Sharing Characteristics of Psychopaths

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I recently got called a psychopath the other day because of my lack of empathy.

For those who are not aware, a psychopath is "characterized by the inability to form human attachment[3] and an abnormal lack of empathy, masked by an ability to appear outwardly normal"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy

Autistics and psychopaths have nothing to do with each other. Sometimes the two things coincide, but that is a coincidence and is no more common among autistics than NTs.

Let's look at this "empathy" thing more closely.

Empathy involves:
1. Reading a person's emotions.
2. Knowing what emotions are so that you can interpret the information.
3. Caring about the other person's emotions.
4. Acting on the knowledge you have to help the other person.

Autism affects:
1. Difficult to read a person's emotions.
2. Some people find it more difficult to understand emotions; others find it very easy. Almost all feel emotion strongly.
3. Autistics care about other people just as much as NTs do; some studies say they actually care slightly more.
4. Autistics will act on the knowledge they can receive, but may not know what the other person expects of them.

Psychopathy affects:
1. Psychopaths are easily able to read others' emotions. Many are extraordinarily sensitive.
2. Psychopaths may or may not feel emotion; but they are not impaired in understanding emotions in other people as a cause-and-effect concept.
3. Psychopaths do not care about the other person's emotions except when the information can be used to benefit them.
4. Psychopaths will use their normal social skills and the knowledge they have gained about other people to turn the situation to their own benefit. They have no problem knowing what the other person expects, but will act only in their own interests (though this may include false altruism).

In other words:
NTs can figure each other out and care about each other.
Psychopaths can easily figure out other people, but they don't care about them.
Autistics have trouble figuring out other people, but once they know, they care just as much as NTs do.
An autistic psychopath neither knows about other people nor cares about them; he is likely to be extremely unsuccessful at manipulation and an extremely obvious psychopath.

So... autism and psychopathy are actually opposites.

Callista wrote:

>Autistics and psychopaths have nothing to do with each other. Sometimes the two things coincide, but that is a coincidence and is no more common among autistics than NTs.

She has provided no references to back up her claim, so I'm assuming this is a personal opinion. Dr Asperger believed all his life that autism was a form of psychopathy and he was following in the footsteps of his teacher, Eugen Bleuler, who first invented the term "autism" to describe what he thought was a form of schizophrenia.

MRI scans conducted recently by Simon Baron Cohen in the UK have demonstrated that people on the autism spectrum and psychopaths use many of the same areas of their brains to perform tasks. These areas are not used by NTs. Check his website, please don't anyone expect me to do it for you.

"Asperger syndrome" was invented by the guys who wrote the first edition of the DSM and has nothing to do with Hans Asperger.

Investigator, maybe you need to investigate before stating that autism and psychopathy are opposites. Not true!!

There is a major difference between displaying genuine "empathy", and in displaying artificial "empathy".
The lack of display of either the true or the fake empathy is something else.

A quick characterizaton of the general psychopath could be stated as appearing "cool and self-assured",
as in the book "Without Conscience: the disturbing world of the psychopaths among us" by Robert D. Hare (1999):
http://books.google.com/books?id=xfIEVt ... ol&f=false

One of the first sociopaths (a psychopathy itself) in literature is the character Iago from "Othello", he is also
one of the first neuropsychiatrists in literature, as Iago exploited Othello's epilepsy and epilepsy's after-effects
as psychopathic, as a sociopathic neuropsychiatrist would in furthering his own nihilistic and egotistical goals.

Sociopathy versus Psychopathy???:
http://blogs.psychcentral.com/forensic- ... ychopathy/

Then, Iago calling Othello the Psychopath:
http://books.google.com/books?id=44_zy3 ... go&f=false

Tadzio

I am beginning to despise this Simon Baron Cohen.

Callista, I am counting on you to retort. Sorry for the pressure. But I can't do it because I don't have enough evidence, I just hope that you do.

Thanks for that. I got confused for a minute.

I agree that autism's lack of empathy is more about not understanding it rather than repressing it.
Not understanding it doesn't go far enough. With me a stressful environment can alter my emotional response to other's grief.
Autistics have a lack of emotional regulation so in most it would take a lot of effort to be able to truly become a psychopath (or sociopath as it is an environmental thing).

Actually, the term "psychopathy" that Asperger used has nothing to do with the term "psychopath" as we use it today. During the middle of the 1900s, psychological disorders were divided into "neurotic" disorders and "psychotic" disorders. Neurotic disorders included things like anxiety and depression (those disorders with features which emphasize emotions); psychotic disorders, things like schizophrenia which have more to do with reality-testing. Borderline personality disorder was thought to be on the border between the two categories, with features of both.

