powers of imagination in gear and beamed on themselves, psychopaths appear amazingly unfazed by the possibility—or even by the certainty—of being found out. When caught in a lie or challenged with the truth, they seldom appear perplexed or embarrassed—they simply change their stories or attempt to rework the facts so they appear to be consistent with the lie. The result is a series of contradictory statements and a thoroughly confused listener.
And psychopaths seem proud of their ability to lie. When asked if she lied easily, one woman laughed and replied, "I'm the best. I think it's because I sometimes admit to something bad about myself. They think, well, if she's admitting to that she must be telling the truth about the rest."
Shallow Emotions
Psychopaths seem to suffer a kind of emotional poverty that limits the range and depth of their feelings. At times they appear to be cold and unemotional while nevertheless being prone to dramatic, shallow, and short-lived displays of feeling. Careful observers are left with the impression they are playacting and little is going on below the surface.
A psychopath in our research said that he didn't really understand what others meant by fear. "When I rob a bank," he said, "I notice that the teller shakes. One barfed all over the money. She must have been pretty messed up inside, but I don't know why. If someone pointed a gun at me I guess I'd be afraid, but I wouldn't throw up." When asked if he ever felt his heart pound or his stomach churn, he replied, "Of course! I'm not a robot. I really get pumped up when I have sex or when I get into a fight."
Impulsive
Psychopaths are unlikely to spend much time weighing the pros and cons of a course of action or considering the possible consequences. "I did it because I felt like it," is a common response. These impulsive acts often result from an aim that plays a central role in most of the psychopath's behavior: to achieve immediate satisfaction, pleasure, or relief.
So family members, relatives, employers, and coworkers typically find themselves standing around asking themselves what happened—jobs are quit, relationships broken off, plans changed, houses ransacked, people hurt, often for what appears as little more than a whim. As the husband of a psychopath I studied put it: "She got up and left the table, and that was the last I saw of her for two months."
Poor Behavior Controls
Besides being impulsive, psychopaths are highly reactive to perceived insults or slights. Most of us have powerful inhibitory controls over our behavior; even if we would like to respond aggressively we are usually able to "keep the lid on." In psychopaths, these inhibitory controls are weak, and the slightest provocation is sufficient to overcome them.
As a result, psychopaths are short-tempered or hotheaded and tend to respond to frustration, failure, discipline, and criticism with sudden violence, threats or verbal abuse. But their outbursts, extreme as they may be, are often short-lived, and they quickly act as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened.
For example, an inmate in line for dinner was accidentally bumped by another inmate, whom he proceeded to beat senseless. The attacker then stepped back into line as if nothing had happened. Despite the fact that he faced solitary confinement as punishment for the infraction, his only comment when asked to explain himself was, "I was pissed off. He stepped into my space. I did what I had to do."
Although psychopaths have a "hair trigger," their aggressive displays are "cold"; they lack the intense arousal experienced when other individuals lose their temper.
A Need for Excitement
Psychopaths have an ongoing and excessive need for excitement—they long to live in the fast lane or "on the edge," where the action is. In many cases the action involves the breaking of rules.
Many psychopaths describe "doing crime" for excitement or thrills. When asked if she ever did dangerous things just for fun, one of our female psychopaths replied, "Yeah, lots of things. But what I find most exciting is walking through airports with drugs. Christ! What a high!"
The flip side of this yen for excitement is an inability to tolerate routine or monotony. Psychopaths are easily bored and are not likely to engage in activities that are dull, repetitive, or require intense concentration over long periods.
Lack of Responsibility
Obligations and commitments mean nothing to psychopaths. Their good intentions—"I'll never cheat on you again"—are promises written on the wind.
Horrendous credit histories, for example, reveal the lightly taken debt, the loan shrugged off, the empty pledge to contribute to a child's support. Their performance on the job is erratic, with frequent absences, misuse of company resources, violations of company policy, and general untrustworthiness. They do not honor formal or implied commitments to people, organizations, or principles.
Psychopaths are not deterred by the possibility that their actions mean hardship or risk for others. A 25-year-old inmate in our studies has received more than 20 convictions for dangerous driving, driving while impaired, leaving the scene of an accident, driving without a license, and criminal negligence causing death. When asked if he would continue to drive after his release from prison, he replied, "Why not? Sure, I drive fast, but I'm good at it. It takes two to have an accident."
Early Behavior Problems
Most psychopaths begin to exhibit serious behavioral problems at an early age. These might include persistent lying, cheating, theft, arson, truancy, substance abuse, vandalism, and/or precocious sexuality. Because many children exhibit some of these behaviors at one time or another—especially children raised in violent neighborhoods or in disrupted or abusive families—it is important to emphasize that the psychopath's history of such behaviors is more extensive and serious than most, even when compared with that of siblings and friends raised in similar settings.
One subject, serving time for fraud, told us that as a child he would put a noose around the neck of a cat, tie the other end of the string to the top of a pole, and bat the cat around the pole with a tennis racket. Although not all adult psychopaths exhibited this degree of cruelty when in their youth, virtually all routinely got themselves into a wide range of difficulties.
Adult Antisocial Behavior
Psychopaths see the rules and expectations of society as inconvenient and unreasonable impediments to their own behavioral expression. They make their own rules, both as children and as adults.
Many of the antisocial acts of psychopaths lead to criminal charges and convictions. Even within the criminal population, psychopaths stand out, largely because the antisocial and illegal activities of psychopaths are more varied and frequent than are those of other criminals. Psychopaths tend to have no particular affinity, or "specialty," for one particular type of crime but tend to try everything.
But not all psychopaths end up in jail. Many of the things they do escape detection or prosecution, or are on "the shady side of the law." For them, antisocial behavior may consist of phony stock promotions, questionable business practices, spouse or child abuse, and so forth. Many others do things that, though not necessarily illegal, are nevertheless unethical, immoral, or harmful to others: philandering or cheating on a spouse to name a few.
Origins
Thinking about psychopathy leads us very quickly to a single fundamental question: Why are some people like this?
