Summary: Contrary to popular belief, those suffering from psychopathy are able to experience emotions, but they do have a blunted emotional response if their attention is directed toward something else.
There is now substantial evidence that psychopaths can in fact experience emotions – but only under the right circumstances. And they can display normal emotional responses – when the emotion is part of their goal, or when they are invited to respond to perceptually simple basic shapes or single objects.
"When a psychopath interacts with you, if they get upset, they can keep their cool, but a sociopath will lose it," Lombardo told Health. "They're really hot-headed. If things don't go the way they want them to, they'll get angry and could be aggressive. They can't keep it together and have emotional outbursts."
While psychopaths show a specific lack in emotions, such as anxiety, fear and sadness, they can feel other emotions, such as happiness, joy, surprise and disgust, in a similar way as most of us would.
There are some areas where psychopaths may experience normal emotions and grief is one such area. In response to death of a person with whom there is a bond, some psychopaths can experience sadness and this may even bring about feelings of guilt which are otherwise impossible to feel. Crying may be a part of this.
Study suggests psychopathic individuals do have emotions, but they are inept at regulating them. A study published in Psychiatry Research found that having psychopathic traits was linked to poor emotional regulation among both a community sample and a sample of violent offenders.
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."
Elevated anger responding is intrinsic to many descriptions of psychopathy. Both Cleckley and Hare's case studies include numerous descriptions of psychopaths whose misbehavior included frequent temper tantrums and rage-induced aggression.
For decades, researchers studying psychopathy have characterized the disorder as a profound inability to process emotions such as empathy, remorse, or regret. A recent study, though, suggests that psychopaths are not incapable of feeling emotions like regret and disappointment.
Psychopaths seem to have shallow emotional experiences, they appear indifferent towards the feelings of others, and remorseless with respect to their harmful actions against others [7].
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 are calm and collected under pressure, and have something called a "resilience to chaos." This means they thrive in situations that others would find highly stressful. Sociopaths, however, are more vulnerable to anxiety, so they do not do as well in those environments.
Relationships with psychopaths are never smooth sailing. If they are particularly narcissistic, they're not happy unless they're the center of attention all the time, meaning they can be obsessive and controlling.
Like healthy people, many psychopaths love their parents, spouse, children, and pets in their own way, but they have difficulty in loving and trusting the rest of the world.
No Shame or Guilt – Psychopaths see no shame or guilt even when the person's behavior was obviously hurtful. Normal people feel significant levels of guilt, remorse, even shame when they manipulate others, steal, cheat or lie. The psychopath is aware their behavior hurt the other person—they simply don't care.
In fact, past research has shown psychopaths can feel empathy, when explicitly asked to, suggesting this ability to understand another person's feelings may be repressed rather than missing entirely in psychopathic individuals.
The best we can do in a free society is to recognize psychopaths and warn each other about them. Psychopaths are always with us. We should feel sorry for ourselves that we have to put up with them, and sorry for all their victims including their parents, but not sorry for the psychopaths themselves.
Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized by a lack of empathy and remorse, shallow affect, glibness, manipulation and callousness. Previous research indicates that the rate of psychopathy in prisons is around 23%, greater than the average population which is around 1%.
Uninhibited by conscience, they initially assess the utility of those around them freely and equally. They then tend to narrow their choices to those they find unusually trusting or vulnerable. Sometimes, simply having normal personality traits qualifies an individual as vulnerable.
Research has indicated that individuals possessing psychopathic traits exhibit a deficit in the processing of emotional stimuli. Lexical decision task studies found that psychopathic individuals do not demonstrate affective facilitation in processing emotional words relative to nonpsychopathic individuals.
In the current study, psychopathy was associated with overall difficulty identifying facial expressions of emotion, as well as with a specific deficit in identifying happy and sad facial expressions. In addition, psychopathy was associated with difficulty identifying less intense facial displays of emotion.
Dimensions of Emotional Hypersensitivity and Normal Affective Functioning in Psychopaths. Although psychopathic personality disorder is characterized by emotional deficits, there is sufficient evidence that psychopaths can be emotionally normal and/or even very sensitive in specific areas, indeed.
The various suggested characteristics of “psychopath eyes” seem to echo the general belief that people with ASPD have no emotions to show. These descriptions include: dead, flat, or reptilian-like eyes. very dark irises, or eyes that appear black.
The psychopath feels rage at being discarded. Losing control or power over a person is not just a narcissistic injury for them; they feel profoundly empty when their partner leaves them even if they had intended to kill their partner. The reason is because they have lost control.