The Psychopath Project - Rule of the Psychopaths
From the beginning, I am compelled to say that a real psychopath has a brain physiology that is different from a normal person and pretty much guarantees that they have no choice in the matter as to whether they are one or not. In light of that fact, I have created a term that is descriptive of the influence that successful psychopaths in high places can have on those around and beneath them... "Trickle-Down-Psychopathy." |
|---|
| Books - News & Opinion Articles - Peer Revued Articles - Video |
| View the Power Point Presentation |
| News & Opinion Articles | Books - Peer Revued Articles - Video | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Monday, 25 August 2014 |
"Actually, many academis argue now that the only personality type that thrives in the neo-liberal world is the psychopath, someone who is naturally inclined to experience less stress and inner pain." | ||||
Published on Monday, August 25, 2014 by TruthDig |
"Any good cop, like any good reporter, knows that every criminal has a story. No one, except for perhaps a few psychopaths, wakes up wanting to cut off another person’s head. Murder and other violent crimes almost always grow out of years of abuse of some kind suffered by the perpetrator. Even the most “civilized” among us are not immune to dehumanization." |
||||
Tuesday, 05 August 2014 |
"Neoliberalism, the contemporary form of capitalism, structures this “surplus-repression” and engenders what Henry Giroux suggested is a widespread “culture of cruelty,” which normalizes violence to such a degree that mass shootings recur regularly. Analyses of individual psychopathy and of real cultural problems abound, but the inquiries cut those acts “off from any larger systemic forces at work in society.” | ||||
OpEdNews Op Eds 6/25/2014 |
"Having once had the utter displeasure of being married to a psychopath, I can't help but notice the eerie similarities in current politics..." |
||||
"And now I see these very behaviors played out in front of the cameras every day! No psychopath is a suitable representative for us in Washington, or anywhere else for that matter. Wall Street is full of narcissists and psychopaths, and the current economic system makes them all float to the top." |
|||||
Published on Monday, June 22, 2009 by Rabble (Canada) |
"The magnitude of the moral crisis of the political right is staggering. The greed, dishonesty, hubris and psychopathic disregard for the public good renders the whole business elite utterly unfit to pronounce on anything -- not even on the economy, but certainly not democracy or how we run our collective affairs." | ||||
Broadcast June 11, 2014 |
"I talk for almost two hours with Paul Craig Roberts On Russia, De-dollarization, capitalism, Psychopaths, Ed Snowden and NSA, Monsanto GMO. Corporatization of the FDA and more." "Paul, So Rob, I agree with you. We have a nation run by sociopaths and psychopaths." "When you don't regulate human behavior, everybody can act like a sociopath/psychopath." |
||||
Tuesday, 10 June 2014 |
"This psychologically diseased minority has tended to dominate the normal majority. The disorders can make the bearers a danger to the rest of us. And when such individuals get into power, with the destructive forces already referred to at their disposal, this danger could not be more acute and urgent. The disorders are Psychopathy, Paranoid Personality Disorder and Narcissistic Personality Disorder." |
||||
| "Tragically, in our corporate culture, the psychopaths have a home in organizations which embrace their own values." | |||||
"The corporation, after all, is deliberately designed to be a psychopath: purely self-interested, incapable of concern for others, amoral, and without conscience." "Psychopaths can fight their way to the top of corporations without experiencing the restraints of conscience felt by others." |
|||||
OpEdNews Op Eds 5/7/2014 |
"So, reading the rantings of one psychopath, I started wondering: if psychopaths could change the rules to their benefit, what would they do? Here are a few ways that you might expect psychopaths to try to shape the culture, the narrative and the rules..." | ||||
Published on Tuesday, April 22, 2014 by The Nation |
"You want extreme? Business as usual is extreme. Just ask a climate scientist. The building is burning. The innocents—the poor, the oppressed, the children, your own children—are inside. And the American petro state is spraying fuel, not water, on the flames. That's more than extreme. It's homicidal. It's psychopathic. It's fucking insane." |
||||
| "Planning on descendants? Well, hey, good luck with that...or maybe you would not like to commit the horrors to come against them?" ...me | |||||