Unfortunately, the forces that produce a psychopath are still obscure, an admission those looking for clear answers will find unsatisfying. Nevertheless, there are several rudimentary theories about the cause of psychopathy worth considering. At one end of the spectrum are theories that view psychopathy as largely the product of genetic or biological factors (nature), whereas theories at the other end posit that psychopathy results entirely from a faulty early social environment (nurture).
The position that I favor is that psychopathy emerges from a complex—and poorly understood—interplay between biological factors and social forces. It is based on evidence that genetic factors contribute to the biological bases of brain function and to basic personality structure, which in turn influence the way an individual responds to, and interacts with, life experiences and the social environment. In effect, the core elements needed for the development of psychopathy—including a profound inability to experience empathy and the complete range of emotions, including fear—are in part provided by nature and possibly by some unknown biological influences on the developing fetus and neonate. As a result, the capacity for developing internal controls and conscience and for making emotional "connections" with others is greatly reduced.
Can Anything Be Done?
In their desperate search for solutions people trapped in a destructive and seemingly hopeless relationship with a psychopath frequently are told: Quit indulging him and send him for therapy. A basic assumption of psychotherapy is that the patient needs and wants help for distressing or painful psychological and emotional problems. Successful therapy also requires that the patient actively participate, along with the therapist, in the search for relief of his or her symptoms. In short, the patient must recognize there is a problem and must want to do something about it.
But here is the crux: Psychopaths don't feel they have psychological or emotional problems, and they see no reason to change their behavior to conform with societal standards they do not agree with.
Thus, in spite of more than a century of clinical study and decades of research, the mystery of the psychopath still remains. Recent developments have provided us with new insights into the nature of this disturbing disorder, and its borders are becoming more defined. But compared with other major clinical disorders, little research has been devoted to psychopathy, even though it is responsible for more social distress and disruption than all other psychiatric disorders combined.
So, rather than trying to pick up the pieces after the damage has been done, it would make far greater sense to increase our efforts to understand this perplexing disorder and to search for effective early interventions. The alternatives are to continue devoting massive resources to the prosecution, incarceration, and supervision of psychopaths after they have committed offenses against society and to continue to ignore the welfare and plight of their victims. We have to learn how to socialize them, not resocialize them. And this will require serious efforts at research and early intervention. It is imperative that we continue the search for clues.
Excerpted from Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us (Simon & Schuster) by Robert Hare, Ph.D.Copyright 1993.
A Survival Guide
Although no one is completely immune to the devious machinations of the psychopath, there are some things you can do to reduce your vulnerability.
Know what you are dealing with. This sounds easy but in fact can be very difficult. All the reading in the world cannot immunize you from the devastating effects of psychopaths. Everyone, including the experts, can be taken in, conned, and left bewildered by them. A good psychopath can play a concerto on anyone's heart strings.
Try not to be influenced by "props." It is not easy to get beyond the winning smile, the captivating body language, the fast talk of the typical psychopath, all of which blind us to his or her real intentions. Many people find it difficult to deal with the intense, "predatory state" of the psychopath. The fixated stare, is more a prelude to self-gratification and the exercise of power rather than simple interest or empathic caring.
Don't wear blinders. Enter new relationships with your eyes wide open. Like the rest of us, most psychopathic con artists and "love-thieves" initially hide their dark side by putting their "best foot forward." Cracks may soon begin to appear in the mask they wear, but once trapped in their web, it will be difficult to escape financially and emotionally unscathed.
Keep your guard up in high-risk situations. Some situations are tailor-made for psychopaths: singles bars, ship cruises, foreign airports, etc. In each case, the potential victim is lonely, looking for a good time, excitement, or companionship, and there will usually be someone willing to oblige, for a hidden price.
Know yourself. Psychopaths are skilled at detecting and ruthlessly exploiting your weak spots. Your best defense is to understand what these spots are, and to be extremely wary of anyone who zeroes in on them.
Unfortunately, even the most careful precautions are no guarantee that you will be safe from a determined psychopath. In such cases, all you can do is try to exert some sort of damage control. This is not easy but some suggestions may be of help:
Obtain professional advice. Make sure the clinician you consult is familiar with the literature on psychopathy and has had experience in dealing with psychopaths.
Don't blame yourself. Whatever the reasons for being involved with a psychopath, it is important that you not accept blame for his or her attitudes and behavior. Psychopaths play by the same rules—their rules—with everyone.
Be aware of who the victim is. Psychopaths often give the impression that it is they who are suffering and that the victims are to blame for their misery. Don't waste your sympathy on them.
Recognize that you are not alone. Most psychopaths have lots of victims. It is certain that a psychopath who is causing you grief is also causing grief to others.
Be careful about power struggles. Keep in mind that psychopaths have a strong need for psychological and physical control over others. This doesn't mean that you shouldn't stand up for your rights, but it will probably be difficult to do so without risking serious emotional or physical trauma.
Set firm ground rules. Although power struggles with a psychopath are risky you may be able to set up some clear rules—both for yourself and for the psychopath—to make your life easier and begin the difficult transition from victim to a person looking out for yourself.
Don't expect dramatic changes. To a large extent, the personality of psychopaths is "carved in stone." There is little likelihood that anything you do will produce fundamental, sustained changes in how they see themselves or others.
Cut your losses. Most victims of psychopaths end up feeling confused and hopeless, and convinced that they are largely to blame for the problem. The more you give in the more you will be taken advantage of by the psychopath's insatiable appetite for power and control.
Use support groups. By the time your suspicions have led you to seek a diagnosis, you already know that you're in for a very long and bumpy ride. Make sure you have all the emotional support you can muster.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/article ... psychopath
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Post: # 157929Unread post Gary Oak »

