I was listening to a show - I think This American Life - about bad children. When they were talking to some expert on exceptionally bad children he jokingly said that toddlerhood is basically a stage of life that we parents survive because our kids are too small to hurt us.
He was being glib, not literally making the same case as Daz ‘the burner’ Rush, and I don’t remember what qualified him as an expert anyway. His general point was that kids aren’t really bad or good, just that some don’t learn to empathize with others or become motivated by earning their parents praise the way normal kids do. It’s not an innate ability.
Because the proposition of the psychopath theory is that they have NO empathy, NO ability to love or care about someone else, and are SOLELY driven by their own self-interest. Like, a sociopath all alone, if you left him stranded on an island where he felt no one could see him or what he did, would without trouble or hesitation strangle a puppy to death to eat it once he got hungry (and if there were a puppy there on the island), because the endearment we feel when we see something cute like that he’s actually incapable of feeling. Or whatever hypothetical example yu could come up with
No, like most things related to human attributes there is a range not simply an on/off value.
From a brain imaging study of people with psychopathic tendencies:
"Participants were assessed with the widely used PCL-R, a diagnostic tool to identify their degree of psychopathic tendencies. Based on this assessment, the participants were then divided in three groups of approximately 40 individuals each: highly, moderately, and weakly psychopathic.
When highly psychopathic participants imagined pain to themselves, they showed a typical neural response within the brain regions involved in empathy for pain, including the anterior insula, the anterior midcingulate cortex, somatosensory cortex, and the right amygdala. The increase in brain activity in these regions was unusually pronounced, suggesting that psychopathic people are sensitive to the thought of pain.
But when participants imagined pain to others, these regions failed to become active in high psychopaths. Moreover, psychopaths showed an increased response in the ventral striatum, an area known to be involved in pleasure, when imagining others in pain."
Note the use of phrases like “degree of psychopathic tendencies”, and “highly psychopathic”, etc.
You’re best off disregarding any poster who simply posts lame-ass attempts at Socratic questions and/or nitpicky questions as a substitute for actually replying. It derails the thread and you can’t actually win, because no matter what your answer, there’ll just be more lame-ass questions.
The OP is asking for opinions based on unattributed(and wrong) definitions and “facts”, and I just happened to notice what forum he posted this thread in.
Did you?
Why do you keep posting the word “fact” in quotes? The OP didn’t try to pass anything off as a fact, which is why the OP is better off ignoring every idiotic contribution you’ve made to this thread.
On top of that, he’s right. According to the study, over 1% of the population shows potentiality for psychopathy, which isn’t materially different than saying 1% of the population has psychopathic traits, for the purposes of this discussion.
If you have something to add other than snark that totally misses it’s mark, then by all means share with the group.
Since “psychopath” is a legal term rather than a medical term, and since legalities change from location to location, and since none of the laws that deal with “psychopathy” as they describe it get into its permanency there can be no factual answer to this question.
Calls for individual opinions, probably best suited for Great Debates or IMHO?
Psychopath and Sociopath are used pretty much interchangeably by the mental health profession, but I tend to think of Psychopaths as people whose brutality can be contrasted with the subtlety of the Sociopath.
If you know any women whose husbands are Sociopaths, you will probably have a pretty good picture, provided you know them well enough to know what is going on behind closed doors.
Sociopaths are very skilled at knowing the boundaries of what they can get away with, so they often go their entire life without risk of prosecution, and privately gloat about it within themselves. They get psychological control of their family members, and never let go.
I believe the disorder is relatively uncommon among women, with about 80% of diagnosed sociopaths being male.
From the NIH site-About 1% of the adult population of the Unite States has what they call “Antisocial Personality Disorder”, defined as "“…a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others that begins in childhood or early adolescence and continues into adulthood.” The site says that men are effected by this more than women. Whether this is 80% or not may be answer in the pdf that I cannot open at work. If someone could please take a look and report back, I greatly appreciate it.
Well the NIH site is all kajiggered up. I downloaded the pdf and all it is is the same graph that is above the link for the pdf. The “Prevelance” “Demographics” and “Treatment/Services Use.”
The most recent information that I’ve seen on the subject indicates that sociopathy is believed to be about 40% genetic, and 60% environmental. I’ll see if I can find the cite, but I think I threw away the textbook.
Despite your disclaimer, this is a rather obvious jab at Czarcasm. Let’s refrain from personal attacks in General Questions. And let’s refrain from Junior Modding as well. No warning issued.
This being General Questions, I think it’s reasonable to ask the OP to define what he’s actually talking about before attempting to provide an answer.
If the OP was seeking to “make a point,” as he states, this perhaps would be better placed in GD or IMHO. However, there are factual aspects of the question that can be addressed in GQ.
If the OP prefers, I can close this thread and you can open another in another forum. As it is it isn’t clear if you are seeking factual information or want to discuss your own ideas.
The OP does in fact appear to want to discuss his own “thoughts” about psychopathy, so that GD or IMHO may actually be a more appropriate forum. The OP’s intent, however, isn’t entirely clear.