Tuesday, 08 April 2014 |
KARLIN: In a chapter called "Madness," you have two sections: global psychopaths and bankster psychopaths? How literally do you mean those terms? HARTMANN: I mean them absolutely literally. There is evidence that many people who run top corporations and key parts of our economy are quite literally sociopaths.... |
||||
Monday, 24 March 2014 |
"...when the alarm clock goes off and the climate change deniers and their corporate blood sucking psychopaths who pay for the propaganda that enables climate change deniers to pretend that there is still a debate to be had over the Apocalyptic course that human induced climate change has us on..." |
||||
Thursday, 20 March 2014 |
"Under autocratic forms of governance, it is a seductive power that can invert the moral order and reward psychopathological personalities. In other words, it can turn virtues like empathy and justice into vices and vices such as greed, inflexibility and rank opportunism into virtues." |
||||
Monday, 10 March 2014 |
"The same with the water supply. In fact, I can almost bet that these commodities will go into scarcity because of one factor alone — the psychopaths in the investment community are giddy over the prospects." |
||||
| "Criminal in the worst way. Do you see why I use a word like “psychopath” with such confidence?" | |||||
Wednesday, 27 November 2013 |
"The human element evinces the pathology displayed in psychoanalytic consulting rooms; the economic elite are psychopathic; tea Party types exhibit paranoid displacement while liberals exhibit neurotic insularity." |
||||
Sunday, 03 November 2013 |
"Do the rich and super-rich tend to be psychopaths, devoid of guilt or shame?" | ||||
"Psychology has a long tradition of bending to current race, gender and sexual orientation biases. Its class bias is reflected by the dominant portrayal of psychopathy." |
|||||
"Reid chides those who recoil at the thought of suspending rights: “While we have been interminably discussing this weighty issue, the psychopaths, who don’t trouble themselves with contemplations, have been gaining ground.” |
|||||
| The text "psychopath" is found 93 times in this article. | |||||
Sunday, 27 October 2013 |
"After these revelations in 2010, Christopher Hitchens wondered if this concerete evidence of psychopathy would mean that the Nobel Peace Prize laureate would, finally, "have the door shut in his face by every decent person" and be "shamed, ostracized and excluded." |
||||
Monday, 23 September 2013 |
"Some are psychopaths who relish acts of sadism, torture and murder. But others, maybe most, see killing as a job, a profession, good for their careers and status." |
||||
Monday, 16 September 2013 |
"But we speak here not of the realm of psychopathology, but of politics and public servants who ought to be judged for their performance in carrying out the duties of their office." |
||||
Monday, 02 September 2013 Original-WebLink - Local Copy - Fear and Loathing in |
"Though Reagan lionized the Contras as freedom-fighters, the "moral equivalent of America's founding fathers," reports of their brutality sank to depths of psychopathic depravity. Tens of thousands would die in Reagan's Contra War." |
||||
Wednesday, 21 August 2013 |
"Deeds which would be prosecuted as major crimes if performed by citizens are routinely enacted byour leaders yet they take no responsibility for these crimes and exhibit no remorse. They act without conscience; they are sociopaths and, in some cases, psychopaths (occupying the extreme end of the sociopathic range)." |
||||
"The renowned US writer and journalist William Blum declares, in an article referring to ‘Washington’s endless bombings and endless wars’ and Kerry’s hounding of whistleblowers, that we are witnessing ‘Unlimited power in the hands of psychopaths’ He adds, ‘My own country truly scares me’" |
|||||
| "The psychopathic behaviour of our political and corporate leaders is clear for all to see; but what about ourselves, the citizens." | |||||
Monday, 12 August 2013 |
"In Part I and Part II of Mankind: Death by Corporation, we looked briefly at what amounts to ruthless, psychopathic behavior of our largest corporations spanning most major industries." | ||||
Wednesday, 13 February 2013 |
"As a people, what is our legacy to future generations? Depressing, isn't it? Ecocide. Debt slavery. War without end. A social milieu in which privileged psychopaths not only thrive but decide the fate of the multitudes." | ||||
Published on January 30, 2013 Psychology Today, Mindmelding: Philosophy meets neuroscience, Sussex Publishers, LLC Original-WebLink - Local Copy |
