Spotting a sociopath

[memvola]

Part of the problem as I see it, is a profit-driven medical industry that wants to define as many disorders as possible so there's something for everyone.

It's not only the medical industry. Everyone likes a picture of reality where their weaknesses arise from the fact that they are actually better than those who have power. Hollywood is milking this for decades now. With this new wave of fear, I'm sure we will be reading about sociopathy on the pamphlets in the organic food stores.

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[myrkul]

Part of the problem as I see it, is a profit-driven medical industry that wants to define as many disorders as possible so there's something for everyone. More disorders = more drugs, more funding, more hypochondriacs, more gullible parents wanting to fix their problematic kids... more profit!

You know what's funny about that? The difference between a productive member of society and a serial killer (both having that different brain structure) is upbringing. Nurture, in this case, beats nature.

[Rob E]

Part of the problem as I see it, is a profit-driven medical industry that wants to define as many disorders as possible so there's something for everyone.

It's not only the medical industry. Everyone likes a picture of reality where their weaknesses arise from the fact that they are actually better than those who have power. Hollywood is milking this for decades now. With this new wave of fear, I'm sure we will be reading about sociopathy on the pamphlets in the organic food stores. Plug papaya root in your child's, umm, nose, once a week to keep the psychopathy out.

For you. Bang on.  All they do is name " symptoms" plus you never get two psychiatrist finding the same diagnosis on the same case a person goes somewhere gets a diagnosis goes to another shrink gets " another" diagnosis . That's because Psychiatry is not a science.  There is No Physical test in any way shape or form to for example; test a chemical imbalance. There are no tests for this. Well, if this is a physical chemical imbalance how come there are no tests for it like for example " Insulin". Were talking about a physical deficient property here.  They've come with hundreds if not thousands of claims they can't prove, and now it is in the " brain structure" . . I don't believe anything these people have to say. They've been proved to been liars fraudsters torturers rapists and plain insane evil nut cases to many times. Psychiatry is a mass controle brainwashing tool for the government. First thing a tyranical government does is to send its opositionists to their death or a mental hospital.
Run by psychiatrists.

[TECSHARE]

->"The most important thing is that sociopaths do not "feel" remorse and cannot sympathize with the emotions of others."

I'm pretty sure that they are "wired" the same way as us and feel remorse, maybe very seldom compared to the average guy, and would never verbalize it to them self or others, that they had done someone wrong.

From personal experience I have known people that have had a bad experience in their past, either violence or abuse from childhood or in a relationship. It's like a blanked out hole in their history when you get to know them. They seldom mention this episode and only superficially, but the effect on them is always visible under the surface when you know them. Being close to such a person can be hard, as you never know them truely. They often feel that they have to cling to the little piece of unblemished self they have left and are convinced that no one would be able to like or love them if anybody really knew how dark and scared of loosing their reality they really are. You knowing about their secret will ultimately make them brake the relation as you become the personification of their hurt.

So when ever I run into one who is more show and charm than logic and coherency in arguments, I always feel a little sad about them and often you can see the fear in their eyes when they discoveres that you have blown their cover when you is not caught up in their self fantasy! It's a bummer if such a guy is your boss as you will get fired a few days after such a moment of truth.

If the sociopath is an attractive woman you are doomed, even if you know what you are getting into, Being the single follower of such a love cult will chew you up in all ways imaginable. However next time such a woman crosses your path, you will jump right in again.

+1
I've met people who check all the right boxes: chronic/compulsive lying, making up fantasies, charming, sometimes anti-social behaviour, careless about others... If they're like that when they're old and grey, it's probably too late, but I've actually seen someone (mostly) grow out of it due to proper family support and a willingness to change. I don't believe in the fad that there's a "psycho lurking around every corner", that it's "1 out of 25 people" and all that bullshit.

Instead, what I see are excuses. A tiny minority might indeed have some diagnosable mental 'anomaly' that makes them incapable of feeling empathy. For the most part, I'm guessing your garden-variety corporate/political psychopath is likely to have been a spoilt child who always "got away with murder" unpunished. How can people develop certain connections in their brain if they grew up never needing them??

