"The Psychopath Test" by Jon Ronson

Faith wrote: »

Antisocial personality disorder is often used interchangably with psychopathy too, but Hare considers them to be separate, albeit overlapping, pathologies.

My MSc dissertation was based on this. The hypothesis was that psychopathy (PCL-R score of <25) stemmed from abnormal brain development that precluded normal social learning and thus empathy. It would also explain the fact that psychopaths themselves experience very attenuated negative emotions such as fear or sadness. They don't feel them strongly themselves and they have difficulty recognising them in others, therefore the distress of others does not act as a negative reinforcer as in normally socialised people.

Antisocial personality disorder on the other hand (PCL-R score of >25) is an environmentally caused hyper-reactivity to perceived threat. Basically living in a stressful environment throughout early life causes a person to become overly vigilant to percieved threats and thus lowers the flashpoint for violence.

Both people with ASPD and psychopathy express a higher level of reactive violence, which is hypothesised to be a result of poor executive functioning. In ASPD the poor executive functioning is essentially a result of social learning/comditioning. In psychopathy though there is also a theorised deficit in amygdalar development that precludes normal negative reinforcement and social learning, and it is this that lack of feedback from the anygdala that prevents normal executive functioning from developing. This is evident in the fact that as well as reactive violence, people with psychopathy also present with high levels of instrumental violence, which is "cold" and goal-directed.

The study that I was working on took the viewpoint that the 2 disorders tend to be lumped together because of the superficial functional similarities, but that if you proceed from the reactive/instrumental offending distinction then it becomes clear that they are different disorders with different eitiologies. Many conditions give rise to higher levels of reactive violence, but psychopathy is the only known disorder that results in an increased level of instrumental violence also.

The reason there is so much confusion is that most literature on ASPD or psychopathy lumps them all together, which results in a lot of inconsistency.

Travel is good wrote: »

That's really interesting, thank you for that. So the main difference seems to be empathy, among other qualities.

If a potential sociopath was raised say, in an environment where they had plenty of interaction with other people with sociopathic tendencies, then they might later become sociopaths themselves?

I know it doesn't happen in every case, as you often hear of the good person who overcomes adversity while they are growing up. However, I'm just thinking about what happens those young children who grow up in an environment where sociopathic tendencies are considered normal by their peer group? The classic case of getting in with the "wrong crowd". Criminal behaviour might be considered normal by some young people growing up because they have no good role models.

Can you reverse sociopathic behaviour?

I presume then, that there is little that you can do with a pyschopath, as they are like that at birth.

With this you are looking at children and adolescents with Conduct Disorder (CD), as psychopathy and ASPD are only diagnosable in adulthood. This group is further divisible by the presence or absence of Callous-Unemotional (CU) traits. I forget the exact proportions but basically of a group of children with CD, roughly 1/4 will display CU traits- basically they are showing psychopathic characteristics. Of the 3/4 without CU traits, something like half will go on to be diagnosable with ASPD in adulthood. Almost all of the 1/4 with CU traits will be diagnosable with psychopathy. This is further evidence of how the development of ASPD is environmentally mediated and these children are very responsive to interventions such as parenting programmes and social skills training. The development of psychopathy is more definite- if the deficits are there at the start they are consistently so throughout the lifespan and the same interventions have little effect on these children.

There is a third group, known as Adolescent-onset CD. These children (obviously) start offending in adolescence, do not display CU traits and usually stop offending in later adolescence/early adulthood. This type of CD is seen to be a form of peer-group modelling, where antisocial behaviour seems "cool" and antisocial peers are more successful than those who are not. This is basically your "getting in with the wrong crowd" thing but does not usually persist unless there are "hooks" such as drug dependency, imprisonment etc that preclude getting back to a more prosocial lifestyle as you grow up a bit.

metrovelvet wrote: »

This is going to sound like a weird question. Can someone explain to me how the lack of empathy in aspergers operates differently from the lack of empathy in NPD or sociopathy? and how it differs in its effects. Thanks.

You should read the paper - Autism, Empathy and Moral Agency. Jeanette Kennett The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 52, No. 208. (Jul., 2002), pp. 340-357.

There's a free pdf on-line. I contrasts the strict & obsessive morality of people with Aspergers with the amoralism of psychopaths.

People with Asperger have a very logical black / white view of the world and accordingly they follow rules to the letter i.e. the Kantian Categorical Imperative, they are bound by logic & rules not emotional sentiment (Humean sentimentalism).

Thus, while there maybe an empathy deficit they don't break the law because they apply rules so strictly.

For example, I was just talking to a woman with Aspergers a few days ago, and I told her about a case where a man with Aspergers (Cornelius Arie Smith-Voorkamp) in New Zealand stole a light switch that cost less then a Euro from a condemned building, that was damaged in an Earthquake months earlier. Light bulbs and electrical fittings are his obession, he couldn't resist. The police charged him with looting and theft, but the vast majority of people want him let off with an official warning, it's such a trivial case and it cost so much money to pursue.

Anyway, I had absolutely no success explaining to her that his crime was trivial, he should be let off with a warning. She thought - he stole something, that's a crime, he should be punished and that's that. Not very empathic towards the light bulb thief, but it's with in the law.

p.s. The reason why the light bulb case dragged on, Arie admitted his guilt and wanted to be punished, he didn't fight his case.