Psychopathy is a difficult order to spot because the psychopath can appear normal, even charming. They lack conscience and empathy which makes them unpredictable, manipulative and often criminal. Psychopathic traits are more innate, however a chaotic or violent upbringing may push people to behave psychopathically. Some researchers make a distinction between “primary psychopaths,” who are thought to be genetically caused, and “secondary psychopaths,” seen as a product of their environments.
The psychopathy checklist describes psychopaths as showing a lack of empathy or “coldheartedness”. For us, caring is largely driven by emotion, however, the brains of psychopaths have been found to have weak connections among the areas of the brain’s emotional systems. These being disconnected are the reason for the psychopath’s inability to feel emotions deeply. Psychopaths are also not good at detecting fear in the faces of other people. In addition, psychopaths have extremely high thresholds for disgust.
Psychopaths show a lack of social emotions, such as; shame, guilt and embarrassment. Cleckley said that the psychopaths he came into contact with showed “lack of remorse or shame.” When normal people are put into an experimental situation where they anticipate that something painful will happen, such as a mild electric shock, a brain network activates. Normal people will also show a clear skin conductance response; sweating. In psychopathic subjects, however, this brain network showed no activity and there was no sweating.
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