Psychopathy: Behind the Mask

Psychopathy is a mental disorder in which a person seems to have little or no conscience, and lacks a propensity for guilt and empathy. It is estimated that about one per cent of the general population can be categorized as being psychopathic.

Psychopaths are usually male, and represent about 15-25 per cent of male offenders in federal correctional settings.

However, a person who is psychopathic is rarely psychotic. In fact, many psychopaths are high-functioning, finding great success in their chosen careers. It has been suggested by some psychologists that many psychopaths are found in leadership positions, particularly in the fields of business and politics.

There is a widely-accepted test used to identify psychopaths called the "Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R)." The "Checklist" was developed by University of British Columbia professor (now emeritus) Robert D. Hare, and is typically only conducted by qualified clinicians, and under licensed conditions, due to the considerable stigma associated with a positive test result.

A 2011 study, "Hungry Like The Wolf: A Word-Pattern Analysis Of The Language of Psychopaths," published in the academic journal, Legal and Criminological Psychology, analysed the crime narratives of homicide offenders, and found significant differences between psychopaths and non-psychopaths:

Psychopaths (relative to their counterparts) included more rational cause-and-effect descriptors (e.g., 'because', 'since'), focused on material needs (food, drink, money), and contained fewer references to social needs (family, religion/spirituality). Psychopaths' speech contained a higher frequency of disfluencies ('uh', 'um') indicating that describing such a powerful, 'emotional' event to another person was relatively difficult for them. Finally, psychopaths used more past tense and less present tense verbs in their narrative, indicating a greater psychological detachment from the incident, and their language was less emotionally intense and pleasant.

Some other interesting facts from the paper:

The psychopath's diminished capability for moral sensibility appears to have biological underpinnings; neuroimaging research indicates potential structural and functional abnormalities, including grey matter reductions in frontal and temporal areas, and anomalies in the prefrontal cortex, corpus callosum, and hippocampus.

Canadian psychopathic offenders, for example, are two and a half times more likely than their counterparts to be successful in their applications for parole, despite a substantially higher rate of re-offending

...psychopaths appear to view the world and others instrumentally, as theirs for the taking. For example, nearly all (93.3%) of the homicides perpetrated by psychopaths are primarily instrumental (premeditated and motivated by an external goal) compared to 48.4% of those by non-psychopathic offenders.

Read the full study, reprinted with permission, originally published in The British Psychological Society's Legal and Criminological Psychology.

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