The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist's Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain

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Delusions and hallucinations are less common among people with psychopathy, making it all the more important to differentiate between the two. Psychopaths know full well the consequences of their behavior, yet they don't care. The Role of Nature vs Nurture in the Development of Psychopathy The book explains why psychopaths are still around the relentless perseverance of their dark, immutable gene streams. Why the evolutionary share price in this niche personality consortium remained stable and buoyant over time. It’s an excellent book for a gift for anybody who’s a psych major as well. Female Serial Killers – How and Why Women Become Monsters by Peter Vronsky: This book examines the lives and crimes of various female serial killers throughout history, their motivations, and the social context surrounding their actions. Humanity’s success as a species has developed in leaps and bounds during our relatively short time on Earth. Many people have hypothesized what might be the cause of these advancements: is it our strength, intellect, curiosity, or something else completely? Authors — and husband-and-wife duo — Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods believe in the latter, making the case in this book that humanity’s progression is actually because of our “friendliness”. Books featuring psychopaths in romantic relationships are in the realm of fiction, categorized as dark romance or psychological thrillers. These books may contain intense and potentially disturbing content. So approach them with caution. Here are some titles that involve psychopaths in romantic relationships:

Snakes in Suits, Revised Edition: Understanding and Surviving the Psychopaths in Your Office” by Paul Babiak and Robert D. Hare. However, these terms are not interchangeable and refer to different subtypes within this broader category. Dr. Kevin Dutton explores criminal and functioning psychopaths in high-stakes professions in a compelling book. Psychopathy and success are compared positively throughout the book, showing the delicate line between craziness and success. One in 25 people on Earth can do anything they want and never feel bad about it. They’re called sociopaths. That means they have no conscience at all. According to the author, seven potential characteristics may be a sociopath. If you are in the faith community, you must read this book and work with people living and breathing as humans. The goal of Rationality is to make you more rational and help you understand why there is so much irrationality in the world. You may think that sounds pretty lofty, but try reading author and cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker’s analysis before making concrete judgements!

As Martha Stout shows in her book, The Sociopath Next Door, sociopaths aren't just cold-blooded killers. They have a lot of other problems, too. In fact, about 4% of the population, or one in 25 people, are sociopaths who have no conscience and can't feel shame or guilt for their actions. Stout talks about the characteristics of a sociopath and gives listeners advice on how to recognize and understand their behavior in others. Shelly Frasier's confident, direct voice makes this eye-opening and important audiobook a pleasure to listen to. Without Conscience Some famous killers are psychopaths. If you Google, you’ll find many psychopathic killers and people who have repeatedly killed, often without conscience, and they cannot see the social wrong of their actions. The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success" by Kevin Dutton: Expanding the discussion of psychopathy into the corporate world, Dr. Paul Babiak and Dr. Robert D. Hare explore the operations of psychopaths in organizational settings. Through case studies and scientific research, they offer strategies to recognize and safeguard against psychopathic individuals, revealing how to spot their destructive behavior and prevent them from causing chaos in modern corporate organizations​. “The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist’s Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain” by James Fallon. On the one hand, proponents of the nature vs. nurture debate believe that psychopathy has a firm biological basis. They argue that psychopathic traits may develop in certain persons due to innate genetic predispositions.

Labeling someone as a “psychopath” without a proper clinical assessment can be misleading and stigmatizing. However, the term describes individuals with antisocial personality traits. Here are a few examples of psychopaths due to their actions and criminal behavior: Yet the reality of this condition is far more nuanced than these stereotypes hold. While it is true that people with the condition display a range of disconcerting tendencies—including low empathy and remorse, grandiosity, impulsivity, and sometimes aggressive or violent behavior—new findings show not only that people with psychopathy have varying degrees and types of this condition but that the condition and its precursors can be treated. Aileen Wuornos: An American serial killer who murdered seven men in Florida between 1989 and 1990 by shooting them at point-blank range. Wuornos claimed that her victims had either raped or attempted to rape her while working as a prostitute and that all homicides were committed in self-defense. While more research is needed on this group, it appears to be an important area for further study, added James Blair, PhD, a prominent researcher of psychopathy and director of the Center for Neurobehavioral Research at Boys Town in Nebraska. Blair says he was initially unconvinced that there could be such a group but that a brain-imaging study he and colleagues conducted convinced him otherwise ( Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, Vol. 16, No. 10, 2021).

Research and Practice

A range of studies show that brain and neurological abnormalities may help to explain some of these symptoms. Among the findings are that the amygdala—an important emotion-processing structure in the brain—is smaller in people with psychopathy than it is in typically developing individuals and that it has deformities in various regions. Those with psychopathy or its precursors also show reduced activity in the amygdala and related regions of the brain and greater neural responsiveness in regions associated with reward-processing and cognitive control when performing tasks involving moral-processing, decision-making, and reward, suggesting that the neural processes that support moral evaluations in people with psychopathy somehow differ from those of typically developing individuals. Their research shows that both groups process information in problematic ways, but that faulty processing is different for each group. For people with ASPD, information-processing difficulties emanate from problems in executive functioning—which involves inhibition, planning, abstract reasoning, and working memory—especially when these individuals are responding to situations that involve rewards or emotional information. “So, they might commit antisocial acts because they have difficulty planning ahead—they have difficulty stopping once they get going with something,” Baskin-Sommers explained. Recent studies with twins and adopted children indicate that there may be a strong genetic component to the condition as well. University College London (UCL) psychologist Essi Viding, PhD, and colleagues have found that disruptive behavior plus CU traits in children are moderately to highly heritable. But these studies also capture the important potential effects of the environment on antisocial behavior, according to a review article by Viding and E. J. McCrory, PhD, also of UCL, in Psychological Medicine (Vol. 48, No. 4, 2018). The Female of the Species by Mindy McGinnis: A young adult novel that tells the story of a teenager with a dark past and a violent nature. Books about Sociopaths