The Psychopathic Personality in a Social Situation

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behavioral action and embarrassment serves to express a lack of intent to commit the inappropriate behavior which had gained social disapproval. Having said that, we can assume that the consequential conditions for individuals with acquired sociopathy are just as severe as those with developmental psychopathy, for without the ability to recognize anger and/or embarrassment, the individual will experience a failure to modulate behavior to fit the social context.

In either case of psychopathy, it would appear that recent studies suggest the impairment of psychopaths to be extensive enough to hinder proper social functioning in contexts where behavior modulation becomes essential. Without the ability to recognize and appropriately respond to elicitors of pro-social tendencies, the psychopath will become a source of much frustration (as is the case with individuals suffering the adverse consequences of acquired sociopathy) or distress (developmental psychopaths who do not learn to behave in ways that do not cause distress) in others within a social context that demands the processing of crucial valence information.

VERBAL AND NON-VERBAL COMMUNICATORY TECHNIQUES OF PSYCHOPATHS

As briefly mentioned earlier, the ability to deceive and manipulate the unsuspecting while maintaining an air of sincerity is a key feature of psychopathy. Whether psychopathy is linked to a greater capacity for lying is not relevant but for mere clarification, the two concepts are, thus far, unrelated. It is not sufficient to assume that being a psychopath directly translates to the individual’s possession of superior lying capabilities. There appear to be other causes underlying successful deception and manipulation within the interpersonal skills of the psychopath. Nonverbal behaviors of psychopaths are good examples. The psychopath’s ability to con and manipulate while seeming utterly sincere and genuine may be reinforced by certain effective nonverbal behaviors. Studies that aimed to shed light on the relationship between psychopathy and nonverbal behaviors suggested that “psychopathic individuals likely use an array of nonverbal strategies to dominate interpersonal interactions in an effort to deceive others” (Klaver, Lee, & Hart, 2007). For instance, psychopaths tended to engage in prolonged eye-contact with interviewers within studies, possibly to convince the interviewer of truthfulness. Psychopaths also displayed an increased use of hand gestures while speaking. One plausible reason for this higher rate of illustrator use in psychopathic individuals is speculated to be an attempt on the psychopath’s part to distract the listener from the content of the speech so that the listener becomes too absorbed by the psychopath’s exaggerated hand movements to detect any inconsistencies within the content. A study conducted by Klaver, Lee, and Hart (2007) examined nonverbal indicators of deception in an incarcerated sample consisting of 45 male offenders, more than half of which were serving sentences for violent crimes. Their discovery of an increased rate of illustrator use in psychopathic offenders supported previous empirical findings distinctively related to the interpersonal dimension of psychopathy. Interestingly, because “a decrease in illustrator use can result…from careful contemplation of speech content” (Klaver, Lee, & Hart, 2007), one would expect less hand gestures and less spoken words when an individual is in the middle of telling a false story, for example. This was found to be true for non-psychopathic offenders. On the other hand, psychopathic offenders presented with increased illustrator use and also talked for a longer period of time, using more words spoken at a faster rate while lying. The latter finding is consistent with the verbosity generally observed in psychopathic individuals. To return to the matter of illustrators, Klaver, Lee and Hart suggest that this represents nothing short of a psychopath’s efforts to gain complete control of an interpersonal situation by commanding attention through augmentation of speech. As a side note to be mentioned later, another nonverbal behavior observed among psychopathic individuals was the tendency to lean forward while speaking in a soft voice to the interviewer.

To address the verbal communicatory techniques of psychopaths when manipulating others, we will take into consideration a study of the acoustic distinctions in the speech of 20 male offenders (10 psychopaths and 10 non-psychopaths) using a computer program which measures variations in amplitude and prosody. This study, conducted by Louth, Williamson, Alpert, Pouget, and Hare (1998), confirmed that the captivating charm of psychopaths was not solely achieved through nonverbal behaviors and that there exists an important distinction in the voice quality of the male psychopath compared to non-psychopathic male offenders. The results showed that psychopaths tended to speak more softly and quietly than controls. This soft voice may serve to draw the listener closer and therefore allow the psychopath to invade interpersonal space and lock in the aforementioned prolonged eye-contact to convince the listener of his trustworthiness. Another significant finding is the psychopath’s lack of voice emphasis on words which possess positive or negative affective connotations. In other words, psychopaths have very little or no emotional investment in the words that they use. This failure to appreciate the affective significance and extra semantic aspects of words allows the psychopath to freely express himself in a cavalier manner, something which may appeal to listeners as they may view the psychopath as someone who is confident and captivating in terms of voice quality and manner of speech.

All of these findings suggest that psychopathy does indeed involve some sort of subtle deficit in the emotional processing of words. Although one might expect this inability to process the emotional significance of words to lead the psychopath to appear cold and unemotional, the psychopathic individual is actually more typically seen as a confident, articulate and sincere individual, someone who seems exceedingly competent as far as interpersonal situations are concerned.

CONCLUSION

We have pinpointed two major processing failures of psychopaths in this discussion. Although most research on the nature of human interaction would suggest that such failures to process either the significance of particular facial cues relevant to the social context or the affective significance of words traded back and forth in an interpersonal interaction would be more than enough to impair the psychopath and leave him utterly incompetent, the psychopath still manages to rise above this hindrance in his abilities.