This article speaks on some primary traits of a psychopath such as: Uncaring; Shallow emotions; Irresponsibility; Insincere speech; Overconfidence; Narrowing of attention; Selfishness; Inability to plan for the future; Violence. "The term “psychopath” was first applied to these people around 1900. The term was changed to “sociopath” in the 1930s to emphasize the damage they do to society. Currently researchers have returned to using the term “psychopath.” Some of them use that term to refer to a more serious disorder, linked to genetic traits, producing more dangerous individuals, while continuing to use “sociopath” to refer to less dangerous people who are seen more as products of their environment, including their upbringing. Other researchers make a distinction between “primary psychopaths,” who are thought to be genetically caused, and “secondary psychopaths,” seen as more a product of their environments." |
||||
Wednesday, 05 December 2012 |
"The psychologist Kevin Dutton in his book, The Wisdom of Psychopaths, notes society, and especially Wall Street, admires and rewards many of the qualities of psychopaths - fearlessness, emotional sterility, supreme confidence, ruthlessness, lack of remorse, refusal to take responsibility, narcissism and delusions of grandeur." | ||||
| "Other studies suggest that financial elites, like psychopaths, are more likely to feel like rules and societal constraints don't apply to them. Mitt Romney's entire business and political career, especially his approach to paying taxes, is the freshest, most conspicuous example of this personality trait." | |||||
| "We are still allowing a powerful elite, who behave like psychopaths, to steer our government towards protecting their interests at the expense of everyone else. The greatest threat to the United States will never be Al Qaeda, Russia, China or Iran. It will be our failure to wrest control of public policy from the inmates of our own insane asylum." | |||||
July 24, 2012 |
"With more than 7 billion people on the planet that means there are as many as 70,000,000 psychopaths alive today." | ||||
| "Thus the psychopathic corporation was forged as a Frankenstein monster that enabled the constant flow of psychopathic blood, continuously replenished by the 1% of the population born into psychopathy in each new generation, to rise into positions of power as stock traders, corporate executives, and corruptible politicians." | |||||
Wednesday, December 07, 2011 by CommonDreams.org |
"Regardless of the dissembling of corporate state propagandists, free market capitalism has always been a government subsidized, bubble-inflating, swindlers' game, in which, psychopathic personalities (not “job creators” but con job perpetrators) thrive. By the exploitation of the many, a ruthless few have amassed large amounts of capital by which they dominate mainstream narratives and compromise elected and governmental officials, thereby gaming the system for their benefit." | ||||
Published on Thursday, November 24, 2011 by the Toronto Star |
"Given the state of the global economy, it might not surprise you to learn that psychopaths may be controlling the world. Not violent criminals, but corporate psychopaths who nonetheless have a genetically inherited biochemical condition that prevents them from feeling normal human empathy." | ||||
| "This shark-like fixation on self-interest means that psychopaths often feel a clear detachment from other people, viewing them more as sheep to be preyed upon than fellow humans to relate to." | |||||
"If psychopaths have in fact installed themselves in the upper reaches of the world’s financial institutions, their genetic deficiency dictates that their greed knows no bounds." |
|||||
Published on Sunday, June 05, 2011 by CommonDreams.org |
"The United States corporate and government spheres have become, Vonnegut suggested, a perfect habitat for psychopaths. What has allowed so many psychopaths to rise so high in corporations, and then government, he wrote, “is that they are so decisive. They are going to do something every fuckin’ day and they are not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they don’t give a fuck what happens next. Simply can’t. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody’s telephone! Cut taxes on the rich!" |
||||
| "The US has been endowed with abundant resources, and there have always been a more than sufficient supply of psychopaths of the first intellectual grade to supply corporate suites and their subsidiary, the Congress." | |||||
| "How had our country disappeared? Vonnegut proposed that among the contributing factors was that it had been invaded – as if by the Martians – by people with a particularly frightening mental illness. People with this illness were termed psychopaths." | |||||
Published on Monday, December 06, 2010 by TruthDig.com |
