Who is the sociopath?

Very interesting.

I didn’t see any major inconsistencies in what Joe Newman had to say. First there’s the shallow affect typical of a psychopath. Psychopaths don’t seem to experience emotions in anything like the same depth that normal people do. Newman did not seem to be denying that emotions in psychopaths are attenuated. He said: “Some people look at my attention theory and think that I’m denying that there’s an emotion deficit in psychopaths, but that’s not the case. I mean their emotion deficit is what really does this thing… Emotions are there to some extent, to the degree that you attend to them. They may have a signal that says you shouldn’t do this, but that’s a weak signal.” [My emphasis.] He does seem to be implying that emotions in general are simply not “felt” by psychopaths with the same intensity.

Taken by itself, this attenuation doesn’t necessarily preclude a psychopath from (potentially) experiencing the same range of emotions that a normal human would. It just means those emotions will be weaker than in normal humans.

One such emotion is fear, and it’s commonly recognized that psychopaths can be less prone to the fears that would otherwise inhibit rash and reckless behavior in more normal humans. Consequently many psychopaths behave in ways that stupidly cause harm to themselves, as well as to others.

What Newman was saying, as Steve Becker pointed out, is that much of the psychopath’s failure to perceive and respond to emotional cues (including “fear” cues, no doubt) is caused by a failure of attention. Psychopaths are less likely to notice certain emotional cues, those that might otherwise inhibit undesirable behaviors, because they’re overfocused on other aspects, including the “reward” potential of a behavior.

However, I don’t think Newman is saying the psychopath’s emotional deficit is secondary to this failure of attention. Rather, I think it’s the other way round. Both factors play a part, but it’s precisely because emotional signals are “weak” in the first place that they’re prone to being ignored altogether if attention is focused elsewhere.

It’s easy to understand this idea with an auditory or visual analogy. Suppose we’re in a room where a party is in full swing and there’s lots of noise. Now and again the noise can “interfere,” but on the whole the auditory signals are strong, and we can discern multiple signals. We can not only hear what a companion is saying to us, but we can also pick up snatches of other conversations around us, besides identifying any music that’s playing. In the visual field, we can easily recognize several people we know in a group of people nearby. There’s Ted, there’s Tom, there’s Sally. We can see all of these multiple people clearly and individually.

Conditions are different if the signals are “weak.” If there’s music coming from somewhere in the distance, and murmurs of conversation from the next room, we’ll have a harder time recognizing what’s being said, or played. More relevant here, trying to recognize it calls for an effort of concentration. If we’re straining to hear what’s being said next door, we may not even notice there’s music playing somewhere else. Or if we’re trying to hear the music, we may not notice the conversation at all, let alone make out what’s being said. Similarly, if we spot a group of people some way away, they may be hard to recognize at a distance. Quite possibly we’ll focus on one person who looks vaguely familiar and ask ourselves “Is that Ted or isn’t it?” But while we’re focusing on him we’re not focusing on the other two, so we may never recognize them. In short, we only pick up some of the many things going on around us, and miss others altogether.

What I got out of Newman’s discussion is that something similar could be happening with psychopaths failing to recognize weak emotional signals if their attention is focused on one signal at the expense of others. That seems plausible to me.

Regardless of how strong (or weak) the emotional signals are in absolute terms, much of the problem with psychopathic behavior is still how strong (or weak) these signals are in relation to one another. If psychopaths’ perception of their “urges” is weaker than in normal humans, bad behavior can still result if their “restraints” (such as “conscience”) are weaker still. That’s entirely logical. Newman mentioned that these ideas aren’t new; they originated with Cleckley.

Along with that, Newman did indeed say that “when they turn their attention to things… the psychopaths will tell us this themselves, they’ll say I don’t know, you know, when I see somebody that’s suffering, I’ll go and help them. I’ll do this and that for them. And they’re saying they have emotions, and if you look at some of their behaviors they actually go out of their way more than other people would to do something about it. And yet… because of the negative, cruel things they often do, people are saying the evidence is that those emotions are not genuine.”

It is of course perfectly possible that people judge psychopaths mainly by their negative behaviors. After all, people notice unusual things, exceptions to the behavioral norm. They don’t notice what seems normal. So even if some psychopaths were particularly helpful to others at times, people still count that within the range of “ordinary, human” behavior and don’t take any special notice of it. Acts of exceptional cruelty on the other hand do get noticed and remembered, and those are what characterize the psychopath in people’s minds.