Part of the problem as I see it, is a profit-driven medical industry that wants to define as many disorders as possible so there's something for everyone. More disorders = more drugs, more funding, more hypochondriacs, more gullible parents wanting to fix their problematic kids... more profit!

You two have a serious misunderstanding of what a sociopath is at their core. The number of sociopaths walking around is debatable, but what is a fact is that they ARE wired differently than what most would call "normal" people.  They in fact are incapable of empathy, even on a theoretical level they just don't get it. This is a mistake I see so often, and it is quite frustrating because sociopaths know this is a common misconception and they utilize it to be better at being sociopaths. Depending on circumstance they may be more or less destructive to those around them, but from birth they simply learn to be proficient mimics of emotional states so as to appear normal to everyone else. Some times they are SO good at it you could be around one for years and not even know it.

 This isn't something they learned, it was something they were BORN with. How do I know this? EEG and active MRI technology now enables anyone with the correct equipment and training to demonstrate which areas of the brain are active during specific activities designed to activate target brain areas while under observation. Now I don't think people should walk around suspecting everyone of being a sociopath, but it is important to note that by definition they try to blend in to their surroundings. Any psychologist will tell you a sociopaths worst fear is being exposed for what they are.

[Luno]

Is "Sociopathy" an acknowledged clinical diagnosis. Is'nt it just a popularised term?

Would'nt it be covered as a combination of psycosis, manias, bi polar or other?

As a few of you has pointed out, sociopaths have a lot of  traits there are higly valued in society, unless they are murdering people for free.

[bb113]

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...

You two have a serious misunderstanding of what a sociopath is at their core. The number of sociopaths walking around is debatable, but what is a fact is that they ARE wired differently than what most would call "normal" people.  They in fact are incapable of empathy, even on a theoretical level they just don't get it. This is a mistake I see so often, and it is quite frustrating because sociopaths know this is a common misconception and they utilize it to be better at being sociopaths. Depending on circumstance they may be more or less destructive to those around them, but from birth they simply learn to be proficient mimics of emotional states so as to appear normal to everyone else. Some times they are SO good at it you could be around one for years and not even know it.

 This isn't something they learned, it was something they were BORN with. How do I know this? EEG and active MRI technology now enables anyone with the correct equipment and training to demonstrate which areas of the brain are active during specific activities designed to activate target brain areas while under observation. Now I don't think people should walk around suspecting everyone of being a sociopath, but it is important to note that by definition they try to blend in to their surroundings. Any psychologist will tell you a sociopaths worst fear is being exposed for what they are.

I don't know enough to argue particulars but most mri results published are much more questionable then they at first appear. Even moreso than most science, there are numerous steps in the process that allow researchers to introduce bias.  Here is an abstract coming from the first page of a google search for "mri analysis":

Obtaining reliable data and drawing meaningful and robust inferences from diffusion MRI can be challenging and is subject to many pitfalls. The process of quantifying diffusion indices and eventually comparing them between groups of subjects and/or correlating them with other parameters starts at the acquisition of the raw data, followed by a long pipeline of image processing steps. Each one of these steps is susceptible to sources of bias, which may not only limit the accuracy and precision, but can lead to substantial errors. This article provides a detailed review of the steps along the analysis pipeline and their associated pitfalls. These are grouped into 1 pre-processing of data; 2 estimation of the tensor; 3 derivation of voxelwise quantitative parameters; 4 strategies for extracting quantitative parameters; and finally 5 intra-subject and inter-subject comparison, including region of interest, histogram, tract-specific and voxel-based analyses. The article covers important aspects of diffusion MRI analysis, such as motion correction, susceptibility and eddy current distortion correction, model fitting, region of interest placement, histogram and voxel-based analysis. We have assembled 25 pitfalls (several previously unreported) into a single article, which should serve as a useful reference for those embarking on new diffusion MRI-based studies, and as a check for those who may already be running studies but may have overlooked some important confounds. While some of these problems are well known to diffusion experts, they might not be to other researchers wishing to undertake a clinical study based on diffusion MRI.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20886566

My point is that modern scientific culture systematically underestimates uncertainty, and thus anything that comes out of it should be questioned rather than taken as fact.

[bb113]

....