"What is frightening in collapsing societies is not only the killers, sadists, murderers and psychopaths who rise up out of the moral swamp to take power, but the huge numbers of ordinary people who become complicit in state crimes. ...True evil, as Goethe understood, is not always palpable. It is “to render invisible another human consciousness.” |
||||
Published on Monday, May 10, 2010 by TruthDig.com |
"Fairy tales about heaven and hell, angels, miracles, saints, divine intervention and God’s beneficent plan for us are repeatedly mocked in the brutality and indiscriminate killing in war zones, where I witnessed children murdered for sport and psychopathic gangsters elevated to demigods." |
||||
Published on Tuesday, August 18, 2009 by The Guardian/UK |
"Here are three observations: 1 Our species (unlike most of its members) is tough and resilient; 2 When civilisations collapse, psychopaths take over; 3 We seldom learn from others' mistakes." | ||||
Published on Monday, May 11, 2009 by TruthDig.com |
"We are morally no different from the psychopaths within the Taliban, who Afghans remember we empowered, funded and armed during the 10-year war with the Soviet Union. Acid thrown a girl's face or beheadings? Death delivered from the air or fields of shiny cluster bombs? This is the language of war. It is what we speak. It is what those we fight speak." |
||||
The Society for the Scientific Study of |
The Society for the Scientific Study of Psychopathy (SSSP) is a non-profit, professional organization aiming to promote the conduct and communication of scientific research in the field of psychopathic personality (psychopathy) and to encourage education and training in those fields of science that contribute to research in psychopathy. The members of SSSP are actively engaged in trying to better understand the characteristics and causes of psychopathy, as well as better ways of detecting it, treating it, and ultimately preventing its destructive manifestations. Our organization is dedicated to the science of psychopathy. Nevertheless, we welcome not only established investigators, but also students, clinicians, educators, science journalists, attorneys, and others who are interested in learning more about research on this still poorly understood condition. | ||||
| Books | News & Opinon Articles - Peer Revued Articles - Video | ||||
Corporate Psychopaths First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Available at Amazon.com or from Hardcover: 208 pages |
|
||||
Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths |
"Snakes in Suits is a compelling, frightening, and scientifically sound look at exactly how psychopaths work in the corporate environment: what kind of companies attract them, how they negotiate the hiring process, and how they function day by day. You'll learn how they apply their "instinctive" manipulation techniques -- assessing potential targets, controlling influential victims, and abandoning those no longer useful -- to business processes such as hiring, political command and control, and executive succession, all while hiding within the corporate culture. It's a must read for anyone in the business world, because whatever level you're at, you'll learn the subtle warning signs of psychopathic behavior and be able to protect yourself and your company -- before it's too late." The work is interlaced with fictional narratives illustrating how the factual content applies to real-life situations |
||||
| Political Ponerology © Andrew M. Lobaczewski Preface, Notes and Commentary © Laura Knight-Jadczyk and Henri Sy Translated in 1985 from the original Polish "Ponerologia Polityczna" by Alexandra Chciuk-Celt, Ph. D., University of New York, N.Y. Corrected by the author in 1998 Website for the Book Links for purchasing are found here |
"Political Ponerology is fascinating, essential reading." --Philip Zimbardo, author of The Lucifer Effect "This is an extraordinary book." --Ilan Pappe, author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine The original manuscript of this book went into the furnace minutes before a secret police raid in Communist Poland. The second copy, painfully reassembled by scientists working under impossible conditions of violence and repression, was sent via courier to the Vatican. Its receipt was never acknowledged - the manuscript and all valuable data lost. In 1984, the third and final copy was written from memory by the last survivor of the original researchers: Andrew Lobaczewski. Zbigniew Brzezinski blocked its publication. After half a century of suppression, this book is finally available. Political Ponerology is shocking in its clinically spare descriptions of the true nature of evil. It is poignant in its more literary passages revealing the immense suffering experienced by the researchers contaminated or destroyed by the disease they were studying. Political Ponerology is a study of the founders and supporters of oppressive political regimes. Lobaczewski s approach analyzes the common factors that lead to the propagation of man s inhumanity to man. Morality and humanism cannot long withstand the predations of this evil. Knowledge of its nature and its insidious effect on both individuals and groups - is the only antidote. | ||||
