Adults with a psychopathic personality may be unable to recognize and express their emotions.
- In one study, people hospitalized in a psychiatric clinic had significantly higher levels of boldness, meanness, and disinhibition.
- These characteristics are considered typical psychopathic traits.
- Additionally, these patients tend to have more difficulty recognizing and describing their own emotions, which contributes to a lack of empathy and poor emotion regulation.
Psychopathy is a serious personality disorder marked by a wide range of emotional deficits, including a lack of empathy. Recently, researchers from the University of Konstanz (Germany) revealed that this could be because patients suffer from alexithymia, also known as emotional blindness. This is a person’s inability to identify, correctly understand and express their own emotions. People with alexithymia tend to perceive their feelings as purely physical sensations. For example, emotional tension is registered as simple discomfort or physical pain.
Boldness, meanness, disinhibition: high levels in patients hospitalized in a psychiatric clinic
To reach this conclusion, the team conducted a study in which they examined co-occurring associations between emotional impairments and psychopathy, with a particular focus on the mediating role of alexithymia. As part of the work, published in the journal Plos One315 people randomly selected from the general population and 50 patients hospitalized in a psychiatric clinic were recruited. The second group consisted of adults from four different departments of the clinic, all of whom had in common that they had been admitted to the clinic after committing crimes under conditions, such as diminished criminal responsibility or drug addiction. All participants were asked to complete a questionnaire to assess psychopathic traits, empathy, alexithymia and emotion regulation strategies.
According to the results, patients hospitalized in a psychiatric clinic had significantly higher levels of boldness, nastiness and disinhibition than those in the first group. These characteristics are considered typical psychopathic traits. Previous research has shown that the proportion of people with psychopathic symptoms was higher in groups of offenders from psychiatric clinics than in the general population in which “boldness may function as an adaptive trait, with lower levels of alexithymia counterbalancing deficits in empathy and emotion dysregulation.”
Alexithymia: more difficulty recognizing and describing emotions in psychopaths
The authors also found that volunteers with strong psychopathic traits tended to have more difficulty recognizing and describing their own emotions, which contributes to a lack of empathy and poor emotion regulation. “This highlights that therapeutic measures aimed at improving emotional awareness could be useful for people with psychopathic personality and reduce the risk of recidivism among offenders,” they concluded.
