Scientific research

The common wisdom in the mental health field is that sociopaths "burn out" in middle age. If only it were true. According to Lovefraud's research, after age 50, the behavior of sociopaths is just as bad — or worse. In Lovefraud's online survey, 2,120 romantic partners, family members, friends and associates of suspected sociopaths answered questions about their experiences. Here were the key questions of the survey: Did you know the individual both before age 50 and after age 50? A total of 1,276 people answered the question, and 65% said yes, they did know the individual before and after age 50. Did the individual "mellow out" or "burn out" after age 50? Did the individual e …

Sociopaths get worse after age 50, say 91% of Lovefraud survey respondentsRead More

UPDATED FOR 2023. I was standing in line, horrified at how a man in front of me was treating his two little girls. The girls looked to be about two and four years old. One of them was in a stroller. He yelled at the older girl — I don't know why. When she started crying, he yelled at her again, threatening to hit her if she didn't stop crying. No matter what the kids did — dropped a blanket on the floor, touched the stanchion rope — the guy yelled. If this father was treating his kids this way in public — what in the world was he doing at home? Make no mistake — the guy was engaging in child abuse, and the kids will likely suffer from it for the rest of their lives. I'm not exa …

Child abuse is America’s biggest public health crisis, and if you had a sociopathic parent, it could explain what happened to youRead More

UPDATED FOR 2023. Research suggests that a baby who prefers to look at a red ball, rather than a human face, may be at risk for developing callous-unemotional personality traits and could grow up to be a psychopath. Callous-unemotional traits, when seen in children, can precede the development of full-blown psychopathy. Researchers at King's College in London studied five-week old babies. They hypothesized that babies who paid more attention to an inanimate object, rather than a human face, would show higher callous-unemotional traits when they were two and a half years old. The researchers were right. Callous-unemotional Psychologists who study the origins of antisocial behavior …

Early warning sign that a baby could grow up to be a psychopathRead More

UPDATED FOR 2022. So you're out with friends, or worse, at a business meeting, when you see someone yawn. Soon, you're yawning too. Why does this happen? Researchers believe that yawning is contagious because it is linked to empathy, and most humans have lots of empathy. This behavior is deeply rooted in our evolutionary history. Many mammals yawn. And yawning by one member of a group often begets yawning by another member of the group. This happens among people — and also among dogs and chimpanzees. But it doesn't happen among psychopaths. Research on yawning Brian K. Rundle and colleagues at Baylor University in Texas published a paper entitled, Contagious yawning and ps …

When everybody yawns, psychopaths don’tRead More

Most of what is known about psychopaths comes from research with imprisoned criminals. Why? Because researchers can access them — they are literally a captive audience. But many psychopaths manage to stay out of prison. Psychopaths live among us and engage in the regular activities of life, including romantic relationships. Little is known about the psychopaths who stay out of prison and how they affect others. But finally, there is scientific evidence of what many of us have learned the hard way: Intimate relationships with psychopaths cause great harm to the victims. A scientific paper, Toxic Relationships: The experiences and effects of psychopathy in romantic relationships, has just b …

Scientific proof that relationships with psychopaths are bad for youRead More

The primary goal of anyone trapped in an abusive situation is survival. When you feel like you aren’t in charge of your life, and you see no way out, how do you survive? This can happen to people who are being coercively controlled in an intimate relationship, are stuck in a cult, or are living in a region of declared or undeclared war. Sometimes the situation is so threatening that the mind can’t deal with it. Psychological solutions include perspecticide and percepticide — the inability to see what is really happening. I first encountered the term “perspecticide” in a Business Insider article from 2017 entitled, Manipulative people brainwash their partners using something called ‘perspect …

Perspecticide and percepticide: effects of psychological terrorRead More

[youtube_sc url="https://youtu.be/RcxW6nrWwtc"] UPDATED FOR 2022. Charismatic, glib, grandiose, magnetic, energetic — sociopaths are typically described in these terms. Here's why sociopaths succeed: No matter what they actually do and say, these men and women have style. And, according to a classic experiment in education research, style is all that is needed to be respected and believed. Back in 1970, Dr. Donald H. Naftulin, director of Continuing Education in Psychiatry at the University of Southern California School of Medicine, and colleagues, conducted an experiment to test the hypothesis that student ratings of educators depend largely on personality variables and not on e …

Why sociopaths succeed: Style matters more than substanceRead More

UPDATED FOR 2021. Psychopaths tend to dominate conversation. Many of us know this first hand, but the reasons why psychopaths talk so much have been documented in a scientific paper published by the Public Library of Science, PLOS.org. Researchers brought together same-sex college students in groups of three people. None of them knew each other. The students were asked to engage in small talk. The conversations were videotaped, and researchers later analyzed who did all the talking. It turned out that study participants with higher scores in primary psychopathy, as measured by the Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy Scale (LSRP), spoke more words and controlled the conversation more than …

Why psychopaths talk so muchRead More