+1
I've met people who check all the right boxes: chronic/compulsive lying, making up fantasies, charming, sometimes anti-social behaviour, careless about others... If they're like that when they're old and grey, it's probably too late, but I've actually seen someone (mostly) grow out of it due to proper family support and a willingness to change. I don't believe in the fad that there's a "psycho lurking around every corner", that it's "1 out of 25 people" and all that bullshit.

Instead, what I see are excuses. A tiny minority might indeed have some diagnosable mental 'anomaly' that makes them incapable of feeling empathy. For the most part, I'm guessing your garden-variety corporate/political psychopath is likely to have been a spoilt child who always "got away with murder" unpunished. How can people develop certain connections in their brain if they grew up never needing them??

Part of the problem as I see it, is a profit-driven medical industry that wants to define as many disorders as possible so there's something for everyone. More disorders = more drugs, more funding, more hypochondriacs, more gullible parents wanting to fix their problematic kids... more profit!

It is true that is an issue with trusting data from pharmaceutical companies. It would be a mistake, however, to automatically trust data from academia where there are huge pressures to "get significant results", and worse, more and more often you see researchers apologizing in their papers when they do not prove their hypothesis true.

If a grad student just started a family or needs to pay medical bills or something like that, it should go in the conflicts of interest just the same as if they got paid by a pharm company.

An early experimental study by Mahoney8 is a particularly striking example of how researchers’ bias can influence their behaviour. Reviewers were asked to referee manuscripts, all of which had identical methodology but reported different results. Reviewers were strongly biased against manuscripts that reported results that contradicted their own theoretical perspectives. This can have a deleterious effect as ideas that have long since been contradicted can persist in the literature.9,10 Researchers’ biases caused by preference for their own ideas can cause a serious COI when they present their own work and when they are involved in any aspect of peer review. Nonetheless, much more attention is paid to COIs owing to external influences such as money than to COIs related to researchers’ inherent biases.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2783432/

[Rob E]

...

...

You two have a serious misunderstanding of what a sociopath is at their core. The number of sociopaths walking around is debatable, but what is a fact is that they ARE wired differently than what most would call "normal" people.  They in fact are incapable of empathy, even on a theoretical level they just don't get it. This is a mistake I see so often, and it is quite frustrating because sociopaths know this is a common misconception and they utilize it to be better at being sociopaths. Depending on circumstance they may be more or less destructive to those around them, but from birth they simply learn to be proficient mimics of emotional states so as to appear normal to everyone else. Some times they are SO good at it you could be around one for years and not even know it.

 This isn't something they learned, it was something they were BORN with. How do I know this? EEG and active MRI technology now enables anyone with the correct equipment and training to demonstrate which areas of the brain are active during specific activities designed to activate target brain areas while under observation. Now I don't think people should walk around suspecting everyone of being a sociopath, but it is important to note that by definition they try to blend in to their surroundings. Any psychologist will tell you a sociopaths worst fear is being exposed for what they are.

I don't know enough to argue particulars but most mri results published are much more questionable then they at first appear. Even moreso than most science, there are numerous steps in the process that allow researchers to introduce bias.  Here is an abstract coming from the first page of a google search for "mri analysis":

[quote]Obtaining reliable data and drawing meaningful and robust inferences from diffusion MRI can be challenging and is subject to many pitfalls. The process of quantifying diffusion indices and eventually comparing them between groups of subjects and/or correlating them with other parameters starts at the acquisition of the raw data, followed by a long pipeline of image processing steps. Each one of these steps is susceptible to sources of bias, which may not only limit the accuracy and precision, but can lead to substantial errors. This article provides a detailed review of the steps along the analysis pipeline and their associated pitfalls. These are grouped into 1 pre-processing of data; 2 estimation of the tensor; 3 derivation of voxelwise quantitative parameters; 4 strategies for extracting quantitative parameters; and finally 5 intra-subject and inter-subject comparison, including region of interest, histogram, tract-specific and voxel-based analyses. The article covers important aspects of diffusion MRI analysis, such as motion correction, susceptibility and eddy current distortion correction, model fitting, region of interest placement, histogram and voxel-based analysis. We have assembled 25 pitfalls (several previously unreported) into a single article, which should serve as a useful reference for those embarking on new diffusion MRI-based studies, and as a check for those who may already be running studies but may have overlooked some important confounds. While some of these problems are well known to diffusion experts, they might not be to other researchers wishing to undertake a clinical study based on diffusion MRI.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20886566

My point is that modern scientific culture systematically underestimates uncertainty, and thus anything that comes out of it should be questioned rather than taken as fact.


