Let Your Conscience Be Your Guide

I like Saffron as much as the next person,
but she fits a psychopath.

Pinnochio was given a cricket as a conscience to become a real human boy, and is a good example of what becomes without a conscience.  Sociopaths and Psychopaths are marked by a lack of empathy for others or conscience for their own misdeeds.  These people can lie without compunction because they have no guilt associated with the process.  

"Interpersonally, psychopaths are manipulative, grandiose, egocentric, deceitful, and forceful.  Affectively, they are shallow and non-empathetic; they do not experience empathy, guilt, or remorse.  Behaviorally, they are impulsive, irresponsible, and sensation seeking."

Ironically, without a conscience, psychopaths, sociopaths, and other similarly characterized disorders are not hindered by the normal social worries that accompany social interactions.

This lack of concern comes across as confidence and can make them appear very charismatic.  They often become popular in social circles.  This lack of reaction to lying and manipulating others makes them incredibly persuasive, and more believable than someone less confident telling the truth.

Psychopaths

These days, psychopathy is defined in psychiatry as a personality disorder characterized by lack of empathy or conscience, poor impulse control and manipulative behaviors. Though in widespread use as a psychiatric term, psychopathy has no true equivalent in either DSM-IV-TR's, where it is most strongly correlated with antisocial personality disorder and the ICD-10 dissocial disorder. It is hoped that the projected DSM V will begin to address this anomaly.

Psychopathy is a three-faceted (in the current most accepted analyses) personality disorder involving interpersonal, affective, and behavioral dimensions:

Interpersonally, psychopaths are manipulative, grandiose, egocentric, deceitful, and forceful.

Affectively, they are shallow and non-empathetic; they do not experience empathy, guilt, or remorse.

Behaviorally, they are impulsive, irresponsible, and sensation seeking.

According to Wikipedia ...

Psychopathy (/saɪˈkɒpəθi/[1][2] from the Ancient Greek ψυχή "psyche", -soul, mind and πάθος, "pathos" -suffering, disease, condition[3][4]) is a personality disorder characterized by a pervasive pattern of disregard for the rights of others and the rules of society. Psychopaths have a lack of empathy and remorse, and have very shallow emotions. They are generally regarded as callous, selfish, dishonest, arrogant, aggressive, impulsive, irresponsible, and hedonistic. Despite this, psychopaths are often superficially charming with an intelligence higher than the average individual.

According to some, there is little evidence of a cure or effective treatment for psychopathy; no medications can instill empathy, and psychopaths who undergo traditional talk therapy might become more adept at manipulating others and more likely to commit crime.[8] Others suggest that psychopaths may benefit as much as others from therapy. According to Hare, psychopathy stems from as yet unconfirmed genetic neurological predispositions and as yet unconfirmed social factors in upbringing.[9] A review published in 2008 indicated multiple causes, and variation in causes between individuals.

Shallowness of emotions

Psychopaths do not feel emotions as deeply as an average person. Although they are not totally unemotional, their emotions are so shallow that some clinicians describe them as "proto-emotions: primitive responses to immediate needs."[68] They live in present to the extreme, and their feelings are immediate, immature and unsophisticated. They are incapable of enduring, real love, and cannot form caring, lasting intimate bonds with others. They feel no fear, and thus take reckless risks and commit crimes with little heed to the consequences. They feel no shame or anguish, thus reprimands and punishments have no effect on their behavior. Their behavior is driven by shallower impulses, such as sexual arousal, frustration, boredom, greed, and irritability.[69]

Psychopaths are fearless. When exposed to grave danger, they do not experience the normal range of physical and emotional reactions that a normal person would, such as trembling, involuntary urination, or a pounding heart.[70] They never panic. They frequently engage in criminal acts because they're not afraid of getting caught. They frequently take foolish risks because they are not afraid of getting hurt. This is not to say they are oblivious to the potential consequences of their actions. Rather, the thought of pain and punishment does not provoke an emotional reaction in them and thus has a weak restraining effect.[71] Their lack of fear also contributes to their often extraordinary talent for lying: people believe the psychopath because he is so unflappable in the face of scrutiny.

Prison does not make any deep impression on the psychopath and thus does little to discourage future criminality (there are anecdotes of psychopaths reacting nonchalantly to being sentenced to life in prison.[72]). Public exposure as a crook does not leave them feeling devastated or ashamed. In short, no sort of setback can break their morale or alter their character.