The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, ISBN-13: 9780374291358 Website for the Book |
|
||||
1988 Fifth Edition: private printing for non-profit educational use |
|
||||
| Supporting Books | |||||
The Origins of Totalitarianism The 1951 edition Wikipedia-WebLink - Local Copy Text File Hannah Arendt wrote only briefly on education, in “The Crisis in Education”, where she asserts that “education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable.”Yet her critique of modernity and account of political action and the public realm is profoundly relevant for educators and educational theorists who seek to locate their activity within a range of other human undertakings and within the context of the modern eclipse of public life. Hannah Arendt’s work points towards how we can fall short in our responsibility for, and love of, the world, and education can become complicit in the erosion of a vibrant and robust public realm. |
In the United States the current process of transition away from democracy to oligarchy, showing signs of fascism, and very likely heading towards totalitarianism is strikingly similar to what happened to the countries described in this book. Upon reading this, or even some of it, you can recognize things that are happening now that were used to achieve domination in the past. "The Origins of Totalitarianism begins with the rise of anti-Semitism in central and western Europe in the 1800s and continues with an examination of European colonial imperialism from 1884 to the outbreak of World War I. Arendt explores the institutions and operations of totalitarian movements, focusing on the two genuine forms of totalitarian government in our time—Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia—which she adroitly recognizes were two sides of the same coin, rather than opposing philosophies of Right and Left. From this vantage point, she discusses the evolution of classes into masses, the role of propaganda in dealing with the nontotalitarian world, the use of terror, and the nature of isolation and loneliness as preconditions for total domination." |
||||
Published: January 1, 2009 Hardcover, 240 pages Available at: Amazon.com - Barnes & Noble - Better World Books - AbeBooks.com - GoodReads.com Scibd-Complete Synopsis - YouTube Video with Chris Hedges 1hr/22min - Wikipedia - Quotes from Book |
"Hedges argues against the leviathan of elite, corporatist interests. His argument is sober and somber. Few escape the blanket of his critique, because we are all complicit, over generations, in erecting this all-powerful beast, which demands our obedience or ignorance -- or both. His argument is a description of how "we are a culture that has been denied, or has passively given up, the linguistic and intellectual tools to cope with complexity, to separate illusion from reality." The ordinary, not extraordinary, is what we must seek if we want a way out of the morass and moral turpitude we suffer. Implicitly, Hedges argues for a return to values based in real community as opposed to illusory communities created by transnational corporate interests, "reality" T.V. or the abstract global community." |
||||
 |
The Grand Chessboard This book maps out and accurately predicts world political, economic, and military events as they have been, are, and will be progressing... though ultimate outcomes are yet to be seen. It appears that the United States and NATO are trying to position themselves around Russia and China while maintaining a presence in the Middle East so as to create hegemony, prevent the aforementioned and related countries from uniting against the US economically and militarily with world domination as an ultimate goal. At the moment, Vladimir Putin keeps getting in the way so the US has “demonized” him and is working on ways to destabilize Russia and get him out of there. So far, Putin holds fast with China as its bosom buddy and collaborator in turning most of the world’s energy resources away from the US dollar... such a thing, if successful, would destroy the US economy. The race for economic and political primacy is on and relations between the superpowers are becoming strained with extreme or world war in the realm of possibility. This particular issue may not be described in this book, but in case you haven't noticed, such domination has already been implemented against the populations of the NATO countries themselves --ever since the Reagan Administration-- with the majority of the US population being duped into complacency towards their patriotic duty to support the Constitution and rid this country of the tyranny by the "Power Elite" that have been effectively destroying their democracy and stealing away their wealth along with the sovereignty of this country. |