It's good to understand the enemy and these guys and girls are not your friend.

Psychopaths are better at learning to lie
A new study suggests that psychopaths may not be innately better liars than other people but can easily learn

Psychopaths may not be naturally better, or more believable, liars but practice makes perfect.

Research by scientists from Hong Kong University has used functional magnetic resonance imaging to show how the brain activity of those with high psychopathic traits differs from those with low indicative traits during the act of lying.

During a repeated task that prompted participants to provide untruthful answers, those with high psychopathic traits became more adept, responding more quickly. Those with low psychopathic traits, on the other hand, showed no change in response time.

The act of lying requires “true” information to be suppressed and reversed, says Tatia Lee, who co-authored with Robin Shao the study published in the journal Translational Psychiatry. “Thus lying requires a series of processes in the brain including attention, working memory, inhibitory control and conflict resolution which we found to be reduced in individuals with high levels of psychopathic traits. By contrast, in individuals with low levels of psychopathic traits this lie-related brain activity increased. The additional 'effort' it took their brains to process untruthful responses may be one of the reasons why they didn't improve their lying speed."

The 52 subjects involved in the study – all HKU students – were recruited for their high and low psychopathic traits on the basis on a questionnaire used to assess psychopathy in a non-clinical setting. Given pathological lying is one of the key traits of psychopathy – along with lack of remorse or guilt, impulsiveness and manipulativeness – tested for by the standard diagnostic tool, the Hare Psychopathy Checklist (PCL), the greater alacrity for lying by those who scoring high for psychopathic traits is hardly surprising.

What is interesting about their results, suggest Lee and Shao, is the potential answer to a question about which the scientific evidence has so far been unclear: whether high-psychopathic individuals tend to lie more or better than others. “Our findings,” Shao says, “provide evidence that people with high psychopathic traits might just be better at learning how to lie."

The test set to measure lying dexterity involved showing study participants photographs of familiar and unfamiliar faces. Participants were prompted to give an honest or a dishonest answer to whether they knew a particular person in a photograph. Response times were measured along with monitoring brain activity using fMRI. Participants completed a two-session training exercise before repeating the task.

"The stark contrast between individuals with high and low levels of psychopathic traits in lying performance following two training sessions is remarkable,” Lee says, “given there were no significant differences in lying performance between the two groups prior to training."

While they caution the limited nature of the study means further research is needed to be able to generalise the findings, an aptitude for learning to lie does help to explain why, according to previous research, higher proportions of people with psychopathic traits can found in certain jobs, such as CEOs, lawyers, salespeople and (ahem) in the media – occupations in which a lack of compunction at telling untruths can prove profitable.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/social-scien ... ing-to-lie
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Post: # 158055Unread post Blue Frost »

Being able to tell a good lie is believing it yourself i think, and someway some people do that.
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Post: # 158144Unread post Gary Oak »

Narcissism is also a trait of psychopaths therefor the reason I am posting this on this thread.

WHY DO NARCISSISTS ABUSE THOSE THEY LOVE?

How to understand and predict narcissistic abuse.

One of the most difficult things to understand in life is how someone who professes to love you can then go on to abuse you. Many people feel traumatized and confused after a romantic relationship with an abusive Narcissistic partner ends. They wonder: “We were so in love, yet he went from telling me that I was the love of his life to treating me like garbage. He cheated on me. He devalued me. He embarrassed me in front of our friends. How can I trust anyone again, if I so badly misjudged this person?”

If you have ever been abused by a Narcissistic mate or lover and now are out of the relationship, you may be wondering how you could have made such a big mistake—and how you can avoid doing it again in the future.

The good news is that most people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder are very predictable. They tend to follow the same relationship pattern over and over again. And, unlike common perceptions about Narcissists, most are not very devious. Narcissists are continually signaling that they are Narcissists. You can learn to recognize the early signs that the new love of your life is a Narcissist by paying close attention to how they behave towards you in each stage of the relationship. Then it is up to you to decide if you want to continue the relationship. Here are some of the basics that you need to know:

Why Are Narcissists Prone to Being Abusive?