Because their own emotional life is so shallow, psychopaths often have difficulty predicting the emotional reactions of others and are often clumsy with emotional language. Sometimes, they may fail to appreciate the emotional meaning of certain words and use them in odd or inappropriate fashion. For instance, one person thought to be a psychopath regularly beat his wife, eventually battering her to death. He was afterwards quoted as saying: "I loved her so deeply. I miss her so much. What happened was a tragedy. I lost my best lover and my best friend. [...] Why doesn't anybody understand what I've been going through?"[73] One might expect that a man who genuinely loved his wife would not have battered her to death and would feel terrible anguish if he did. This might suggest that his description of his own emotions was inaccurate or deceptive. Psychopaths can be very skilled at figuring out and manipulating people's emotions, but only so long as they can read their reactions for cues. Hare cites the example of a psychopath who once described dispassionately his murders to an interviewer. Eventually, the interviewer could no longer maintain her poker face and expressed her disgust. The psychopath immediately shifted gears and feigned remorse and horror. Because of his sparse emotional life, he did not realize that his description should horrify his listener. It took the interviewer's loss of composure to make him realize this.[74]

Sweeping generalizations about emotions in psychopathy are contradicted by complexity and individual differences found in research. Lack of fear and anxiety has been the most consistent claim, but while studies show some reduced responsiveness in specific contexts, for example to forewarned aversive stimuli or film imagery, most studies do not report significant differences in resting physiological activity or in reactions such as the startle response. It is also possible that some emotions are suppressed so as not to show weakness or vulnerability. Anger, sadness or happiness may be present though denied, concealed or linked to motivational states of impulsivity or antisocial behaviors. Guilt, shame and interpersonal affection are complex states that relate to socialization and morals as well as particular emotional experiences.[75]

Lying and manipulation

Psychopaths can be pathological liars. Their relationships with other people are practically defined by manipulation and exploitation. The psychopath sees no reason why he should be honest or caring towards other people. They typically become very good at lying, sometimes fooling experienced interrogators. Because they are incapable of shame or fear, their body language and tone of voice never display the typical signs that often betray liars. They are completely unafraid of being caught in a lie. When they are confronted, they will, without pause, simply rework their story to fit the facts and appear consistent. This utterly confident presentation is what often sways people's doubts. Another reason they are great manipulators is because they practice harder. They are aggressive and domineering, often relishing the game of control for its own sake if not the rewards they can finagle. They have fewer social inhibitions, and are usually more confident. They are not afraid of causing offense, being rejected, or being put down. When these things do happen, they tend to dismiss them and are not discouraged from trying again.

Although psychopaths are mentally very different from normal people, through their skill at deception they often succeed in convincing others that they are normal, caring, and law-abiding. A psychopath will readily lie about his past to cover up past errors and exaggerate his skills and virtues, all to create the impression that he is in fact the most wonderful kind of person imaginable. Although the psychopath possesses shallow emotions, he will often claim to possess the normal range of human emotions. They tend to make good first impressions and can appear quite likable. There is thus no easy way to detect psychopaths.

Psychopaths are not perfect liars. The speech of psychopaths is often riddled with wild inconsistencies and contradictions. While this is often due to their usually improvisational method and poor emotional understanding, there is also a cognitive deficit at play. Robert Hare argues that psychopaths have difficulty integrating the components of their thought processes and thus fail to notice the absurdities in their speech. They simply toss ideas at their listener without putting much thought into coherence. Cleckley called this phenomenon "semantic aphasia".[76] For instance, one psychopath told Hare: "I had to steal sometimes to get out of town, yeah, but I'm not a fucking criminal."[77] Another psychopath was once asked if she ever committed a violent crime, and responded: "No, but once I had to kill someone."

Impulsivity, irresponsibility, low tolerance for boredom

Psychopaths can be impulsive and have little self-control. They often act on their immediate desires with little planning or thought for the consequences. Their crimes tend to be spur-of-the-moment affairs. Psychopaths do not think hard about the future and they change their plans frequently. They often abandon relationships and quit jobs on a whim. Their lifestyles often reveal a pattern of bouncing from one job to another, one city to another, and in and out of prison.

Psychopaths care nothing for rules and obligations. At work, they regularly shirk duties and break promises, leading to erratic performance records. They spend their money recklessly and often have terrible credit histories. They neglect their children.

Psychopaths have an excessive need for stimulation. They will often abuse drugs or perform reckless acts, including criminal ones, simply for the thrill. At work, they regularly neglect tasks that they find boring.

Parasitic lifestyle

Due to their frequent lack of qualifications, concern only for their own welfare, irresponsibility, and disinterest in boring work, it is unlikely that psychopaths will be productive family members or workers. They tend to live parasitically, draining resources but contributing little.[79] They have no qualms about draining the money of friends and family to satisfy their desires or bail them out of trouble. Some psychopaths specifically adopt a lifestyle of seducing men or women in order to obtain money and sex from them for as long as they can.

