Psycho… it’s not just a movie!

No one is born a psychopath or with any other psychological disorder, but some children are born at high risk for developing psychopathy due to inherited or genetic factors. Only 1% of the population are aected by psychopathy, the personality disorder characterised by anti-social behaviour and extreme lack of empathy or remorse.

Key behaviours indicate psychopathy – people who score highly for psychopathy nd diculty seeing the bigger picture or the ner details. For instance, in a social situation, in a business meeting or social gathering, psychopaths quickly lose interest in details – that’s if they’ve noticed them in the rst place! People who can stand higher levels of pain are more likely to be psychopathic. 

Psychopaths also have diculty regulating their focus of attention. Over two experiments, the researchers recruited 236 participants of between 18 and 40 years of age residing in the UK, who participated in eye-movement experiments. via computer. 

Several studies reveal that the biggest psychopaths tend not to move their heads when having conversations. It’s thought this is to hide clues about their personality, but psychopaths have a severe form of antisocial personality which ranges from occasional bad behaviour to repeatedly breaking the law and committing serious crimes. 

Environmental inuences can increase or reduce the odds of developing psychopathy in people who are at risk due to inherited factors for example, a child’s chances of becoming a psychopath may be reduced if they grow up away from a psychopathic parent. 

At the Australian National University in Canberra, psychologists Stephanie C. Goodhew and Mark Edwards identied multiple personality traits, including higher levels of impulsivity, irresponsibility, egocentricity (being chiey occupied with one’s own interests), callousness (feeling no feeling or emotion, or lack of sympathy for others), untruthfulness, and antisocial behaviour.

Their psychopathic traits were measured using a questionnaire of 26 statements, for example – for anti-sociality – ‘I have been in a lot of shouting matches with other people’. 

Researchers also assessed their ‘attentional breadth’ which showed how good they are at mentally processing ‘global’ and ‘local’ information, where global information is the bigger picture and local information is the ner details. Participants were presented with images consisting of a large letter made up of multiple smaller letters, such as an image of a large T shape made up of lots of much smaller E shapes. As the image was presented, the participants had to say what letter they noticed rst by pressing the corresponding key on a computer keyboard. Choosing the large letter suggested they had a ‘broad’ attentional breadth. Choosing a small letter suggested they had a ‘narrow’ attentional breadth, meaning they were prone to focusing on the small details. 

The researchers found denite evidence that one of the psychopathic traits – people who scored higher for anti-sociality also tended to quickly increase their eld of vision to see the bigger picture. 

The complete study is published in the journal Personality and Individual Dierences.