Most social animals have mechanisms to control aggressive behavior. A dog for example will stop fighting when its opposite shows signs of defeat. Human do it too. When we are raging in anger we will stop when we see someone is scared or starts crying. But psychopaths won’t.
When I was catching onto the idea that some things in our family live were in fact not normal, I started reflecting a lot on things that had happened. At a time when I was still sharing my thoughts with my parents, I noticed they different responses or lack there off. In a very sincere way, I would account for thing that had happened and how they had made me feel. My father would take it in, walk away and then come back telling me in a low voice „but you have got to understand: children are annoying“. While that is definitely one of the lamer excuses to mistreat your children it is not nearly as unnerving as my mother’s response. Which was Nothing. Nada. Nichts. Rien. No matter how much I expressed and gestured the distress I was in at the time. Still nothing.
The Science
My mother’s deadpan stare reminded me of the stereotypical image we have of the psychopaths’ expressionless face. So, I looked into the literature. Healthy humans have developed a violence inhibition mechanism. It means that we stop aggressive behavior when someone else shows signs of distress. Psychopaths on the other hand don’t have that same response to people in distress.
From previous research Blair et al. knew that psychopaths react the same to threatening pictures as healthy individuals (1). In the experiments the skin conductance response (SCR) of the participants was measured. The conductance of the skin reflects sweat glands that are active. From that it is deduced how aroused the sympathetic nervous system of an individual is.
Each participant was shown threatening pictures to set their 100% arousal and neutral pictures for 0% arousal. Then the examiners showed pictures of people in distress e.g. people crying. The results show that non-psychopaths are as aroused by seeing people in distress as they are they seeing a threat like a snake or gun (ns) (Figure 1). Psychopaths significantly (***) lack this response to other people in distress (2).
And here is me, thinking how frustrating it is that I can’t convey to my mother how I was feeling getting mistreated. Having had to grow up in the care of such a highly toxic person I thought that was normal. Others I am sure find the lack of responsiveness in a psychopath downright unnerving if they ever came across a psychopath. And they would be right. There are dangerous people in this world, and they don’t all have a buzz cut, bad teeth and a scare across their face. – Be Careful out there!!
(1) Emotion in the criminal psychopath: Startle reflex modulation (1993) C. J. Patrick, M. M. Bradley, P. J. Lang
(2) The psychopathic individual: A lack of responsiveness to distress cues? (1997) R.J.R. Blair, L. Jones, F. Clark, M. Smith