Lack of remorse

Psychopaths show a profound inability to feel remorse. Whatever the crime, whoever the victim, a psychopath simply does not accept responsibility for the consequences of his actions. They know the difference between right and wrong but do not care. In some cases, psychopaths are completely forthright about their attitude: they acknowledge the pain they cause but are not sorry. In other cases they may rationalize what happened, perhaps by minimizing the seriousness of the incident, or blaming the victim in some way. They may deny any harm was done.

Though psychopaths do not feel remorse, they may feign contrition in order to elicit leniency and forgiveness.

Grandiosity

Psychopaths see themselves as superior beings, with an exaggerated sense of entitlement. They often appear arrogant, opinionated, domineering, and cocky. They believe they are more talented than anyone else and that they can become anything they want to be. They see themselves as smarter than everyone else and have little regard for the opinions of others. It is not uncommon for psychopaths who have defrauded people to describe them as weak, inferior beings who deserved to be taken advantage of.[80] They resent authority and being in a position of inferiority.[81] With their exaggerated sense of entitlement, psychopaths often expect large rewards for mediocre efforts.[82] They will apply for important jobs despite lacking qualifications, demand authority and privileges above their rank, and show no gratitude for favors granted them. They are shameless and relentless self-promoters, exaggerating or fabricating their talents and dismissing their failings. In this respect, they resemble narcissists, and indeed the two disorders are sometimes hard to distinguish.

Most psychopaths tend to be underachievers due to their lack of interest in education and lack of self-discipline. However, they are unashamed and dismissive of the legal, financial, career, or personal problems in their lives. They blame everyone and everything but themselves for their failures - bad luck, an unfair system, unsupportive colleagues, etc. - or they might dismiss their old projects as wastes of time that they were right to abandon. They may even portray their bad qualities as virtues: many psychopaths brag about their criminal versatility, the number of crimes they got away with, and their talent for deception.

Unrealistic long-term goals

Closely related to the psychopath's grandiosity is his lack of realistic planning. They often have grandiose, self-centered goals, and they believe that they can become anything they want to be. However, they often fail to appreciate the talent, dedication, and effort it would take to achieve such goals. Since they are focused on the present, they have no capability to self-sacrifice to achieve their goals, give up quickly and easily, lack patience and instead focus on instant gratification.[77]

High recidivism

It is impossible to correct a psychopath's behavior through punishment. Psychopaths reoffend at a much higher rate than non-psychopathic offenders, especially when it comes to violent crime. As much as 80% of psychopathic inmates will be convicted of something within five years of their release, compared to less than half of other inmates.[83][84] Psychopaths frequently violate parole conditions, winding up back in jail soon after release.

There is currently no reliable means by which to reform a psychopath. In the past, special therapies for psychopathic inmates were designed to teach them sensitivity, but these backfired and instead made them even more likely to reoffend.[85] It is believed that the programs instead made them more adept manipulators and thus opened up more opportunities for them to exploit people.

Juvenile delinquency

Background checks on psychopaths typically reveal that their antisocial behavior began in childhood. Researchers noticed common misbehaviors including:

• frequent unauthorized absences from school and home
• defiance of parents, teachers, and rules
• petty theft from other children and parents
• non-responsiveness to reprimands and punishment
• animal abuse
• early promiscuity
• vandalism and arson
• persistent bullying and fighting

What has struck researchers is that many psychopaths come from apparently stable backgrounds. Popular wisdom holds that antisocial tendencies are the result of abusive and neglectful parenting, yet some psychopaths had caring parents who did their best to socialize their child properly.[86]

"There are some individuals who come from fantastic home backgrounds—dedicated parents, all the advantages in the world—and yet they grew up to become psychopathic violent monsters later in life, and you ask the question: 'how the heck did they get there?'"—Adrian Raine

Robert Hare argues that parents cannot be held to fault for their offspring becoming psychopaths, for no amount of good parenting can fix the basic condition, which has genetic causes.[87] Though upbringing cannot cure psychopathy, it can alter its expression. Hare found that psychopaths from unstable families were more likely to be violent.

