lack of empathy, guilt, conscience, or remorse. shallow experiences of feelings or emotions. impulsivity, and a weak ability to defer gratification and control behavior.
Uninhibited by conscience, they initially assess the utility of those around them freely and equally. They then tend to narrow their choices to those they find unusually trusting or vulnerable. Sometimes, simply having normal personality traits qualifies an individual as vulnerable.
One is the psychopathic stare. Dr. Robert Hare, the Canadian psychologist who developed the commonly used Hare Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-Revised), described it as “intense eye contact and piercing eyes,” advising people not to make eye contact with psychopaths.
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.
Their lack of self control can also get partners in trouble. For example, a psychopath may be rude to their partner's colleagues or embarrass them at a party. Psychopaths also tend to show traits of sociopathy and narcissism, and both traits have been been correlated with infidelity.
The psychopath is aware their behavior hurt the other person—they simply don't care. In fact, you will almost never receive an apology from a psychopath, and if you do, it is only because they want something from you, or to save face in front of others.
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.
In psychopathy, anger is most likely to result from goal frustration rather than perceived threat (Blair, 2012), although it should be noted that considerably less empirical research has assessed anger responding in psychopathy compared to fear.
"When a psychopath interacts with you, if they get upset, they can keep their cool, but a sociopath will lose it," Lombardo told Health. "They're really hot-headed. If things don't go the way they want them to, they'll get angry and could be aggressive. They can't keep it together and have emotional outbursts."
In the current study, psychopathy was associated with overall difficulty identifying facial expressions of emotion, as well as with a specific deficit in identifying happy and sad facial expressions. In addition, psychopathy was associated with difficulty identifying less intense facial displays of emotion.
Compared to non-psychopaths, studies suggest that psychopaths make significantly less eye contact. This applies to both eye contact frequency and duration. Eye contact avoidance doesn't only occur while listening during in-person interaction.
They talk about life in terms of cause and effect.
Psychopaths--especially those who commit crimes--talk about their behavior in terms of cause and effect. For example, one might say, "I had to teach him a lesson." Rather than show remorse, a psychopath is likely to justify his actions.
“You misunderstood me.”
So if you hear phrases such as “You misunderstood me”, “You mush have heard me wrong” or “I never said that. You misheard me” then this could be an indicator that the person is using tactics to make you question yourself which could indicate psychopathic behaviour.
Psychopathy is a condition characterized by the absence of empathy and the blunting of other affective states. Callousness, detachment, and a lack of empathy enable psychopaths to be highly manipulative.
In general, the research suggests that psychopathy is higher among male offenders (accounting for perhaps 15-25% of prisoners) than female offenders (where it is found in 10-12%). But it is a field that is still understudied in the general population, while even less research is conducted on women.
The dilated pupils make the eyes seem black. They indicate that the person's brain perceives a threat and is preparing to respond with aggression. You don't want to be the object of possible aggression.
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.
Their lack of empathy and ability to express deep emotions may lead, if not to a violent end, then to dissolution based on increasingly destructive patterns of interaction with each other.
Theory and empirical research maintain that psychopathy may be linked to a history of trauma.
For decades, researchers studying psychopathy have characterized the disorder as a profound inability to process emotions such as empathy, remorse, or regret. A recent study, though, suggests that psychopaths are not incapable of feeling emotions like regret and disappointment.