Aftermath Radio: Episode Eight: Psychopathy and Emotional Dysfunction

David Kosson, Ph.D.
David Kosson, Ph.D., President, Aftermath: Surviving Psychopathy Foundation

In the first part of the show, Dr. Schug addresses the concept of the sociopath. He clarifies the origin and meaning of the term sociopath, the confusion between the psychopath and the sociopath, and explains why the term sociopath is misleading and should probably be avoided. Also this week, Dr. Robert Schug interviews “Sally” a woman who was married to someone with symptoms of psychopathy. Sally discusses the damage done to her life and what she has learned from the experience. In the second half of the show, Dr. Schug speaks with Dr. David Kosson about research on the emotional functioning of psychopathic individuals. Click here to listen to the episode.

Dr. Dave Kosson, Professor of Psychology at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science and co-author of the Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version, discusses scientific research about emotional deficits thought to be associated with psychopathy.

 

Affective (emotional) features are commonly considered one of the core components of psychopathy, and they are commonly considered to play an important part in the antisocial (and often callous) behavior exhibited by psychopathic individuals. Affective features are prominent in most clinical and self-report measurement approaches. For example, the Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R) includes four items in its affective dimension:

  1. Lack of Guilt
  2. Shallow emotions
  3. Callousness
  4. Failure to accept responsibility

These items tend to cluster together so that if a person has one of these they tend to also have the others. Some scientists think that psychopathic individuals actually experience less intense emotions or may fail to experience them at all. Other scientists think that psychopathic individuals do experience emotions but that their emotions have little effect on their behavior.

Many studies have examined the association between emotional deficits and psychopathy. Behavioral studies have shown that psychopaths have difficulty classifying emotional stimuli (e.g., emotional faces or voices), and that emotion does not appear to impact the memory of psychopaths as it does in normal people. Additionally, psychopaths appear to be characterized by deficits in passive-avoidance learning (e.g., learning to avoid doing something that hurts or leads to punishment), and it is often suggested that these learning deficits reflect an emotional impairment (that is, punishments do not seem to activate emotional responses in these individuals the same way they do in the rest of us. Physiological studies have shown that psychopaths demonstrate reduced skin conductance responding (that is, reduced sweating in the palms) but not a reduction in heart rate activity in anticipation of electric shocks and loud noises, and differences in activity in certain brain areas during tasks involving moral processing. Furthermore, there is also evidence for emotional dysfunction in children with psychopathic features (referred to by some researchers as “callous and unemotional traits”).

In summary, the majority of studies looking at emotional function reveal differences (impairment) associated with psychopathy, though the results across different samples and methods are not entirely consistent. Alternative explanations must also be considered, and the exact interpretation of these results may have to wait until further research is conducted.

To learn more listen to the show.