Current medical practice forbids diagnosing children as psychopaths.[86] Nonetheless, Robert Hare has developed checklists that can identify psychopathic tendencies in juveniles. The Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version (PCL:YV) is used for clinical research,[89] while the Antisocial Process Screening Device (APSD) is used to identify problem children for therapeutic intervention.[90]

Moral judgment

Psychopaths have been considered notoriously amoral – an absence of, indifference towards, or disregard for moral beliefs. There is little firm data on patterns of moral judgment, however. Studies of developmental level (sophistication) of moral reasoning found all possible results – lower, higher or the same as non-psychopaths. Studies that compared judgments of personal moral transgressions versus judgments of breaking conventional rules or laws, found that psychopaths rated them as equally severe, whereas non-psychopaths rated the rule-breaking as less severe. A study comparing judgments of whether personal or impersonal harms would be endorsed in order to achieve the rationally maximum (utilitarian) amount of welfare, found no significant differences between psychopaths and non-psychopaths. However, a further study using the same tests found that psychopaths (prisoners scoring high on the psychopathy checklist) were more likely to endorse impersonal harms or rule violations than non-psychopaths. Psychopaths who scored low in anxiety were also more willing to endorse personal harms on average.[91]

Perceptual/emotional recognition deficits

Facial affect recognition

In a 2002 study, David Kosson and Yana Suchy, et al.[Who] asked psychopathic inmates to name the emotion expressed on each of 30 faces. Compared to the control group, psychopaths had a significantly lower rate of accuracy in recognizing disgusted facial affect but a higher rate of accuracy in recognizing anger. Additionally, when "conditions designed to minimize the involvement of right-hemispheric mechanisms" (i.e., sadness) were used, psychopaths had more difficulty accurately identifying emotions. This study did not replicate Blair's et al. (1997) findings that psychopaths are specifically less sensitive to nonverbal cues of fear or distress.[92]

One study indicated that in children antisocial behaviour is associated with perceiving hostility from others, while callous-unemotional traits appear related to not recognising fear in others. Those showing the latter trait tended to pay less attention to the eye region of faces. Although deficits in these areas have been linked to the amygdala in patients with brain damage, a recent meta-analysis suggested the deficits are not always found in adult psychopathy and tend to show more on tasks requiring verbal processing (e.g. a verbal response to a questioner) at the same time as visual processing.[93][94]

Vocal affect recognition

In a 2002 experiment, Blair, Mitchell, et al. used the Vocal Affect Recognition Test to measure psychopaths' recognition of the emotional intonation given to connotative neutral words. Psychopaths tended to make more recognition errors than controls with a particularly high rate of error for sad and fearful vocal affect.[95]

PCL-R items

There are 20 items in the PCL-R, conventionally divided into two factors. Each factor is sometimes further subdivided in two - interpersonal vs affect items for Factor 1, and lifestyle vs antisocial behavior items for Factor 2. Two items, 'Promiscuous sexual behavior' and 'Many short-term marital relationships', have sometimes been left out in such divisions (Hare, 2003):

Interpersonal-Affect items	Antisocial items
Glibness/superficial charm Grandiose sense of self-worth Pathological lying Cunning/manipulative Lack of remorse or guilt Emotionally shallow Callous/lack of empathy Failure to accept responsibility for own actions	Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom Parasitic lifestyle Poor behavioral control Promiscuous sexual behavior Lack of realistic, long-term goals Impulsiveness Irresponsibility Juvenile delinquency Early behavioral problems Revocation of conditional release Many short-term marital relationships Criminal versatility.

Cleckley checklist

In his book Mask of Sanity, Hervey M. Cleckley described 16 'common qualities' that he thought were characteristic of the individuals he termed psychopaths:[154] Cleckley checklist formed the basis for Hare's more current PCL-R checklist (see above).

1. Superficial charm and good "intelligence"
2. Absence of delusions and other signs of irrational thinking
3. Absence of "nervousness" or psychoneurotic manifestations
4. Unreliability
5. Untruthfulness and insincerity
6. Lack of remorse and shame
7. Inadequately motivated antisocial behavior
8. Poor judgment and failure to learn by experience
9. Pathologic egocentricity and incapacity for love
10. General poverty in major affective reactions
11. Specific loss of insight
12. Unresponsiveness in general interpersonal relations
13. Fantastic and uninviting behavior with drink and sometimes without
14. Suicide threats rarely carried out
15. Sex life impersonal, trivial, and poorly integrated
16. Failure to follow any life plan.

Psychopathy vs. sociopathy

Hare writes that the difference between sociopathy and psychopathy may "reflect the user's views on the origins and determinates of the disorder." The term sociopathy may be preferred by sociologists that see the causes as due to social factors. The term psychopathy may be preferred by psychologists who see the causes as due to a combination of psychological, genetic, and environmental factors.[161]

David T. Lykken proposes psychopathy and sociopathy as two distinct kinds of antisocial personality disorder. He believes psychopaths are born with temperamental differences such as impulsivity, cortical underarousal, and fearlessness that lead them to risk-seeking behavior and an inability to internalize social norms. On the other hand, he claims sociopaths have relatively normal temperaments; their personality disorder being more an effect of negative sociological factors like parental neglect, delinquent peers, poverty, and extremely low or extremely high intelligence. Both personality disorders are the result of an interaction between genetic predispositions and environmental factors, but psychopathy leans towards the hereditary whereas sociopathy tends towards the environmental.