||||
|
|||||
| Peer Revued Articles | Books - News & Opinion Articles - Video | ||||
Date: 20 Feb 2011 Journal of Business Ethics |
This short theoretical paper elucidates a plausible theory about the Global Financial Crisis and the role of senior financial corporate directors in that crisis. The paper presents a theory of the Global Financial Crisis which argues that psychopaths working in corporations and in financial corporations, in particular, have had a major part in causing the crisis. This paper is thus a very short theoretical paper but is one that may be very important to the future of capitalism because it discusses significant ways in which Corporate Psychopaths may have acted recently, to the detriment of many. Further research into this theory is called for. |
||||
April 2010 Behavioral Sciences & the Law Original-WebLink - It is possible to obtain a free PDF copy from Charles University in Prague, Czechoslovakia |
There is a very large literature on the important role of psychopathy in the criminal justice system. We know much less about corporate psychopathy and its implications, in large part because of the difficulty in obtaining the active cooperation of business organizations. This has left us with only a few small-sample studies, anecdotes, and speculation. In this study, we had a unique opportunity to examine psychopathy and its correlates in a sample of 203 corporate professionals selected by their companies to participate in management development programs. The correlates included demographic and status variables, as well as in-house 360° assessments and performance ratings. The prevalence of psychopathic traits—as measured by the Psychopathy Checklist—Revised (PCL-R) and a Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version (PCL: SV) “equivalent”—was higher than that found in community samples. The results of confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modeling (SEM) indicated that the underlying latent structure of psychopathy in our corporate sample was consistent with that model found in community and offender studies. Psychopathy was positively associated with in-house ratings of charisma/presentation style (creativity, good strategic thinking and communication skills) but negatively associated with ratings of responsibility/performance (being a team player, management skills, and overall accomplishments). Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
||||
| Modernity and the Monstrous: the Making of the Modern Psychopath Stephen Garton, Professor of History and Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Sydney Articles: Arts: The Journal of the Sydney University Arts Association - Vol 23 (2001) - Pages 64 - 81 PDF of this article is available at no cost |
Final Summary Paragraph: "The failure of contemporary theories of the psychopath to move us much beyond ideas over two centuries old suggests, to me at least, some limits to our capacity to comprehend, something that escapes the will to know. It also suggests that, despite modernity, the mysterious and unfathomable are still things that pervade our culture. What we can know is not so much the nature of these things, the what or why of the mysterious, but how it works in specific times and places, how unfathomable things work within culture and allow us to talk about ourselves in complex ways. We might struggle to know evil as a thing in itself, but we can make a serious effort to understand some of the ways it has shaped our culture and out deeper cultural fears and anxieties. Perhaps this is an insight into why I practise history-it is one of those things that can free us from the tyranny of the present." | ||||
Publication date: 2014/7/1 Original-WebLink - Download the Article PDF |