Today, we use "psychopath" as a near-synonym for "antisocial personality disorder", and we no longer use the neurotic and psychotic categories. Autism is in the category of "Disorders first observed in infancy and childhood"--that is, developmental disorders.

What you think is a similarity is actually only a trick of semantics. It is like trying to prove that homosexuals are happier than other people because they are also called "gay".

Callista has it right.


I do find it unsettling how people are trying to pass aspergers off as psychopath.

I've been reading up on the social cognition/ASD literature lately. The authors of the scientific publications often mention anti-social personality disorder in the same paragraph as ASD. Fools "reading between the lines" will draw parallels between the two. Or conflate them entirely. "Lack of empathy" is also the standard operating terminology for describing both ASD and AsPD.

In my actual experiences with sociopaths, I find the above to be untrue. The sociopaths I've dealt with are so hyperfocused on their manipulations that they neglect to read the actual reactions of those around them on a moment to moment basis. And it's not as if they have great powers of insight into others which they forget to use in the moment.

My experience is that, in their grandiocity, they are pretty damned clueless about how those around them are feeling and reacting. They seem uninterested in reading other people and have not invested much effort in developing any skill at it.



Yep, that's true. They understand how to use negative emotions such as envy, covetousness, jelousy and anger to cause as much distruction in the relationships around them as possible. But they do it based on stereotype rather than reading individual reactions.

My conviction in this topic is based on my experience with more sociopaths than any one person wants to deal with.

in developmental psychology today we learned that the word 'autistic' has its origins in the egocentric thoughts of children

http://www.abc.net.au/austory/specials/ ... efault.htm
click 'in cold blood (full program)' on the right hand side.

the guy seems autistic.

p.s. just for the record im NOT arguing psychopaths and autistic people are similar. i know that there are quite a number of differences. i dont like to be called a psychopath just because i have aspergers.

Autistics feel emotion strongly?

Sorry, but that's a load of crap. Callista, you're gonna have to back up those claims.

OK, both autism and psychopathy are obsessive interests of mine, so I'll weigh in here.

The idea is that there are two types of empathy - cognitive and affective. Cognitive empathy is knowing how others are feeling, affective empathy is having the right emotional response once you know. Traditionally, autistics are described as lacking cognitive empathy but having normal affective empathy, while psychopaths show the opposite pattern. (And a small number of people are psychopaths and autistic, and have deficits in both kinds of empathy.)

The reality is a bit more complicated.

Autistics don't have the severe deficits in affective empathy seen in psychopathy. But we do tend to experience emotions differently, and it's harder to have affective empathy for someone who is reacting differently to a situation than the way you would react. Especially when cognitive empathy is very poor and the person has trouble understanding that others have different likes and dislikes. Plus there are certain specific emotions that some autistics don't seem to feel, such as loneliness, sexual desire, embarrassment, etc, and an autistic who lack one of those emotions will tend to have trouble empathizing with a person feeling one of those emotions. But overall, we do care about other people and feel that it's important not to cause harm to others.

Psychopaths have severe deficits in affective empathy. But they can also have problems with cognitive empathy, especially in childhood. Evidence suggests that childhood psychopaths show severe deficits in affective empathy plus moderate deficits in cognitive empathy, and then as they enter adolescence they start to catch up in cognitive empathy. My guess is that their cognitive empathy deficits are mostly due to lack of practice because they don't care about other people's feelings, and then around the start of adolescence they realize (possibly because of entering formal operational thinking) that learning to manipulate people can get them good rewards. In addition, they have specific difficulties recognizing fear and sadness in others, which continues on into adulthood. There is some evidence that if you make the other person's fear and sadness more salient to them (eg if the person outright says they're scared) then psychopaths are less aggressive towards that person. Which suggests that highly specific deficits in cognitive empathy may contribute to their lack of affective empathy.

So it's complicated. On a scientific level, I don't feel comfortable saying that psychopathy and autism are completely unrelated, because both can show similar difficulties stemming from different mechanisms. But as an autistic person I don't really want to be associated with psychopaths because people tend to fear and hate psychopaths for their harmful behavior, and autistics don't tend to cause the kind of harm to others that psychopaths cause.

Does this mean we can finally stop diagnosing Dexter nd the Joker wih Asperger's? Because both of them are clearly psychopaths.

I do. So much at times that I withdraw all while appearing to others as being aloof

The Joker's clearly a psychopath, but Dexter isn't (even though his foster father thought so). I'd say attachment disorder combined with obsessive compulsive disorder for him, with his obsession being killing. He clearly had a sense of morality, warped though it was. And part of that might've been more his foster father screwing him up - if you notice that your child is killing small animals, training them to kill bad guys is not the appropriate response.

Dexter actually has some autistic traits too, though in my opinion more broader autistic phenotype than on the spectrum.