Psychopaths have an incapacity for love, show no remorse, and have no conscience. Not only is the psychopath emotionally immature, but their immaturity is of “animal” rather than “human” nature. The child psychopath is “hard as nails,” and often does not learn from experience.
The core personality features associated with psychopathy are callous and unemotional personality traits, which include a lack of empathy or remorse, weak social bonds, an uncaring nature, and shallow emotional responding (Cooke et al., 2005; Frick and White, 2008; Viding and McCrory, 2012).
Psychopaths and Shallow Emotions
Having shallow emotion and a lack of empathy, fear and guilt altogether are diagnostic symptoms of psychopathy. However, this still means that psychopaths can experience emotions like happiness to a smaller extent and in a fleeting way.
Psychopathy and Emotional Intelligence
Psychopaths are renowned for using superficial charm and manipulation to get what they want from others. This means they are highly skilled at reading people's emotions. Therefore, by inference, they have to have some degree of emotional intelligence.
Key traits
Some of the red flags that someone is a psychopath include a lack of empathy, a charming personality to fool others, disorganisation, a tendency to blame others, a lack of fear, and being cold-hearted. “Making a clinical diagnosis of psychopathy is rather hard, actually,” Erikson said.
There is no single known cause of psychopathy. Genetics, trauma, brain structure, exposure to violence during childhood, and environmental conditions are possible contributing factors. Research about effective treatments for psychopathy is ongoing.
First, they assess the value of individuals to their needs, and identify their psychological strengths and weaknesses. Second, they manipulate the individuals (now potential victims) by feeding them carefully crafted messages, while constantly using feedback from them to build and maintain control.
But new research by Brock psychologist Angela Book shows that psychopaths are able to display emotions they don't feel to the extent where everyone around them is convinced that those emotions are real. “Psychopaths tend to lack fear and we know they lack remorse,” says Book.
Psychopaths can read our minds and behavior as well as anybody, but when you look for the more unconscious and uncontrollable signs of empathy, you begin to see their depravity through clearer glass.
They are really bad at crying.
When psychopaths cry, Glass says they will often wipe underneath each eye, one at a time. "When people cry genuine tears they cry with both eyes, and so they will tend to wipe both eyes at once."
Of course, they can also get angry, especially in response to provocation, or get frustrated when their goals are thwarted. So Villanelle is right, to some extent. You can hurt a psychopath's feelings, but probably different feelings and for different reasons.
That said, psychopaths do appreciate their relationships in their own way. They do suffer pain, feel loneliness, have desires and feel sadness if they do not receive affection.
Karin Roelofs, at the Donders Institute at Radboud University in the Netherlands, confirmed that the brains of psychopaths showed poor connectivity between the amygdala — the brain region key for processing emotions, especially fear — and the more “judging,” wiser prefrontal cortex.
Lack of Empathy
Psychopaths struggle to understand how someone else might feel afraid, sad, or anxious. It just doesn't make sense to them as they're not able to read people. A psychopath is completely indifferent to people who are suffering—even when it's a close friend or family member.
The callous unemotional traits consist of lack of empathy and remorse, with short-lived emotions. The daring-impulsive domain (also named impulsivity or psychopathy-related impulsivity) traits include irresponsibility, proneness to boredom, novelty seeking and antisocial behaviour.
Yes, research shows there are “good” psychopaths. Many people in positively heroic professions have strong psychopathic traits.
They speak slowly and quietly.
They don't emphasize emotional words like other people do. Their tone remains fairly neutral throughout the conversation. Researchers suspect they craft a calm demeanor intentionally because it helps them gain more control in their personal interactions.
High-functioning psychopaths may be fully aware of their condition and perceive exactly how they differ from the general populace. Some psychopaths may realize that their emotions are “blunted” or “turned down” and they cannot feel joys or sorrows as much as others.
Unlike sadists, psychopaths don't harm the harmless simply because they get pleasure from it (though they may). Psychopaths want things. If harming others helps them get what they want, so be it. They can act this way because they are less likely to feel pity or remorse or fear.
Psychopaths often use intimidation to control others. A psychopath may make subtle threats, stand over you while you're talking, or use aggressive language to get you to back down. Stand your ground in an assertive manner, and report incidents of bullying or harassment to human resources.
As it turns out, psychopaths actually do feel regret under the right circumstances. What differentiates them from people who don't compulsively act out, the study found, is their ability to use those feelings to make better decisions.
Those with histrionic, narcissistic, obsessive-compulsive, schizotypal, passive-aggressive, self-defeating, antisocial, paranoid, borderline, avoidant, dependent, and sadistic personality traits also were attracted to psychopaths.
Although sociopathy and psychopathy cannot be diagnosed until someone is 18, one of the hallmarks of both conditions is that they usually begin in childhood or early adolescence. Usually, the symptoms appear before the age of 15, and sometimes they are present early in childhood.