Psychopaths: 10 myths about the psychopathic personality

Not everything the movies tell about psychopaths is true.

Piercing gaze, serious attitude, arrogant intelligence, neat clothes, perverse thoughts and bloodthirsty goals. This is how movies and series always portray psychopaths. psychopaths.

Before you continue reading this post, I invite you to learn more about psychopathy. I leave you a link below:

• "Psychopathy: what goes on in the mind of the psychopath?"

Stereotypes and misconceptions about psychopathy.

But, how real is this stereotype that Hollywood sells us with those that exist in real life? In this article you are reading we set out to challenge ten of the most popular and widespread myths about psychopaths.

Myth 1: They lack empathy

The empathy psychopathy is the ability of human beings to understand the emotions, feelings and moods of other people. Psychopathy is often associated with a lack of empathy. In this regard, we need to clarify something.

Empathy comprises two spheres: the cognitive area and the emotional area. The first consists of the capacity to understand the feelings of others, to know what emotion the other person is experiencing; the second consists of being able to live, feel or experience what the other person feels when he/she expresses it to us.

Psychopaths are able to understand emotions (when someone feels anger, love or fear for example) and even imitate the expected behavior of those emotions. However, they cannot feel these emotions themselves. This is probably due to the fact that, as numerous neurological studies have shown, psychopaths are able to understand emotions.Psychopaths have alterations at the brain level in specific areas related to this ability..

Myth 2: They cannot feel fear

To understand fear we could say that there is a real fear and an unreal fear. The first one is that fear that we commonly know, the one that we have for real consequences, for example, to suffer an accident when we go in a speeding car.

On the other hand, the unreal fear, which we could well call psychotic fear.goes hand in hand with a psychotic type disorder where there is a fracture of the reality of the psyche of the individual, the subject hears voices that want to kill him or feels threatened by persecutory images.

The first fear is unknown to them, however, they may experience the unreal fear. they could experience the unreal fear. It should be clarified that not all psychopaths present psychotic symptoms, just as not all psychotics have traits of psychopathy, but we will talk about that later.

Myth 3: Cold look, serious gestures, superior intelligence

This profile has already has become a cliché for movies and series.. We know that there is a correlation between our mood and the facial expressions we gesture, but as we saw in the previous point, psychopaths are perfectly capable of imitating behaviors related to emotions, even some psychopaths tend to be charismatic and kind to go unnoticed and get what they want.

As far as intelligence is concerned, we could say that not experiencing emotions is a point in their favor, since this favors their actions to be carried out in the best possible way. This favors their actions to be carried out with greater coldness and meticulousness.They also have instinctive and intellectual objectives. However, there is no direct correlation between psychopathy and a person's IQ.

Myth 4: They are the product of a dysfunctional family.

Completely false. We will not dispute that there is an important correlation between the family environment and the tendency to commit crime. Abuse, mistreatment, abandonment, bad role models are undoubtedly very important criminogenic factors to be taken into account when explaining the criminogenesis of a delinquent.

In spite of this, there is no conclusive data linking the dysfunctional family as a cause of psychopathic behavior of an individual, as there are multiple examples There are many examples of psychopaths who have committed terrible crimes, but when analyzing their family environment, we found that this nucleus was perfectly functional and integral.

Myth 5: One sixth of all people are psychopaths.

Some experts estimate that the global number of psychopaths corresponds to 6% of the world's population. Robert Hare, a psychologist renowned for his studies on psychopathy, estimates that it is 1% of the world's population and 25% corresponding to inmates..

The DSM-5 indicates a prevalence of 0.2% to 3.3% of the world population. However, all of these data only include the number of psychopaths who transgress the norm and cause harm, but as we will see in the second part of this article, not all psychopaths have transgressed the norm and caused harm, not all psychopaths have transgressed the law..

Some simply go through life using their gifts of seduction and deception to satisfy their needs or are successful businessmen who have risen to the top using their skills, so all figures are essentially inaccurate.

Myth 6: Their crimes are savage, bloody and sadistic.

There is no denying that their lack of emotions sometimes leads them to experience the limits of what is human when they commit their violent crimes. But let's take into account that the media (TV, movies and series) live on how many viewers watch them all the time, and depicting a scoop as bloodthirsty always grabs the attention, depicting the perpetrators as psychopaths, a view that is often distorted from reality..

Relating psychopaths to violent crime is sometimes far removed from what actually happens because they do not always incur in crimes related to physical violence, murders, genocides, genocides, etc.They do not always commit crimes related to physical violence, murder, genocide, or rape. There are psychopaths who are adapted to society and the upper class committing financial crimes, art theft, fraud and other white collar crimes.

Myth 7: They are unstable and have uncontrollable needs.

We should not confuse the impulsivity with the demand for gratification of a need.

The concept of impulsivity refers to the tendency to perform an action without thinking about its consequences, while in the second case and in relation to psychopathy, we could say that by not adapting to the norms, when a need requires to be gratified the psychopath will go to the act of satisfying it without morally debating whether the way to obtain such gratification is right or wrong. Psychopaths have a "cold" mind, they know the consequences of their actions, impulsivity is rarely seen in them as they tend to execute their acts with a lot of premeditation..

Myth 8: Psychopaths are crazy.

This may depend on one's conception of the term "crazy". crazybut if we take the word crazy as someone who has a disconnection someone who has a disconnection with reality (without the purpose of stigmatizing, let's say for example a schizophrenic) the answer to this question of madness, in most cases corresponds to a resounding no, because they execute their actions with full awareness and malice.

Although it could be the case of a psychopath who in addition to suffering from psychopathy suffers from severe psychotic episodes or even schizophrenia itself. The punctual study of the subject will yield the pertinent results.

Myth 9: Psychopaths will never integrate or reintegrate into society.

Let's keep something in mind: whether or not a psychopath adapts to society is because it has been entirely his or her own decision.And if most of them transgress the law, it is because they have learned that it is the best way to satisfy their needs.

There are psychopaths who learn to accept some rules if they feel it suits them or as a guideline to achieve a greater end. As for reintegration, although it is true that efforts to reintegrate psychopaths into society have yielded practically no results, criminology is learning more and more about them and the alterations that characterize the psychopathic personality, which makes it possible to act in order to propose more effective treatments for the future. more effective treatments with a view to the future.

Myth 10: All psychopaths are criminals

We close this article with the most popular myth about psychopaths.. Let us clarify that crime as defined by law is the action or omission punishable by criminal law. Understanding this concept, it is easy to understand that not all behaviors that seem bad to us are crimes if they are not sanctioned by law.

So, for example, if one day a friend asks us for lodging in our house, claiming that life has treated him unfairly and that after a week he will help us with the rent and homework, but that after several months he does not cooperate, eats all the reserves in our pantry, and even borrows our things, taking advantage of our kindness to the point where the situation seems unfair to us, does this deserve to be called a crime? Not at all, because it is we who have allowed our psychopathic friend to take advantage of our goodness to the point where it seems unfair to us.. There are thousands of cases where psychopaths like this are doing so, leading a parasitic lifestyle but without necessarily transgressing the law.

Concluding

In conclusion, there are many myths surrounding the enigmatic psychopaths.Many of them have been fed by the morbid urban legends, the media and, of course, the entertainment industry, which often present them as perverse, twisted and bloodthirsty beings.

However, the criminological sciences collaborate together to reveal the hidden motivations behind the to reveal the hidden motivations of these beings in the hope that one day they will be provided with adequate treatment that will allow them to be reintegrated into society.