[/quote] Right because they don't know what the fuck they're talking about . There isn't even any evidence the mind itself is a brain. Or the brain is the mind  ..  There is no sound evidence for that . That's why they can't fucking fix anything . If you Knew really how things worked you would be able to do something about  it you would be able to fix things understand things solve things. Just like the banking world are fraudsters its really not that hard to concieve that the elites of the mental health field are fraudsters.  

[Rob E]

My point is that modern scientific culture systematically underestimates uncertainty, and thus anything that comes out of it should be questioned rather than taken as fact.

 ...........................................................

[TECSHARE]

....

+1
I've met people who check all the right boxes: chronic/compulsive lying, making up fantasies, charming, sometimes anti-social behaviour, careless about others... If they're like that when they're old and grey, it's probably too late, but I've actually seen someone (mostly) grow out of it due to proper family support and a willingness to change. I don't believe in the fad that there's a "psycho lurking around every corner", that it's "1 out of 25 people" and all that bullshit.

Instead, what I see are excuses. A tiny minority might indeed have some diagnosable mental 'anomaly' that makes them incapable of feeling empathy. For the most part, I'm guessing your garden-variety corporate/political psychopath is likely to have been a spoilt child who always "got away with murder" unpunished. How can people develop certain connections in their brain if they grew up never needing them??

Part of the problem as I see it, is a profit-driven medical industry that wants to define as many disorders as possible so there's something for everyone. More disorders = more drugs, more funding, more hypochondriacs, more gullible parents wanting to fix their problematic kids... more profit!

It is true that is an issue with trusting data from pharmaceutical companies. It would be a mistake, however, to automatically trust data from academia where there are huge pressures to "get significant results", and worse, more and more often you see researchers apologizing in their papers when they do not prove their hypothesis true.

If a grad student just started a family or needs to pay medical bills or something like that, it should go in the conflicts of interest just the same as if they got paid by a pharm company.

An early experimental study by Mahoney8 is a particularly striking example of how researchers’ bias can influence their behaviour. Reviewers were asked to referee manuscripts, all of which had identical methodology but reported different results. Reviewers were strongly biased against manuscripts that reported results that contradicted their own theoretical perspectives. This can have a deleterious effect as ideas that have long since been contradicted can persist in the literature.9,10 Researchers’ biases caused by preference for their own ideas can cause a serious COI when they present their own work and when they are involved in any aspect of peer review. Nonetheless, much more attention is paid to COIs owing to external influences such as money than to COIs related to researchers’ inherent biases.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2783432/

We have had discussions in the past relating to the medical industry and you know very well I don't simply blindly trust anything some one with a PHD says as fact. In fact I have a severe distrust for the medical industry as a whole. I have been closely monitoring technology relating to the mind for many years because I find it extremely interesting. I have through my experience seen many technological developments that in my own opinion as some dude on the internet, leads me to believe that this type of thing is possible. There are many sources you can find on the internet supporting and refusing my conclusions. I am not a doctor and I doubt anyone here is, so we could all stand here arguing and trying to prove each other wrong, or maybe we could just learn for ourselves if we care so much.

[bb113]

...

...

You two have a serious misunderstanding of what a sociopath is at their core. The number of sociopaths walking around is debatable, but what is a fact is that they ARE wired differently than what most would call "normal" people.  They in fact are incapable of empathy, even on a theoretical level they just don't get it. This is a mistake I see so often, and it is quite frustrating because sociopaths know this is a common misconception and they utilize it to be better at being sociopaths. Depending on circumstance they may be more or less destructive to those around them, but from birth they simply learn to be proficient mimics of emotional states so as to appear normal to everyone else. Some times they are SO good at it you could be around one for years and not even know it.

