Recently, there has been some discussion on Lovefraud about the relationship between antisocial behavior and sociopathy as a disorder. It has been argued that antisocial behaviors are learned by some people and so not all people who are antisocial are sociopaths. The idea is that behavior that is learned may not reflect a person’s underlying personality, and can therefore be unlearned. Many people also believe that personality features such as low empathy indicate sociopathy more than does antisocial behavior.
The above issues are important because if pervasive antisocial behavior is reflective of a deeply rooted personality profile as opposed to “social learning” then there are many more “sociopaths” than if there are a large number of antisocials who are really nice loving people underneath all that nasty behavior.
In the past three months there also has been discussion here about sex differences in violent and antisocial tendencies. These two discussions often become one discussion because there are some who believe our society teaches males to be violent and antisocial and that again “social learning” (as opposed to personality features) accounts for sex differences in antisocial behavior.
I am teaching a university course in “The Psychology of Gender” this semester. Due to the lack of good unbiased texts for the class, I am teaching from original research papers. In that context I discovered one of the most amazing books I have ever read. That book is Sex Differences in Antisocial Behavior, by Dr. Terrie Moffitt and colleagues. Anyone who wants to understand sociopaths/psychopaths should read that book. It is well worth the $20.00 – $25.00 price.
The book is not an opinion driven textbook. It is a report of years of very thorough research — The Dunedin multidisciplinary health and development study which prospectively followed about 1500 men and women born between 4/1/1972 and 3/31/1973 in Dunedin, a provincial capital city on New Zealand’s South Island. The book covers the first 21 years of their lives. These individuals have been studied at age 32 and that data is reported in other sources. I obtained all those other sources and will share them with you.
The study collected comprehensive health data on all subjects; antisocial behavior was just one aspect of the research. They collected information every year or two by interviewing parents and teachers; and as the subjects got old enough they completed self-reports and brought friends and romantic partners in for interview. The researchers also accessed government and school records. The assessment tools used were well established valid instruments. They answered the following questions which also have implications for the etiology of antisocial behavior (ASB):
• Do males show increased ASB in all circumstances and in every antisocial activity?
• Are there sex differences in the developmental course of antisocial behavior?
• What is responsible for observed sex differences?
• Does ASB have different consequences for men and women?
In the next few weeks I will summarize and discuss their results in the context of other recent research. If we accept the 1 percent figure for PCL-R psychopathy in their population, we would expect about 15 psychopaths. Antisocial personality disorder has about a 4 percent prevalence rate so we would expect 60 sociopaths based on that figure. Keep that in mind as I go through the findings.
To give you an idea of this comprehensive study here is an outline of the assessments made:
• Teacher reports done at 5, 7, 9, 11 and 13 (Rutter Child Scale)
• Self-reports were done at ages 11, 13, 15, 18, 21 (items included age appropriate antisocial and illegal acts).
• At ages 18 and 21 Study members were asked to nominate a friend or family member who knew them well to answer 4 items (problems with aggression, doing things against the law, alcohol, drug use).
Results
• The smallest sex difference was seen at age 15.
• Sex effect sizes ranged from d=.15 to d=.48 and indicated a small to moderate sex difference.
• The largest age difference in antisocial behavior was at age 21.
• Official records revealed a significant difference between males and females for every variable examined.
• Drug and alcohol use was most similar, but was still more common in males.
When they pooled the data on antisocial behavior they got results similar to those reported by psychopathy researchers including Dr. Robert Hare. These researchers say that “psychopaths” are responsible for a disproportionate amount of violent and property crime in our society. In the Dunedin study most juveniles had broken the law but only a small number of juveniles were responsible for the majority of offending for both males and females. 50% of 64,062 “offenses” in 21 y/o males were reported by only 41 men (8%). 50% of the 23,613 offenses in women were reported by only 27 women (6%). The most active females were less prolific than their male counterparts.
There are several take-home messages given by the researchers:
• Males’ antisocial behavior is more often serious and is more likely to be sanctioned.
• Throughout the first two decades of life males consistently emerge as more antisocial than females with two exceptions.
• Males and females are most similar at age 15.
• Males and females are most similar in alcohol and drug use patterns.
To summarize then the Dunedin study identified a group of antisocial males and females whose pattern of antisocial behavior, beginning early in life resembles that of “psychopaths.” Most psychopathy researchers say that the disorder begins in childhood. The number of antisocial males and females identified by the researchers is very close to the number predicted, but was larger than expected. The researchers also collected personality profiles of all participants, data on intimate partner violence perpetration and data on whether subjects qualified for the diagnosis of conduct disorder. Kids with conduct disorder are considered to be “psychopaths in the making.” I will share those results with you in the next weeks.
And back to to OP.
From an article on Jan 09 by Wendy Murphy (a leading victim-rights advocate and nationally recognized television legal analyst) she states that according to DOJ stats that roughly 1.6 million men and 1.5 million women were sexually abused by women when they were children. The majority of female offenders are between 22 and 33 years old and are not mentally ill. They are typically employed in professional jobs or as managers and a high percentage of their victims are “close” contacts, such as students, family friends and children they advised in some fashion.