When people have a Narcissistic Personality Disorder, two things interact to predispose them to be abusive:

They are low on emotional empathy.
Emotional empathy is the capacity to feel what another person is feeling (or what you imagine that the person is feeling). Having emotional empathy decreases the likelihood that you will want to hurt other people because you will literally feel some of their pain. Without emotional empathy, you have less motivation to pay attention to the pain that your words and actions are causing your partner.

Narcissists can have “intellectual empathy” without also having emotional empathy. Intellectual empathy is the ability to cognitively understand that you are causing the other person pain. Intellectual empathy requires that you stop and think about what the other person might feel in response to your actions. Narcissists, therefore, can understand that they may be causing you pain, but they have less motivation to care because they are not feeling anything negative themselves.

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They lack “whole object relations” and “object constancy.”
One of the main reasons that people abuse others that they profess to love is that they lack “whole object relations” and “object constancy.” Briefly defined: “Whole object relations is the capacity to see oneself and other people in an integrated and realistic way as having a mix of good and bad qualities, some that you like and others that you dislike. If you have “whole object relations” you can accept that someone is not perfect and still value the person for the good qualities that he or she has. “Object constancy” is the ability to maintain your positive emotional connection to someone that you care about while you are feeling angry, frustrated, disappointed, or hurt by the person. Having “object constancy’ helps you rein in your impulses to hurt someone during a fight. Not having “object constancy” makes people more likely to be willing to emotionally and physically damage their mate.

NOTE: Not all people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder are equally abusive. Narcissists range from those who put you on a pedestal and then verbally devalue you when they realize you are not the perfect being that they expected you to be, to people who physically abuse their mates and try and control their every move—who they see, what they spend money on, how often they speak to their family.

The Three Stages of the Narcissistic Relationship Abuse Pattern

Although there are Narcissists who are “players” and not looking for a serious long-term relationship, many people with Narcissistic disorders do want to settle down and get married. Unfortunately because they lack whole object relations, they tend to be extremely unrealistic about what they expect in a mate. They have only two categories, perfect and flawed.

Perfect = You are pleasing me right now.

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Flawed = You are doing something that I do not like right now.

As a result, instead of finding the perfect relationship that they crave, Narcissists end up repeating what I think of as “The Narcissist Relationship Abuse Pattern” over and over again. Each relationship stage has its own form of Narcissistic abuse that you can learn to spot. Below are the three basic stages, the type of Narcissistic abuse typical of that stage, and the behaviors that predict the abuse.

STAGE 1: Chasing the Unicorn

In the beginning, you seem like that rarest of imaginary creatures, “The Unicorn.” They love everything about you, even your flaws seem like endearing idiosyncrasies. Narcissists are extremists and have no middle ground. When they first find you attractive, they are likely to idealize you and believe that you are the perfect mate for them. At last they have found someone who will never disappoint them. They give chase and pursue you with attention, gifts, texts, flattery, and anything else that they think will work to prove their total devotion. In this stage, while you are slightly out of reach and they have not yet sealed the deal, they are totally focused on convincing you to give them a chance to prove their love. Some Narcissists just repeat the “Chase Stage” over and over with different people because they really do not know how to have an actual relationship with someone that they have “caught.”

Stage 1 Abuse Pattern: After spending an enormous amount of time, energy, and sometimes money trying to convince you of their devotion, your pursuer immediately loses interest in you after you stop running. You are left feeling disappointed and bewildered that this person who said he wanted you to be the mother of his future children (or the father) has “ghosted” on you and will not even answer your texts.

Predictors of Abuse: Here are some typical signs that you may want to notice at this stage of the relationship that signal your “lover” may become a Narcissistic abuser.

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The over the top nature of their chase is a signal that they are unrealistic.
Unlike most people who want to gradually get to know the person that they are dating before they start to make commitments about the future, Narcissists often try to engage you in planning your future together after your first date. They may start talking about all the places that they want to take you this Summer on vacation, or even want to discuss how many children the two of you will have together and where they should go to school.

They worship the ground that you walk on.
I know that this sounds like a good sign, but it is not. What goes up, must come down. This degree of idealization is actually a sign that they are not seeing the real you at all. Instead they are simply projecting their fantasy woman onto you. The real you is not perfect and certainly is unlikely to fit every item on their wish list. Once they discover that you are not exactly like their fantasy woman, they are likely to be resentful and disappointed. If you are lucky, they will simply disappear from your life at that point instead of proceeding to the next Narcissistic Relationship Abuse Stage.

All their former lovers ended up disappointing them.
However they describe their former lovers and mates is how they are likely to eventually describe you. If they are perpetually disappointed in people, it says more about them than the people they feel disappointed by. If you ask why their previous relationships did not work out and they tell you that they found out that their lovers were very different than they first seemed, this is a sign that you too will be described that way one day.

STAGE 2: The Construction Project

Once you are “caught,” Narcissistic lovers start to relax and enjoy your company. Now that they have time to take a good look at you, they slowly begin to notice little things about you that they think detract from your perfection. Your idiosyncrasies no longer seem so adorable. Now they are flaws. It is at this point that you can start to recognize the signs that this person may be a Narcissist.

