Can Psychopaths Feel Emotions?

Psychopathy is a personality disorder that presents with bold, disinhibited, and meanness traits, as well as characteristics such as rebellious nonconformity, blame externalization, shallow affect, and manipulativeness.

Shallow affect is an important factor in psychopathy, which is described as a ‘significant reduction in appropriate emotional responses to situations and events’.¹ In accordance with this, psychopaths show significantly less affect-related activity which was observed in fMRI.² Due to this emotional underarousal, psychopaths have often been described as having an incapacity to fall in love.³

What are the similarities between attachment and addiction?

Some studies examine the parallels between attachment and addiction showing that there are significant overlaps between these processes.⁴ After a breakup, we all go through withdrawal, so can we claim love is a form of addiction?

Interestingly, even though substance abuse and psychopathy are highly co-morbid, evidence suggests that psychopaths do not experience withdrawal and craving⁵, at least not to the same extent normal people do. This again confirms the existence of shallow affect showing that psychopaths’ addiction does not have a strong emotional component.

So, what can psychopaths feel?

Contrary to popular perception, psychopaths can feel a range of emotions. Someone with shallow affect is in a neutral and unemotional state most of the time but events, especially negative ones, can still trigger an emotional reaction for them. And it’s not a case where the person is not able to feel certain emotions but more that their emotions are short-lived and not very intense in comparison to healthy people. Psychopaths are capable of feeling fear and anxiety but it tends to be more of a physical reaction they would feel in their stomach and not something long-lasting. Most of their feelings are experienced as thoughts only. In other words, they would feel anxiety in the form of paranoia and hypervigilance but they are rarely “emotionally” anxious.

An interesting example is Ted Bundy, a well-known serial killer who kidnapped, raped, and murdered numerous women. During his interviews, although he was only willing to discuss his murders in the third person, he did admit to feeling guilty for three months after his first victim. He also spoke about how he wanted to stop once and tried to only sexually assault one of his victims but then ended up killing her by accident. These show that psychopaths might not be as emotionless as we think, even though, their emotions are indeed very shallow. For a normal person, murdering someone would likely be accompanied by years and years of feeling guilt and remorse, whereas someone with antisocial personality disorder would only experience these emotions for a much shortened period.

Why do psychopaths deny their emotions?

Ted Bundy, the same person who spoke about feeling guilty, claimed that he was the most ‘cold-hearted son of a bitch’ one can ever meet. He also said he feels sorry for people who feel guilt and remorse.

What is the truth, then? Are psychopaths incapable of feeling these emotions after all?

The answer is a mix of both. Psychopaths have a lower capacity for remorse but it is not true that they cannot feel it at all. Due to the nature of their disorder, psychopaths are preoccupied with not showing any weaknesses or vulnerabilities. They perceive the world as hostile and abusive and therefore see emotions such as empathy, guilt, and remorse are weaknesses they believe people will try to use against them to manipulate or subjugate them. As a result, they often present a façade of invulnerability and hide emotions they consider weak.

References:

[1]: Shallow Affect (n.d.). In APA Dictionary. Retrieved from https://dictionary.apa.org/shallow-affect

[2]: Kiehl, K. A., Smith, A. M., Hare, R. D., Mendrek, A., Forster, B. B., Brink, J., & Liddle, P. F. (2001). Limbic abnormalities in affective processing by criminal psychopaths as revealed by functional magnetic resonance imaging. Biological psychiatry, 50(9), 677–684. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0006-3223(01)01222-7

[3]: Cleckley, H. (1941). The mask of sanity; an attempt to reinterpret the so-called psychopathic personality. Mosby.

[4]: Burkett, J. P., & Young, L. J. (2012). The behavioral, anatomical and pharmacological parallels between social attachment, love and addiction. Psychopharmacology, 224(1), 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00213-012-2794-x

[4]: Fisher, H. E., Brown, L. L., Aron, A., Strong, G., & Mashek, D. (2010). Reward, addiction, and emotion regulation systems associated with rejection in love. Journal of neurophysiology, 104(1), 51–60. https://doi.org/10.1152/jn.00784.2009

[5]: Cope, L. M., Vincent, G. M., Jobelius, J. L., Nyalakanti, P. K., Calhoun, V. D., & Kiehl, K. A. (2014). Psychopathic traits modulate brain responses to drug cues in incarcerated offenders. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 8, 87. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00087

If you enjoyed this post and would like to read more, you can subscribe here — https://shopping-feedback.today/authors/ella-harris to get an email whenever I publish a story. You can also buy me ☕ via — https://ko-fi.com/ella_harris