And remember that these offenses are under reported quite a bit. She also stated:
The truth is, people who look nice on the outside are just as capable of doing dastardly things as the toothless homeless guy living in a box by the river. In fact, I’d go further and suggest that the pretty people can be even more dangerous because they can afford the cover of a good job and a white picket fence.
Like most parents, I relish the myth that blonde female fifth-grade teachers aren’t dangerous. It helps me feel good about sending little Johnny off to school every day.
But feel-good cultural pablum distorts the disturbing facts:
Little Blue Fish-
I had another thought about your friend as an example. Many empathetic loving men and women get connected to partners with poor impulse control and little ability to love. They then experience a double tragedy. First the partner never satisfies their need for love and intimacy. Second many of the children produced in these families have disordered ability to ove as well so the “victim” can’t escape the psychopathic traits. He/she can divorce the spouse but the kids are with him/her forever and it is much more painful to deal with psychopathic traits in a child.
My advice to those who have not yet had children is to find a person with very good impulse control, little dominance motivation, some achievement motivation and plenty of empathy. That person should have an established record of caretaking and faithfulness.
By following that advice, you and your children will have the greatest chance of a good life and positive life-time development.
Liane – Your advice to Little Blue Fish… should be the advice to every young adult in the world. It is profound.
Dr. Leedom,
My mother is a sociopath, there is not question in my mind. I have too much long term, 1st hand evidence to believe otherwise. She is ruthless, and without shame or pity, unless it serves her purposes to appear so.
But her behavior, taken as isolated incidents, seems very well within normal boundaries. As far as I know she has never broken the law. She prides herself on being ultra respectable, and even honest. She has perfected the dance of abiding by the letter of the “law” and moral codes even, but not the spirit of them.
To an outsider (which is everyone but her children – my father is dead), the worst she will appear is cold and snobbish, maybe extremely so depending on the situation. Frankly, comparing her persona or behavior to the “typical” drug addicted, law breaking, incarcerated male sociopath is ridiculous. She is much more subtle than that. She has learned to get what she wants within the rules of society, at least publicly.
Even as a child she isolated herself as much as possible from other people. Why? because she does not value anyone else, unless he can give her something she wants. (Such as my father providing her with money and a certain amount of prestige.)
As a child, I thought she expected perfection from me in all things. But I realized as an adult, she didn’t care if I succeeded. When I failed, she delighted in shaming me. If I succeeded, it reflected well on her, but I was not praised or rewarded. (She would have an, “of course, you did so-and-so attitude). Win-win situation for her, lose-lose for me. Though I always felt under her extremely critical eye, I think now that much of the time, she didn’t even notice what I was doing.
What she did want from me, was to get into my head. Her most common question was “What are you thinking?” I found the terms “emotional incest” and “emotional vampire” recently and they begin to describe what I mean. Even when I was (still am) a middle-aged adult, she’d occasionally complained that she didn’t “know what I was thinking”, that I wasn’t “letting her in” (her wording) or I was “building walls” (her words too). A lot is lost here in the translation of my experience into words. She didn’t want to know about my life. (She has zero interest in my activities and interests, in her grandchildren even.) She wanted in my head. She wanted my emotions?, she wanted to rob me of who I was? she wanted my essence? It’s creepy, and I venture to say that if you haven’t had this type of experience, this might make no sense. It’s taken me 25 years of adulthood to see how twisted what she wants is.
Perhaps you can make some sense of it.
Cedrus
Thank you Liane,
I agree with you, personally, I had a good father and a good mother and these characteristics are essential for me in a husband: healthy impulse control, no anger, empathy and the capacity to discriminate between their needs and other’s need; a balance 🙂
Dear Liane,
Profound advice! “Life is tough, she gives the test first, then the lesson” and all too often we don’t really know what is what until we have had a child.
In my case, though neither me or my children’s father was a P, we still passed on the genes from our own P-fathers to my P-son.
The human race isn’t, unfortunately, as uniform genetically as a specific breed of dogs so that if you breed two dogs of a certain breed you are pretty sure what the temperment of the pups will be. If you breed two Pit Bulls or Akitas, you have a pretty good idea the dog will be aggressive and if you breed two Beagles you can get the idea that they are not likely to be aggressive. (of course there are exceptions to all rules) but with people, we don’t know what genes for temperment are hiding in our DNA, even our OWN DNA. We don’t know what products our DNA mixed with our partner’s DNA will produce.
Of course if one parent is disordered, I would think the likelyhood of a disordered child or children would be greater, but I have (and I am sure you have) seen perfectly wonderful children come from TWO disordered people, and totally disordered chldren come from two “normal” people.
You are so right though, that NC doesn’t get you away from the Ps if one of them is your child. And many times if you have a child with the disordered parent, even if the child is okay the contact with the P parent doesn’t do them any good, or you either for that matter.
