Posted by Jack Lee
Do you know a psychopath? You might want to know just in case you should come across one and here’s how to tell:
- Lack of empathy, guilt, conscience or remorse
- Shallow experiences of feelings or emotions
- Impulsivity and a weak ability to defer gratification and control behavior
- Superficial charm and glibness
- Irresponsibility and a failure to accept responsibility for their actions
- A grandiose sense of their own worth
Psychopaths are thought to make up as much as roughly 1 percent of the general populace and up to 25 percent of the prison population.
“Criminal psychopaths are about three times more likely to commit violence than other offenders and about two-and-a-half times more likely to commit other antisocial acts such as lying and sexual exploitation,” Newman explained.
“Although not all psychopaths are violent, their kind of behavior is very destructive socially, and hurts our trust of other people,” he added. “And many people in prison who might otherwise be treated sympathetically aren’t given the chance they deserve because people have trouble distinguishing them from true psychopaths.”
Scientists investigating the disorder commonly agree that psychopaths are often marked by the following traits:
“There are people who are impulsive, at high risk of substance abuse, who are high in emotionality, whom many people call psychopaths, but that is more what we’d call an externalizing syndrome,” Newman said. Many scientists researching psychopathy see it as an emotionally cold disorder.