While psychopaths show a specific lack in emotions, such as anxiety, fear and sadness, they can feel other emotions, such as happiness, joy, surprise and disgust, in a similar way as most of us would.
Primary psychopaths tend to show low trait anxiety and more closely match the stereotype of the prototypical psychopath. Their symptoms are thought to be inherent and are not an indirect consequence of some other deficit (Lykken, 1957). In contrast, secondary psychopaths tend to show high levels of trait anxiety.
Consistent with earlier theorists (Cleckley, 1941/1982) and empirical data (Schmitt & Newman, 1999), we observed that psychopathic attributes are unrelated to negative trait affect. Instead, we observed a weak, but significant negative, relationship between psychopathy and social anxiety.
Increased levels of primary psychopathy may actually mitigate the association between stressful life events and psychopathology, as primary psychopathy is characterized by self-reported stress tolerance and lower stress reactivity (Benning et al., 2005b, 2003; Salekin et al., 2014).
Psychopaths are considered to have a severe form of antisocial personality disorder.
Key traits
Some of the red flags that someone is a psychopath include a lack of empathy, a charming personality to fool others, disorganisation, a tendency to blame others, a lack of fear, and being cold-hearted. “Making a clinical diagnosis of psychopathy is rather hard, actually,” Erikson said.
Individuals with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPDs) become overwhelmed and incapacitated by the intensity of their emotions, whether it is joy and elation or depression, anxiety, and rage. They are unable to manage these intense emotions.
From a theoretical perspective, psychopathy is traditionally associated with a lack of anxiety or worry (Cleckley, 1941/1988).
Psychopaths are not all “psycho”.
Their lack of emotions, such as anxiety and fear, helps them to stay calm in frightening situations. Experiments have shown that they have a reduced startle response.
Psychopaths are calm and collected under pressure, and have something called a "resilience to chaos." This means they thrive in situations that others would find highly stressful.
Psychopathy is an antisocial personality disorder that's typically characterized by a lack of fear, in addition to callousness, impulsive behavior, and deceitfulness.
The individuals with psychopathy in their interpersonal relationships present grandiose, deceptive, dominant, manipulative, superficial, unable to form strong emotional bonds with others, affectively shallow, irresponsible, impulsive, tend to ignore social conventions, lacking in empathy, guilt and/or remorse ...
A unique positive relationship was found between pain tolerance and the meanness facet of psychopathy, which also predicted reduced fear of painful algometer stimulation. Other psychopathy facets (boldness, disinhibition) showed negative relations with fear of pain stimulation during testing and at follow-up.
For decades, researchers studying psychopathy have characterized the disorder as a profound inability to process emotions such as empathy, remorse, or regret.
One factor that might drive the variability found in psychopathy is the stress response. Psychopathy is associated with little emotionality, fearlessness, and a low response to stress.
A psychopath has an inflated view of themselves. They see themselves as important and entitled. Psychopaths often feel justified to live according to their own rules, and they think that the laws don't apply to them.
There are some areas where psychopaths may experience normal emotions and grief is one such area. In response to death of a person with whom there is a bond, some psychopaths can experience sadness and this may even bring about feelings of guilt which are otherwise impossible to feel. Crying may be a part of this.
That said, psychopaths do appreciate their relationships in their own way. They do suffer pain, feel loneliness, have desires and feel sadness if they do not receive affection.
Psychopaths tend to speak slowly and quietly
They also use fewer emotional words, keeping a relatively neutral tone.
Psychopathy describes a set of personality traits and behaviors associated with a lack of emotional sensitivity and empathy, impulsiveness, superficial charm and insensitivity to punishing consequences.
The study showed that psychopaths have reduced connections between the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), the part of the brain responsible for sentiments such as empathy and guilt, and the amygdala, which mediates fear and anxiety.
Borderline personality disorder is one of the most painful mental illnesses since individuals struggling with this disorder are constantly trying to cope with volatile and overwhelming emotions.
Borderline personality disorder (BPD) has long been believed to be a disorder that produces the most intense emotional pain and distress in those who have this condition. Studies have shown that borderline patients experience chronic and significant emotional suffering and mental agony.