Psychopaths in our orbit seem to chuckle when they cause fear in others and a recent report points to amygdala malfunctions.
Marsh AA, Cardinale EM. When psychopathy impairs moral judgments: Neural responses during judgments about causing fear. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2012 Sep 5. [Epub ahead of print] PubMed PMID: 22956667.
Psychopathy is associated with reduced activity in the right amygdala during judgments of fear-evoking statements (as compared to controls), and psychopathy is also associated with more lenient moral judgments about causing fear, according to a recent report. Plus, the higher individuals rated on a psychopathy scale, the less accurately they identified behaviors that cause fear – and, the more they judged being scary to be morally acceptable. (Here.) Another report demonstrates that psychopaths view inflicting accidental (unintentional) harm as being OK more than neurotypicals do. (Here). Taken as a whole, we see that psychopaths simply don’t really care about the fear of others.
This makes sense. Psychopaths and people with amygdala damage don’t pick up on expressions of fear in others. (See, here). Psychopath empathy wiring is frayed and pitted (see the report).
So psychopaths are organically impaired in detecting or empathizing with fear in others. Yet, they get that thrill when they get power over others. So no wonder there is enjoyment in causing fear in others. Perhaps psychopaths perceive fear in others as some kind of discomfort or just weird facial expression.
We recall a certain executive-suite type who said he enjoyed firing people, and we immediately thought that he enjoyed watching the people in fear of losing their job. Perhaps this is why.
Psychopaths are also not very good at feeling fear themselves, right? You linked to a Reddit AMA with a psychopath who had intentionally cut her own hand while diving near sharks, just to see how they would react. They don’t care about fear in others because they don’t really know what fear is (among other things).
NLN: Correct. We don’t get this. Apparently “fearless dominance” is a psychopathic trait reportedly in US Presidents. (Here’s an article from Dr. Vitelli: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/media-spotlight/201209/can-psychopathic-personality-traits-predict-successful-presidents). We view thrill-seeking as something distinct from “fearlessness” and don’t quite get how impulsive decision-making/thrillseeking/”fearlessness” are biologically connected. There seems to be some dopaminergic systems as well as disinhibition (to oversimplify). And, not all psychopaths are thrill-seekers — some are very deliberate. But, there are papers talking about reward – sensivity and punishment in-sensivity.
Ties right in with an older study, “Bullies may enjoy seeing others in pain: Brain scans show disruption in natural empathetic response” (2008)
http://news.uchicago.edu/article/2008/11/07/bullies-may-enjoy-seeing-others-pain-brain-scans-show-disruption-natural-empathet
And who are the “bullies”?
“Correlational analyses demonstrated that psychopathy was most strongly related to bullying” -
Relationships between bullying behaviours and the Dark Triad: A study with adults. (2011)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886911005423
and one concerning children,
“Bullying at school as a predictor of delinquency, violence and other anti-social behaviour in adulthood” (2011)
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cbm.799/abstract
Bullying = fearless dominance and “bullies” (sooner or later) cause major ‘problems’ (to say the least) and/or even death wherever they are, on an individual level or for a group/s of people, i.e., being ruled by a psychopath (or a group of psychopaths as the case may be as they apparently tend to ‘feed’ off each other)
* Also of interest,
“Psychopathic traits and preattentive threat processing in children: a novel test of the fearlessness hypothesis.” (2011)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21881061
Keep up the good work!
Hellooo E-C up in the arctic circle! (I kid)(Well almost)
Many thanks for the comment, and for those who want to read thorough analyses of all kinds of studies go to Evah.org