Stage 2 Abuse Pattern: Narcissistic lovers start suggesting ways that you should change “for your own good.” “If only you would do your hair differently, work out more, or wear sexier (or less sexy) clothing, you would be even better. Don’t you want to be better?” “Don’t you want to please me?” I think of this stage as “The Construction Project” because they keep suggesting ways to renovate you.

Predictor of Abuse: How they deal with their disappointment and react to your "no." Many people discover that their new lover is not as perfect as they first assumed and are disappointed. This can be quite normal. What differentiates Normal disappointment from Narcissistic disappointment is how they react to you saying “no” to their suggestions.

Normal Disappointment: They would love you to make slight changes to please them, but if you really do not want to, they can accept that without devaluing you or losing interest in you as a mate. They may occasionally bring up the topic again, but they more or less gracefully make peace with the idea that you will not give them every single thing that they want. They also accept that you are a separate person from them and have a right to your own ideas. You’re a not a doll for them to dress, or a house to renovate; you are a real person.
Narcissistic Disappointment: They cannot understand why you want to stay the way you are. When you resist their suggestions, they feel insulted—as if you have criticized them, and not the other way around. They become angry, want to punish you, and they begin to get nasty. They start picking fights with you about every little thing that you do that they do not like. The ratio of compliments to devaluing comments shifts. You find yourself starting to wonder: “What happened to the sweet man I fell in love with?”
STAGE 3: Devaluation

Stage 3 Abuse Pattern: One day you wake up and realize that the compliments have stopped and all you are hearing are criticisms.

Predictors of Abuse: The criticisms are no longer phrased politely as suggestions. They are outright insults. He says: “You look like a clown in that dress. It makes your butt look like the rear end of a cow.” Or she says, “I hate that scent you are wearing. It smells like something my grandfather would wear. When did you become such an old man?”

Eventually, the insults go public. One day you are out together with friends and your beloved not only starts criticizing you in front of them, but to them in front of you.
The verbal abuse escalates until it is the main way that your lover speaks to you. Your wishes are ignored and you are treated cruelly. The fights escalate into screaming matches and you find yourself yelling or crying hysterically. You may get hit or physically abused in some other way. Unless you put a stop to this quickly, this will become your life from now on.
Conclusion: Once you learn to recognize the above, you may still find yourself in love with a Narcissist one day. The question you then need to ask yourself is: “How much abuse am I prepared to take?” If your answer is “very little,” then you may want to take your heart and leave before it gets well and truly broken.

Elinor Greenberg, PhD, CGP

Author of the Book: Borderline, Narcissistic, and Schizoid Adaptation: The Pursuit of Love, Admiration, and Safety.

www.elinorgreenberg.com


https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/un ... -they-love
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Post: # 158852Unread post Blue Frost »

Just like her, giving money to terrorist isn't new, she funded ISIS with Obama, and friends after all.

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Post: # 165017Unread post Gary Oak »

You will have to open the page to read about all ten of these professions. I was under the impression that psychopaths weren't so successful as betrayal stings. of course it is no surprise that manipulative salepeople would be on the list but clergy ? I have seen some police that are very dodgy but i do have a high regard for Canadian police, I didn't expect cooks to be on the list and surgeons also is a surprise. Open the article and take a look for yourselves.

The 10 professions with the most psychopaths

Psychopaths are difficult to spot most of the time. They're not the "Jack the Ripper" caricatures you see in films or read about in books. Often, psychopaths appear normal, which makes them hard to identify.

In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM-5, someone with a psychopathic personality type is defined as having an inflated, grandiose sense of themself, and a knack for manipulating other people. But a diagnosis is rarely simple.

One thing psychopaths tend to have in common is the careers they go for. For example, you're likely to find a lot of them in leadership positions because of their ruthlessness, charisma, and fearlessness. They're very good at making snap decisions, but not so good at the empathetic professions like nursing or therapy.

Kevin Dutton, a British psychologist and writer, specialises in the study of psychopathy. In his book "The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success," he made a list of the types of jobs that attract the most psychopaths.

"Functional psychopaths," as Dutton calls them, "use their detached, unflinching, and charismatic personalities to succeed in mainstream society." In other words, psychopaths often live as normal people with a few traits that make them different.

Scroll down to see what the top 10 career choices for psychopaths are, ranked in ascending order by popularity.

http://www.businessinsider.com/professi ... ths-2018-5
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Post: # 165027Unread post Gary Oak »

This sentence interests me "Lacking empathy isn't a problem for a psychopath, and they won't ever believe there's anything wrong with them. By this logic, if you're ever worried about being a psychopath, that means you cannot be one." So that answer one important question. I do believe that we all do come accross psychopaths from time to time.


Psychopaths cannot be cured — here's why

Psychopathy is a personality disorder, not a mental illness.
There is no "cure" for psychopaths, and they will never be able to change.
If they are in prison, psychopaths can be managed with reward-based treatment.
But this is simply a means of control, rather than a cure.

Like many personality traits, psychopathy is a spectrum. About 1-2% of men and 0.3-0.7% of women in the general population are estimated to be true psychopaths, but for the rest of us, we fall on the scale somewhere lower down.