Co-occurrence

Psychopaths may have various other mental conditions. It is difficult to consider psychopathy 'comorbid' with clinical diagnoses when it is not itself a clinical diagnosis, unless considered to mean antisocial personality disorder. The constellation of traits in psychopathy assessments overlaps considerably with ASPD criteria and also with Histrionic personality disorder and Narcissistic personality disorder criteria.

Psychopathy is associated with substance use disorders. This appears to be linked more closely to anti-social/criminal lifestyle, as measured by Factor 2 of the PCL-R, than the interpersonal-emotional traits assessed by Factor I of the PCL-R.

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is known to be highly comorbid with conduct disorder, and may also co-occur with psychopathic tendencies. This may be explained in part by deficits in executive function.

Anxiety disorders often co-occur with antisocial personality disorder, and contrary to assumptions psychopathy can sometimes be marked by anxiety; however, this appears to be due to the antisocial aspect (factor 2 of the PCL), and anxiety may be inversely associated with the interpersonal-emotional traits (Factor I of the PCL-R). Depression appears to be inversely associated with psychopathy. There is little evidence for a link between psychopathy and schizophrenia.

It has been suggested that psychopathy may be comorbid with several other diagnoses than these, but limited work on comorbidity has been carried out. This may be partly due to difficulties in using inpatient groups from certain institutions to assess comorbidity, owing to the likelihood of some bias in sample selection.

Comorbidity may be more reflective of poor discriminant validity of categories in the DSM-IV than reflective of actually separate conditions.

Antisocial personality disorder (APD or ASPD), or dissocial personality disorder, is a psychiatric diagnosis that interprets antisocial and impulsive behaviors as symptoms of a personality disorder. Psychiatry defines only pathological antisocial behavior; it does not address potential benefits of positive antisocial behavior or define the meaning of 'social' in contrast to 'antisocial'.

Professional psychiatry generally compares APD to sociopathic disorders and psychopathic disorders (not to be confused with psychosis). Approximately 3% of men and 1% of women are thought to have some form of antisocial personality disorder according to DSM-IV. Formal psychiatric definitions make a distinction between APD and social anxiety disorder.

Although criminal activity is not a necessary requirement for the diagnosis, these individuals often encounter legal difficulties due to their disregard for societal standards and the rights of others. Therefore, many of these individuals can be found in prisons. However, it should be noted that criminal activity does not automatically warrant a diagnosis of APD, nor does a diagnosis of APD imply that a person is a criminal. It is hypothesized that many high achievers exhibit APD characteristics. This, however, brings much criticism upon the diagnostic criteria specified for those exhibiting APD and the PCL-R. Both of these tests depend upon the person in question being a criminal or having participated in criminal activities.

Research has shown that individuals with APD are indifferent to the possibility of physical pain or many punishments, and show no indications that they experience fear when so threatened; this may explain their apparent disregard for the consequences of their actions, and their lack of empathy to the suffering of others.

Central to understanding psychopaths is that they do not appear to experience true human emotions, or at least, they do not appear to experience a full range of human emotions. This can explain the lack of empathy for the suffering of others, since they cannot experience emotion associated with either empathy or suffering. Risk-seeking behavior and substance abuse may be attempts to escape feeling empty or emotionally void. The rage exhibited by psychopaths and the anxiety associated with certain types of ASPD may represent the limit of emotion experienced, or there may be physiological responses without analogy to emotion experienced by others.

Emotions which the true psychopath exhibits are the fruits of watching and mimicking other people's emotions. This is to mask their sociopathic tendencies from others.

One approach to explaining APD behaviors is put forth by sociobiology, a science that attempts to understand and explain a wide variety of human behavior based on evolutionary biology. One route to doing so is by exploring evolutionarily stable strategies; that is, strategies that being successful will tend to be passed on to the next generation, thus becoming more common in the gene pool. For example, in one well-known 1995 paper by Linda Mealey, chronic antisocial/criminal behavior is explained as a combination of two such strategies.

According to the older theory of Freudian psychoanalysis, a sociopath has a strong id and ego that overpowers the superego. The theory proposes that internalized morals of our unconscious mind are restricted from surfacing to the ego and consciousness.