Dr. Newman discussed
what it really means to be a psychopath. The definition of a psychopath is a person suffering from a chronic mental disorder with abnormal or violent social behavior. One way to explain
the mental processing of a psychopath is the low fear hypothesis. This is the
widely known and accepted hypothesis, stating that they have poor response to
threat and do not pick up on punishment cues. For example psychopaths would not
react as strongly when viewing disturbing pictures. However, Newman presented
us with another way of explaining the mental processing of a psychopath. The response
modulated hypothesis states that people with psychopathy get focused on an idea
and ignore all other irrelevant information.
Dr. Newman’s experiments
demonstrated that the low fear defects of psychopaths are a result of their
severe modulation of attention. Psychopathic individuals are better at the Stroop
test because of their ability to focus and exclude irrelevant information. Also
you can get the “normal” startle response from someone with psychopathy if they
are attending to it in their task. However, if their attention is elsewhere
then they will display a lower startle response.
Hare developed a psychopath
checklist to help people determine whether someone is psychopathic or not by
judging how their mental processing regulates their behavior.
- Glibness/superficial
charm
- Grandiose
sense of self-worth
- Pathological
lying
- Cunning/manipulative
- Lack of
remorse of guilt
- Shallow
affect
- Callousness/lack
of empathy
- Failure to
accept responsibility for his or her own actions
- Need for
stimulation/proneness to boredom
- Parasitic
lifestyle
- Poor
behavioral control
- Lack of
realistic long-term goals
- Impulsiveness
- Irresponsibility
- Juvenile
delinquency
- Early
behavioral problems
- Revocation
of conditional release
- Criminal versatility
- Promiscuous
sexual behavior
- Many
short-term relationships
There is an interesting TEDtalk about this
list describing psychopathy. The journalist Jon Ronson talks about his
experience with the DSM, psychiatry, and psychopathy focusing on the checklist. As human beings we are
obsessed with conceptualizing our world (i.e. the DSM). He discusses how he
began to diagnose himself after looking at the DSM, which many of us do after
learning about abnormal psychology as well. However, we should leave that up to
the professionals, namely psychiatrists. But psychiatrists are human too, so don’t
they also feel the urge to conceptualize the world around us. Ronson became a certified
psychopath spotter and discussed how he felt the urge to shove the business leaders
into the conceptual box of a psychopath. He tried to apply this checklist to
them just because the statistics said psychopaths are common among CEO’s. He
brings a refreshing look to psychiatry. Reminding us that it is ok to accept
that there is grey area in the world of mental disorder, though we like to think
about it in black and white.
Resources
Ronson, Jon. TEDtalks (2011). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYemnKEKx0c
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy
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