People who experience psychopathic traits, such as ruthlessness, charisma, impulsivity, and persuasiveness, tend to get through life just fine. Even full-blown psychopaths can be very successful — they just won't ever be the same as everyone else.

What sets a true psychopath apart from the rest of the population is a lack of empathy. They will never be able to sympathise with someone else's feelings, or care that someone else is suffering while they thrive. In fact, sometimes a psychopath will enjoy feeling superior while they cause chaos for other people.

Lacking empathy isn't a problem for a psychopath, and they won't ever believe there's anything wrong with them. By this logic, if you're ever worried about being a psychopath, that means you cannot be one.


It also means a true psychopath can never be "cured."

"From what I've read, what I've heard, what I've seen and experienced so far, people with dark triad personality disorders cannot and will not change," said Perpetua Neo, a doctor of psychology and therapist, in an earlier article for Business Insider.

She added that people with these traits — narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy — are usually good at pretending to be something they are not. For example, even if they were coerced into going to therapy, they would be able to manipulate and trick their therapists.

"They orchestrate this show, put on a false self in front of the therapist, and they know how to push the buttons of their partner, so their partner looks extremely unstable in these situations," Neo said. "The therapist may collude unknowingly with the dark triad person against the partner who really has been the one suffering."

A paper by Nigel Blackwood, a forensic psychiatrist at King's College London, explains that psychopaths do not fear punishment or social stigmatisation. They don't feel the need to fit into social norms, so expectations of society have no impact on their behaviour.


This is why, if they are convicted of crimes, the punishment seems to have no impact on them. As a result, Blackwood explains, it's incredibly hard to rehabilitate an adult psychopath in prison.

Reward-based treatment, such as giving them their favourite food or video games if they behave, is considered the best course to manage psychopaths who are incarcerated. But even by keeping them calm, this is a means of control, not a cure.

Not all psychopaths will become criminals, and many will get through life without anyone knowing what they are. But whether they end up causing trouble or not, there's no evidence their personality will ever change.

http://www.businessinsider.com/psychopa ... ?r=US&IR=T
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Post: # 165037Unread post Gary Oak »

I wanted all three of these articles that I have just read on this thread as they all have info that I want to have easily accessible. I have wondered recently if the huge ego or narcisism doesn't create the psychopath. When I realised how repulsive a huge ego and conciet is it changed me quickly to the better without any increase in brains.

How psychopaths and sociopaths deceive and trick their therapists

A true psychopath will never choose therapy. TriStar Pictures
People with psychopathic traits may seek out therapy. True psychopaths will not.
Psychopaths can manipulate everyone around them, including their therapists.
There may not be a cure, but certain therapies may stop the most violent of psychopaths from re-offending.
An estimated 1-2% of men and 0.3-0.7% of women in the general population are psychopaths. However, the number of people who have psychopathic traits is probably a lot higher.

Psychopathy is a spectrum, and we all fall on it somewhere, according to neuroscientist and psychiatrist Dr Tara Swart. The traits of a psychopath include ruthlessness, narcissism, persuasiveness, and the inability to feel guilt.

What separates most of us from people with psychopathic disorder, though, is the ability to feel empathy, says therapist Dr Perpetua Neo.

Usually, if someone shows unfavorable traits in a way that is pushing other people away, they will stop when they learn they are acting inappropriately. They may even choose to go to therapy to learn why they behave in such a way, and adjust accordingly.


However, a true psychopath will never choose to go see a therapist because they don't think there's anything wrong with the way there are. They will also never change, according to Neo.

A true psychopath will never change.
"People with traits, they're going to be okay," Neo told Business Insider. "[But] from what I've read, what I've heard, what I've seen and experienced so far, people with dark triad personality disorders cannot and will not change."

Neo has worked mainly with women who have come out of abusive relationships with narcissists and even psychopaths. She usually works with them on their own while they are still with the abuser, or after they have been discarded.

Sometimes, though, a psychopath and their partner will go to counseling to try and fix their broken relationship. Neo says the only time a psychopath will agree to do this is if they can see how it will benefit them, and if they still have some use for their partner.

Even therapists can be fooled by them.
Psychopaths are often masters of manipulation, and by this point they have already managed to skew the whole relationship. They are very charming, and know how to tug at your heart strings, according to Neo. Unfortunately, even therapists can be fooled by them too.


"They orchestrate this show, put on a false self in front of the therapist, and they know how to push the buttons of their partner, so their partner looks extremely unstable in these situations," she said. "The therapist may collude unknowingly with the dark triad person against the partner who really has been the one suffering."

The psychopath may say that their partner is the "mad" one, gaslighting them into believing that it's true.

"It's very difficult for you to realize, because they can seem so stable and so rational," Neo said.

Psychopaths don't think there's anything wrong with them.
It's also difficult for therapists to know how to treat narcissists and psychopaths, because the research and knowledge on the topic is fairly limited. There are several tests to help diagnose psychopathy — such as the Hare Checklist— but these are far from perfect.

To further complicate matters, psychopathy is a wide-ranging personality disorder, and those who have it don't tend to think there is anything wrong with them. Also, their traits can mimic many other problems, such as substance abuse, domestic abuse, or a gambling addiction, making them hard to identify.