However, I think the point being made is that because psychopathic behavior is not well regulated emotionally in any constant fashion, it tends to be impulsive. One characteristic of “impulsive” behavior is that it’s likely to be inconsistent from one time to another. It may even be somewhat RANDOM in the direction the impulse takes from one occasion to the next. The psychopath is a “loose cannon” whose behavior may be hard to predict.

Given this built-in inconsistency, it’s credible enough, at least in theory, that a psychopath acting on impulse could behave helpfully, even generously toward others at one time, and at another time, acting just as uninhibitedly on a very different impulse, be guilty of an act of sheer cruelty or predation.

For the reason I mentioned above, people observing these contrasting behaviors are likely to discount the psychopath’s acts of helpfulness or generosity and characterize him or her chiefly by the acts of cruelty. But people go further. They attempt to see (as Polonius put it) “method in the madness,” where sometimes there may not BE any “method”! People expect “consistent” behavior out of others, and they look for a pattern. If a psychopath appears helpful and generous to them at first sight, they’ll start off believing “this is a kind, caring person.” If the psychopath then turns round and treats them badly or exploits them, eventually they’ll decide “this person is a villain after all.” But they may still try to reconcile the contradictory behaviors in their own mind by trying to find a common motive or purpose behind both. Then they may conclude that the behaviors they saw as “kind” and “caring” were deliberately contrived by the psychopath in order to “take them in” and “put them off their guard.”

That may well be true in some cases, but in other cases it may not be true at all. The contradictory behaviors may be largely random and impulsive, not part of any greater “scheme” or purpose. Whether or not that’s true of psychopaths, people certainly do make that mistake with other types of abusers, often imputing motives to the abuser that simply aren’t there in that messed-up individual.

Needless to say, no matter what’s really going on in a psychopath’s skull, they still need to be given a wide berth!

Another point Newman touched on was the disagreement in how to define a psychopath–which of course includes distinguishing the psychopath from other kinds of abusive, predatory or antisocial individual. As he pointed out, the majority of people even in the prison system, 80 to 85 percent, are not psychopathic. The majority of people commit crimes for other reasons, or due to other pathologies. One problem is that methods of assessing psychopathy (and similar conditions) in any individual nearly always, even in Hare’s PCL-R, takes criminal behavior into account to one degree or another. Assessment of so-called “antisocial personality disorder” leans even more heavily on such behavioral criteria. This runs the risk of circular reasoning, in which subjects may be classified as “psychopathic” because they’re criminals, while their criminal behavior in turn is attributed to their psychopathy! In other words, it’s important to ensure that a test really is detecting a specific clinical disorder of the mind rather than just measuring criminality.

Of course, everybody needs to bear in mind that a person does not have be a psychopath to be potentially harmful to them!

In this light it was interesting to hear Newman’s remarks on the prevalence of psychopathy in the population. While he estimated 10-15 percent in the prison population, he repeated the standard figure of 1 percent for the population at large. Asked about gender aspects, he gave the standard ratio of three men to one woman. However, he hemmed and hawed about that gender ratio, and hedged a bit by saying that’s using criteria for “antisocial personality disorder” rather than the more precise ones for psychopathy. If the kinds of socially deviant things men do are more likely to attract the attention of the law than those women do, this might mean the prevalence of psychopathy is somewhat more gender-equal than that “three to one” ratio suggests.

As for the rest, I listened to this twice, but nowhere did I hear anything about anyone “coming under the better, and more appropriate, stewardship of their emotions.”

Nor did I hear anything I could interpret to mean “liberating the humanity within the psychopath.” Where did all these warm fuzzy feel-good notions come from?

If Newman was discussing psychopathy in terms that seemed “benign,” that didn’t mean he was gushing as if psychopaths were truly warm, wonderful souls who only needed “liberating” from their cold shell of pathology. I didn’t hear anything of the kind!

He is looking at treatment possibilities, yes, and not writing off all psychopaths as utterly untreatable the way many experts do. However, even from what he said, my impression is that such treatment possibilities are rather limited. They’re also far more in the nature of “fear conditioning” and various methods akin to dog training. I didn’t hear any warm fuzzies about “liberating humanity” there. He did talk about early intervention with children, and that’s bound to hold more promise than with adults. However, I doubt he’s holding out much hope that cold-blooded killers can be trained to short-circuit their homicidal impulses. To do that he’d have to start by getting their cooperation and willingness to learn and change. I doubt very much that would be forthcoming from those types!