Fortunately,, my contact with my P-sperm donor only lasted about 3 years, but that was enough to wound me deeply. I did have sense enough even then though to stay away from him (NC) but didn’t have sense enough to cut the ties with my P-son when he was 17, which is when I should have cut them and never looked back. Hind sight is always 20-20 though.
So, here I am 21 years later, finally, realizing what my son is, and about 2+ years into NC, but still the trauma from those years of contact, emotional pain, despair, hope, and more despair resonate in me.
I have several friends with Psychopathic children who are reaching adulthood and becoming criminals. Some of them are continuiing to try and “save” littlle “Johnny” from himself, and some are cutting off contact with little “Johnny” and refusing to pay the bail or hire him a lawyer. Others are raising little “Johnny’s” offspring in their years when they should be enjoying themselves in the empty nest. I know one lovely lady who is raising 6 of the offspring of her husband’s two psychopathic kids. How many of these children will be psychopathic? All six of those children had TWO psychopathic parents with heavy criminal backgrounds, even the mothers had jail time for violence.
I have known this family and my family has known the family for multiple generations and they are all good, kind, caring people who are responsible and hard working. There is not an abuser in the bunch. My friend’s husband though, married and had two children bhy a psychopathic first wife, and this is the end result of that marriage. Two psychopathic children, and now six offspring that resulted from those two psychopaths having children by other psychopaths.
Since my friend is raising them almost from birth as DCS took them away from the mother almost at birth (the last one was born in prison) they have had a nurturing environment from the start. I hope it helps, and I hope that they didn’t get the genetic whammy. My own P-sperm donor produced (out of four offspring) one psychopath, and the other three were OK, in spite of the fact he raised and abused 3 of them.
BloggerT7165:
It is critical to name this disorder. It is critical to proclaim this is a sociopath, these are the characteristics, and if you see them, run.
In the marketing business, we call it “branding.” The purpose of branding is to create a certain mindset in relation to a product, service, organization, etc. Everyone knows, for example, that the Apple Ipod is a cool and easy way to carry a lot of your favorite music around with you. Everyone knows what an Ipod is and what it does.
The folks involved with conditions like autism and breast cancer have done this well. Who knew about autism 20 years ago? Now we all know about it.
The same thing needs to happen with sociopaths / psychopaths / ASP. By not agreeing on the terminology and the definition of this personality disorder, mental health professionals are doing a great disservice to humanity. I almost feel like there’s an evil force – the collective mind of psychopaths – who do not want to be discovered, do not want to be identified, and so they sow confusion by keeping the professionals arguing with each other. Because the problem is not clearly identified and defined, people don’t know what they’re fighting against.
Many, many people have written to Lovefraud, saying when they discovered that there was a disorder called “sociopath,” and saw that it perfectly described the person who was tormenting them, it was the beginning of their recovery.
Saying there are “nasty, manipulative people” out there simply isn’t good enough. The condition needs to be named, defined, and taught to the public. Only then will people have a chance of avoiding these predators.
Wini:
I was giving a little thought to your situation regarading the cars in your garage.
Your state may have a procedure to clear the title. Some states call it removing the cloud from the title. Your state DMV may be able to help you on this without your having to go to court. Since this is a fairly easy procedure with most property, the clerk of court maybe able to advise you on this.
It’s probably a case of submitting documents to the court. Your neice and nephew who are in law school would be able to help you with this. Since you have the proof you paid for the cars, the goal is to get them retitled in your name.
Donna:
“Saying there are “nasty, manipulative people” out there simply isn’t good enough. The condition needs to be named, defined, and taught to the public. Only then will people have a chance of avoiding these predators.”
The public doesn’t have a clue. There is rarely an accurate portrayal of a sociopath in the mass media. Worse, when the media has a chance to label one of these creatures for what they are — a sociopath — they don’t. The talking heads sit there and wring their hands over how awful so-and-so was — but they don’t ever tell the public — WHAT HE IS.
In a weird way they get the same treatment as mobsters. People think of the Mafia as this gang of loveable, rogues. They don’t get that these same people are murderers, enslave people into prostitution, are loan sharks, are drug traffickers, etc.
Matt stated:
“In a weird way they (sociopaths) get the same treatment as mobsters. People think of the Mafia as this gang of lovable, rogues. They don’t get that these same people are murderers, enslave people into prostitution, are loan sharks, are drug traffickers, etc.”
I agree. For better or worse, knowledge of S/P/N has changed my movie watching habits forever. The average action-adventure hero seems dangerously disordered to me now.
I do think there’s a tolerance for the Sociopath that may be fostered by popular media, or exploited by popular media. (Chicken or Egg question!)
My private term for the S/P/N effect is “spin”. For me, it fits. No matter disorder, there’s a feeling of psychological vertigo that goes with contact with these folks. When I have that “WTF-over?” feeling, I start looking for the S/P/N. Now I know, if the social climate is kooky, there’s probably a cluster B causing the oddities.