Simon Paynton

There’s the fearlessness of the cornered animal.  There’s also courage, which isn’t necessarily the same as fearlessness.

You’re right.  Impaired, lacking – I should have been more precise.  That’s why a spectrum model makes sense – the various traits show up in different degrees in different individuals.

Psychopathy is defined as one of the dark traits.  It’s not the only one.  In many people with dark traits, fear experience and recognition may not be impaired.

Davis wrote:
the first two articles you cited directly refute your claim about psychopaths not experiencing fear

I need a quote, otherwise I think it’s fake news.

The amygdala is involved in responding to fear, so if it’s under-reactive, there’s less of a fear response.

@davis – there’s a lot of confusion in the literature over what psychopathy is.  Some people confuse it with narcissism, some with antisocial personality disorder.  The Abigail Marsh article goes into how psychopaths don’t feel or recognise fear.

This is from the first paper:

Moreover, recent imaging studies indicate that psychopathic i…

[Read more]

Davis wrote:
Simon could you list some of the papers that you’ve read?

Here’s a good one:

Baskin-Sommers, Arielle; Elizabeth Krusemark; Elsa Ronningstam –“Empathy in Narcissistic Personality Disorder: From Clinical and Empirical Perspectives”; Personality Disorders: Theory, Research, and Treatment; 2014, Vol. 5, No. 3, 323-333

In relatio…[Read more]

Unseen wrote:
the territory overlapping psychopathy with narcissism and antisocial tendencies

I read that people with Borderline personality disorder (emotionally unstable disorder) have more empathic concern than the average.  I think there’s a spectrum of empathic concern going from high on the left (borderline) to zero on the right (psychopathic).

I’ve done a lot of reading of papers as well as listening to Athena Walker.  There’s a lot of misinformation about psychopaths, and fuzzy definitions.  It gets mixed up with other disorders.  I think the real situation is a kind of spectrum, like this:

I’m pretty sure they also don’t feel fear, or recognise fear, in addition to lacking empathic concern, guilt and conscience etc.  They don’t respond to punishment, but they respond to reward.

Psychopaths are very unemotional, according to Athena Walker, a self-identifying psychopath who writes very entertainingly on quora.com.

They have to get through life without (at least, negative) emotions.  Therefore they have to use their brains where we would use our emotions.  That’s how I understand it.

I think that emotions tell us what’s important to us – how things affect our goals.  So, machines could do that in a primitive way I think, monitoring their environment like we do.