Cartoon villains on TV crime shows obscure the huge social and personal costs of psychopathy, as well as the encouraging new science that can help treat it.
On any given day, millions of Americans curl up to watch their favorite crime shows. Whether it is “FBI” on CBS, “Dexter” on Showtime, “Mindhunter” on Netflix, “Killing Eve” on BBC, reruns of “Law & Order,” or any of a myriad of other similar shows, they draw huge audiences with their vivid portrayals of villains whose behaviors are perplexingly cruel. I’ll confess: I am part of that audience.
Such portrayals leave viewers with the impression that individuals with psychopathy are uncontrollably evil, unable to feel emotions, and incorrigible. But extensive research, including years of work in my own lab, demonstrates that the sensationalized conceptions of psychopathy used to drive those narratives are counterproductive and just plain wrong.
Reality is significantly more nuanced and encouraging than the grim media narratives. Contrary to most portrayals, psychopathy is not synonymous with violence. It is true that individuals with psychopathy are more likely to commit violent crime than are individuals without the disorder, but violent behavior is not a requirement for a diagnosis of psychopathy.
Research in my lab and in others has uncovered additional evidence that individuals with psychopathy are capable of experiencing and labeling emotions in the context of observing emotional scenes or faces, the pain of others and experiences of regret. Here, too, individuals with psychopathy are able to process emotion when focusing on the emotion, but they display deficits when emotion is hard to detect or is secondary to their objective.
Traits of psychopathy naturally decrease over time for many young people, starting in late adolescence into adulthood. Samuel Hawes, a psychologist at Florida International University, and his collaborators tracked more than 1,000 individuals from childhood to adulthood, repeatedly measuring their traits of psychopathy.
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