"The psychopath or narcissist, anyone who is very abusive, they tend to be the master of smoke and mirrors," Neo said. "It could look like something else — it could be the fact he has a difficult mother, so he drinks, and after he drinks he hurts me. Or he has a drug problem. Or he has this convoluted history of paranoia, because people are unfaithful to him and hurt him. So you're always jumping from one thing to another."

They could also be misdiagnosed as having a different personality disorder, because the therapist could pick up on something else. Depending on how cunning and manipulative the psychopath is, they may only show the therapist what they want them to see.

"I've met quite a few who learn symptoms and pretend to have them," Neo added. "And a lot of therapies are about believing in a person's ability to change their lives. If you build a relationship with somebody, you don't want to believe they are bad. And if they have narcissistic personality disorder, or they're a psychopath, they are a bad person. So there is this inherent conflict."

A 'cure' might not be the answer.
With violent and criminal psychopaths, their lack of empathy and care for themselves means they have no guilt about what they've done and do not have any problems going to prison.

According to the work of Dr Kent Kiehl, a neuroscientist who has studied psychopaths for over 20 years, if you think going to therapy for a "cure" is the answer, you're probably asking the wrong question.


In his book "The Psychopath Whisperer," he outlines some treatment options for highly dangerous psychopaths. In these cases, they are already incarcerated, and so haven't opted in for therapy, but are forced to go.

For example, at the Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center in Wisconsin, high risk youths are taken in and treated with intensive programs to try to reduce the chance they'll re-offend.

The treatments are based on positive reinforcement rather than punishment, such as being given a reward, like a video game in their cell for the weekend, if they respond positively.

"The treatment doesn't necessarily cure individuals with psychopathy, but it helps provide insight on how to reduce impulsivity and/or poor decisions that contribute to relapse to crime or antisocial behavior," Kiehl told Business Insider.

"This program reduces violent recidivism by over 50%, which is a huge decrease and evidence that scientific-based treatment can effect positive outcomes in individuals with these traits."


According to Kiehl, though, 10 to 15% of kids still re-offended violently, so the psychological treatment isn't always effective. After all, there is still a lot we don't know about the psychopathic brain.

In fact, some forms of therapy can actually make psychopaths commit more crimes than if they had none at all, Kiehl writes in his book.

This means research into the brain patterns, upbringing, and behavior of psychopaths is needed to better understand the chance somebody will become a psychopathic abuser, criminal, rapist, or murderer.

MRI scans could also help to determine whether treatment is really working, by looking at whether the brain activity in areas that regulate emotions, impulses, and morality increases over time.

The most important thing is to help the victims.
Whether somebody becomes a psychopath or is born that way is still a grey area, so the way they are treated is going to be a work in progress for a long time.


Neo says that right now, the most important thing in her own work is to help the people who are the victims, and aid them with getting out of dangerous situations.

"When I see there is clearly abuse going on, regardless of whether it's emotional, financial, or physical, I will call it out," she said.

"I will say it's not healthy behavior, and this is not how anybody should be treated. I won't mince my words. It's tough, though, because [nobody] wants to hear they are with a psychopath."

http://www.businessinsider.com/psychopa ... ?r=US&IR=T
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Post: # 166735Unread post Gary Oak »

This statement is good to keep in mind "Narcissists 'can never really love anyone" This article is long but definately worth reading. Narcissism is a red alert to me.

Here's Why Psychopaths Are Unable to Love Their Own Children
The effects are devastating.

Dark triad personality (DTP) traits are narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. These traits manifest in people as excessive self-love, a manipulative attitude, and a lack of empathy.

It's unclear how many people in the population have these traits, but various studies and estimates put the number somewhere between 1 percent and 10 percent.

DTPs are often reported to have an obsession with themselves, and they struggle to see the point in other people's feelings. Because of this, their relationships are often abusive and controlling.

Romantic partners are manipulated, used, and tricked into believing they are crazy, before being abruptly devalued and discarded.

A common question that comes up is whether the offspring of a DTP would be treated any differently than the individual's romantic partners.

Narcissists 'can never really love anyone'

According to Perpetua Neo, a psychologist and therapist who specialises in DTPs, the answer is no.

"Narcissists, psychopaths, and sociopaths do not have a sense of empathy, they do not and will not develop a sense of empathy, so they can never really love anyone," she told Business Insider.

This doesn't change when they have children. There's no primal instinct to protect and encourage their offspring, because they are not seen as a separate entity. They are merely a tool which is at their disposal.

"DTPs tend to see children as an extension of themselves and a possession," Neo said.

"So rather than saying, 'I'm going to nurture you so you can grow up to be the amazing person you're meant to be,' [they say] 'you're supposed to grow up and do this so that you're my trophy.'"

This is very different from the environment a child in a healthy family would grow up in. Instead of being nurtured and taught the ways of the world, a child of a DTP parent grows up not knowing their own sense of self.

"'I can check your phone, I can do anything I want to do, I can just barge into your room, basically not respecting your sense of property,'" is what Neo said DTP personalities believe.

"There are no emotional boundaries, either. So the children grow up not really sure about what boundaries are."

The child is expected to fill all kinds of functions they shouldn't have to. For example, narcissists tend to be very unhappy people, with low self esteem, so they unload a lot of unnecessary emotional baggage onto their children.

