The results from our studies suggest that people with high levels of psychopathic tendencies are generally unhappy. They show low levels of positive emotions and life satisfaction, and high levels of negative emotions and depression.
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.
The lower on the scale a psychopath is, the more likely they are to develop some sort of love for people such as family members. Psychopaths are much less likely to develop deep bonds with others, however. Interestingly, psychopaths may still want to be loved even if they are almost incapable of truly loving another.
As with anyone else, psychopaths have a deep wish to be loved and cared for. This desire remains frequently unfulfilled, however, because it is obviously not easy for another person to get close to someone with such repellent personality characteristics.
Scientists have linked taking pleasure in the suffering of others - a feeling known as schadenfreude - to several 'dark' psychological traits. These include sadism, narcissism and psychopathy - an inability to empathise with your peers.
Unlike sadists, psychopaths don't harm the harmless simply because they get pleasure from it (though they may). Psychopaths want things. If harming others helps them get what they want, so be it. They can act this way because they are less likely to feel pity or remorse or fear.
Psychopaths think they're superior
Psychopaths consider themselves better than the people around them, which might help account for why they aren't concerned by the negative impacts of their actions.
Those with histrionic, narcissistic, obsessive-compulsive, schizotypal, passive-aggressive, self-defeating, antisocial, paranoid, borderline, avoidant, dependent, and sadistic personality traits also were attracted to psychopaths.
Lack of Empathy
Psychopaths struggle to understand how someone else might feel afraid, sad, or anxious. It just doesn't make sense to them as they're not able to read people. A psychopath is completely indifferent to people who are suffering—even when it's a close friend or family member.
People with psychopathic traits typically get much greater pleasure from psychoactive substances than other people. One brain imaging study found that people who scored high on the psychopathy scale had a massive dopamine response to amphetamines–almost four times that of other participants.
According to Perpetua Neo, a psychologist and therapist who specializes in people with DTP traits, the answer is no. "Narcissists, psychopaths, and sociopaths do not have a sense of empathy," she told Business Insider. "They do not and will not develop a sense of empathy, so they can never really love anyone."
Individuals who fit the criteria of psychopathy—whether or not they also engage in criminal behavior—exhibit behaviors associated with an avoidant attachment style, being unable to form close intimate relationships.
If you think you might be dating a psychopath, here's some bad news: They may not leave you alone when you break up. According to a new study in Personality and Individual Differences, psychopaths and narcissists are out to benefit from their relationships long after they're over.
The core personality features associated with psychopathy are callous and unemotional personality traits, which include a lack of empathy or remorse, weak social bonds, an uncaring nature, and shallow emotional responding (Cooke et al., 2005; Frick and White, 2008; Viding and McCrory, 2012).
For decades, researchers studying psychopathy have characterized the disorder as a profound inability to process emotions such as empathy, remorse, or regret.
To sum up, given the above reviewed literature, we may conclude that individuals with psychopathic traits are found to have a deficit in dispositional empathy, particularly related to the processing of distress and negative arousal cues (i.e., affective empathy and affective ToM).
Karin Roelofs, at the Donders Institute at Radboud University in the Netherlands, confirmed that the brains of psychopaths showed poor connectivity between the amygdala — the brain region key for processing emotions, especially fear — and the more “judging,” wiser prefrontal cortex.
Although sociopathy and psychopathy cannot be diagnosed until someone is 18, one of the hallmarks of both conditions is that they usually begin in childhood or early adolescence. Usually, the symptoms appear before the age of 15, and sometimes they are present early in childhood.
Psychopaths are considered to have a severe form of antisocial personality disorder.
Results showed that persons high in psychopathy were more likely to perceive fantasizing about sexual relations with other people and expressing emotions towards a person other than the partner as infidelity.
That means they may want to have your friends, resources and even your financial status back as their own. 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.
ISTP – A lot of the things an ISTP enjoys don't actively involve people, and they may even find it that people get in the way of their goals. As such, their antisocial tendencies make them likely candidates have psychopathic tendencies.
Individuals higher in psychopathy are more likely to aspire to power (but not achievement), financial success, and acquiring material possessions (Glenn et al. 2017) , demonstrating how motivations of psychopathic individuals may match, albeit deceptively and superficially, these preferences.
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.