Sarah Francis Smith, Ashley L. Watts and Scott O. Lilienfeld broadly, research suggests there may also be a bright side to some 'dark triad'personality traits (Judge et al., 2009). Indeed, psychopathy, along with narcissism and Machiavellianism (the other two members of this triad), appear to predict both positive and negative social outcomes, including short-term occupational success (eg leadership: Judge & LePine, 2009). This academic research is mirrored by a burgeoning popular literature surrounding the concept of successful psychopaths. For decades, researchers and social commentators have alluded to the successful psychopath. Features associated with psychopathy such as interpersonal charm and charisma, fearlessness and a willingness to take calculated risks may predispose to success in a number of professional arenas, such as business, law enforcement, politics and contact sports. A burgeoning body of research is taking strides to examine potential adaptive manifestations of psychopathy. Nevertheless, the existence of successful adaptations of psychopathy remains hotly contested. Can researchers track down the elusive successful psychopath or will the concept go down in history as clinical lore? |
||||
January, 2012 |
"Successful psychopaths, defined as individuals in the general population who nevertheless possess some degree of psychopathic traits, are receiving increasing amounts of empirical attention. To date, little is known about such individuals, specifically with regard to how they respond to ethical dilemmas in business contexts. This study investigated this relationship, proposing a mediated model in which the positive relationship between psychopathy and unethical decision-making is explained through the process of moral disengagement, defined as a cognitive orientation that facilitates unethical choice. The results of the study supported this model, and implications for theory and practice are discussed." |
||||
Published: 2012 HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2 (2): 105–28 - 24 pages |
"The experience of bureaucratic incompetence, confusion, and its ability to cause otherwise intelligent people to behave outright foolishly, opens up a series of questions about the nature of power or, more specifically, structural violence. The unique qualities of violence as a form of action means that human relations ultimately founded on violence create lopsided structures of the imagination, where the responsibility to do the interpretive labor required to allow the powerful to operate oblivious to much of what is going on around them, falls on the powerless, who thus tend to empathize with the powerful far more than the powerful do with them. The bureaucratic imposition of simple categorical schemes on the world is a way of managing the fundamental stupidity of such situations. In the hands of social theorists, such simplified schemas can be sources of insight; when enforced through structures of coercion, they tend to have precisely the opposite effect." | ||||
Bibliography Entry: Genetic and Environmental Influences on Psychopathic Personality Traits: A Meta-Analytic Review. diva-portal.org. Örebro, Sweden: Örebro University, Criminology C. Retrieved February 2016, from: |
To understand the etiology of psychopathic personality traits and thus in the long run to be able to develop successful prevention, a first step is to find out what role genetic and environmental effects play. A meta-review of 15 twin studies (N=26, 981), was conducted to estimate the magnitude of genetic and environmental influences on psychopathic personality traits. The results show that additive genetic (heritable) factors and non-shared environmental factors each explain 50% of the variance in psychopathic personality traits, while shared environmental factors were of no importance. Measure, informant, age, and sex were investigated as potential moderators showing that informant had an impact on the findings. This meta-analysis provides a structured synthesis of the relative genetic and environmental contributions in psychopathic personality traits through various stages of development and across sex. | ||||
Bibliography Entry: |
The biological basis of psychopathy has not yet been fully elucidated. Few studies deal with structural neuroimaging in psychopaths. The aim of this article is to review these studies in order to contribute to our understanding of the biological basis of psychopathy. Data in the literature report a reduction in prefrontal gray matter volume, gray matter loss in the right superior temporal gyrus, amygdala volume loss, a decrease in posterior hippocampal volume, an exaggerated structural hippocampal asymmetry, and an increase in callosal white matter volume in psychopathic individuals. These findings suggest that psychopathy is associated with brain abnormalities in a prefrontal–temporo-limbic circuit —i.e. regions that are involved, among others, in emotional and learning processes. Additionally, data indicate that psychopathic individuals cannot be seen as a homogeneous group. | ||||
|
|||||
|
|||||
|
|||||
|
|
|||||
|
|||||
| Videos | Books - News & Opinion Articles - Peer Revued Articles | ||||