They are used as a listening ear for the parent's problems, and a source of emotional comfort.

This continues over the years, and Neo says some of her clients have said their parents told them: "The only reason I had you was so you could take care of me for the rest of your life."

"You're not allowed to have children, and you're not allowed to get married," she added. "The parent would be meddling in all these different relationships, left right and centre, creating all sorts of drama, so the child stays single."

'The child is expected to be a punching bag'

Throughout their life, the child is also expected to be a punching bag, either physically or emotionally. This becomes harder as the child grows older, because they become stronger and more aware, so the DTP parent will counteract this by hacking away at their self esteem.

"As the parents grows older, and their health starts to decline, their sense of self esteem becomes really shaky," Neo said.

"Then the child grows up, becomes strong, becomes powerful, has more of a sense of self, and it's very difficult for the parent to watch. So there becomes this unhealthy competition, putting the child down, telling the child they're fat, they're useless, they're ugly."

At the same time, whenever the child accomplishes something, the parent has to take credit for it.

For example, they would mention the fact the child is a very good trumpet player, and the only reason is because they scrimped and saved for lessons for years, even if this may not be true.

"Every single thing is always brought back to them," Neo said. "So the child is brought up thinking, 'I have no sense of self, I have no say, and I do not matter.'"

The 'golden child' vs. the scapegoat

The dynamics shift depending on how many children the DTP has.

Sometimes, DTPs will have more than one child, and Neo says it is remarkable how often the same power dynamics play out in these families. In most cases, one child becomes the golden child, who can do no wrong.

"The child can live in fear, because all they want to do is please mummy or daddy so there's no trouble - so they will be loved," Neo said. "So they get this reward and it's almost transactional."

Then the second child is used as a scapegoat, and is blamed for everything. So much so, that the DTP parent will enjoy playing the children off against each other, and create unnecessary competition.

If there is a third child, Neo says they become the "lost boy" or the "lost girl", who is neglected and more or less completely ignored.

"If you watch the families and see the traits of narcissistic parents, this is often what plays out," Neo said.

"Essentially, it's designed to keep the self esteem of the child low, so the child will always stay small and as a possession, and there's a lot of dictatorship over what a child can or cannot do because it's all about the parents' sense of self."

Do monsters breed monsters?

One fear children of DTPs have is that they will grow up and turn into their mother or father. However, according to the blog NarcissisticMother.com, written by psychotherapist Michelle Piper, this is only true in the minority of cases.

Piper writes that narcissistic parents hate the idea of their children growing up, and want to keep them from doing so as long as possible to "keep stroking their thirsty but fragile egos."

"When you, an adult child of narcissistic parents, grow up, you may feel something is wrong but cannot necessarily identify what that is," she wrote. "You may have always associated love and appreciation with conforming to the demands of your parents, and therefore assume that is how it all works."

One less common way children of DTPs react is by growing up with a "siege response," which is when you become used to protecting yourself by becoming less sensitive, walled off, and extremely independent.

"You would do whatever you had to do to manipulate others and treat them as if they are the parents who wanted you to meet their every expectation," Piper wrote. "This is more or less a passive-aggressive attack on your parents through other people, doing to others what you wish you could've done to your narcissistic parent."

However, the more common response is the "compliance response," where you are used to putting your own needs to the side, and want to bend over backwards to please everyone you meet.

"Children of narcissists, they tend to be taken over by this compulsion to serve others," Neo said. "That's when they become completely empathetic, over-giving, and are used by more narcissists and more dark triad people in their lives."

How you turn out sometimes depends on which child you were in the family system. They may have avoided the majority of abuse growing up, but the golden child may actually end up worse off that the scapegoat.

"The child believes if they do what mummy or daddy wants, 'everything will be OK - I'm going to be loved,'" Neo said.

"And the moment you don't do something, you're going to be completely devalued, be insulted and scolded. So you learn that your views and your dreams don't matter."

The scapegoat never measured up to the golden child growing up, but usually they do better in their life than the one who is essentially the parent's puppet. They grow and venture out into the world, and discover freedom.

By having more obviously negative feelings associated with their DTP parent, they are more able to break free and create an entirely, new, healthy life.

https://www.sciencealert.com/can-psycho ... psychology
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Post: # 166754Unread post Blue Frost »

Do monsters breed monsters :think: makes me think of a lot of Liberals that let their kids raise themselves to burden society .
A lot of so called conservatives do the same.
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Post: # 166771Unread post Renee »

Blue Frost wrote: July 29th, 2018, 12:51 pm Do monsters breed monsters :think: makes me think of a lot of Liberals that let their kids raise themselves to burden society .
A lot of so called conservatives do the same.
For the most part, children are a product of their environment.

So yes, in many cases monsters create monsters.

But outside forces that many times parents can not control, have their effect as well. Case and point....our liberal public school system. When a parent is disengaged from their child's education all kinds of mayhem may take place that affect a child's outlook on life and society.

The union backed progs who run our school system depend on this taking place so that they can mold impressionable minds in an effort to further their sociopolitical agenda.
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Post: # 166774Unread post Blue Frost »

That's why parents need to talk with their kids, and go over what they learned.
People used to have dinner together, and talk this stuff out, very few do that today.
The schools are awful, anyone should know that that has a kid by now.
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