 This isn't something they learned, it was something they were BORN with. How do I know this? EEG and active MRI technology now enables anyone with the correct equipment and training to demonstrate which areas of the brain are active during specific activities designed to activate target brain areas while under observation. Now I don't think people should walk around suspecting everyone of being a sociopath, but it is important to note that by definition they try to blend in to their surroundings. Any psychologist will tell you a sociopaths worst fear is being exposed for what they are.

I don't know enough to argue particulars but most mri results published are much more questionable then they at first appear. Even moreso than most science, there are numerous steps in the process that allow researchers to introduce bias.  Here is an abstract coming from the first page of a google search for "mri analysis":

[quote]Obtaining reliable data and drawing meaningful and robust inferences from diffusion MRI can be challenging and is subject to many pitfalls. The process of quantifying diffusion indices and eventually comparing them between groups of subjects and/or correlating them with other parameters starts at the acquisition of the raw data, followed by a long pipeline of image processing steps. Each one of these steps is susceptible to sources of bias, which may not only limit the accuracy and precision, but can lead to substantial errors. This article provides a detailed review of the steps along the analysis pipeline and their associated pitfalls. These are grouped into 1 pre-processing of data; 2 estimation of the tensor; 3 derivation of voxelwise quantitative parameters; 4 strategies for extracting quantitative parameters; and finally 5 intra-subject and inter-subject comparison, including region of interest, histogram, tract-specific and voxel-based analyses. The article covers important aspects of diffusion MRI analysis, such as motion correction, susceptibility and eddy current distortion correction, model fitting, region of interest placement, histogram and voxel-based analysis. We have assembled 25 pitfalls (several previously unreported) into a single article, which should serve as a useful reference for those embarking on new diffusion MRI-based studies, and as a check for those who may already be running studies but may have overlooked some important confounds. While some of these problems are well known to diffusion experts, they might not be to other researchers wishing to undertake a clinical study based on diffusion MRI.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20886566

My point is that modern scientific culture systematically underestimates uncertainty, and thus anything that comes out of it should be questioned rather than taken as fact.


 Right because they don't know what the fuck they're talking about . There isn't even any evidence the mind itself is a brain. Or the brain is the mind  ..  There is no sound evidence for that . That's why they can't fucking fix anything . If you Knew really how things worked you would be able to do something about  it you would be able to fix things understand things solve things. Just like the banking world are fraudsters its really not that hard to concieve that the elites of the mental health field are fraudsters.  

Here is my current timeline (under construction):
Edward Bernays -> Sigmond Freud Popularity -> Psychoanalysis + WW2 -> NIH funding starts skyrocketing -> Govt needs metrics by which to choose who to fund -> Null hypothesis testing accepted as the gold standard -> Science getting crappier and crappier

http://officeofbudget.od.nih.gov/approp_hist.html

Now that isn't to say we know nothing about the brain...

[bb113]

....

+1
I've met people who check all the right boxes: chronic/compulsive lying, making up fantasies, charming, sometimes anti-social behaviour, careless about others... If they're like that when they're old and grey, it's probably too late, but I've actually seen someone (mostly) grow out of it due to proper family support and a willingness to change. I don't believe in the fad that there's a "psycho lurking around every corner", that it's "1 out of 25 people" and all that bullshit.

Instead, what I see are excuses. A tiny minority might indeed have some diagnosable mental 'anomaly' that makes them incapable of feeling empathy. For the most part, I'm guessing your garden-variety corporate/political psychopath is likely to have been a spoilt child who always "got away with murder" unpunished. How can people develop certain connections in their brain if they grew up never needing them??

Part of the problem as I see it, is a profit-driven medical industry that wants to define as many disorders as possible so there's something for everyone. More disorders = more drugs, more funding, more hypochondriacs, more gullible parents wanting to fix their problematic kids... more profit!

It is true that is an issue with trusting data from pharmaceutical companies. It would be a mistake, however, to automatically trust data from academia where there are huge pressures to "get significant results", and worse, more and more often you see researchers apologizing in their papers when they do not prove their hypothesis true.

If a grad student just started a family or needs to pay medical bills or something like that, it should go in the conflicts of interest just the same as if they got paid by a pharm company.

An early experimental study by Mahoney8 is a particularly striking example of how researchers’ bias can influence their behaviour. Reviewers were asked to referee manuscripts, all of which had identical methodology but reported different results. Reviewers were strongly biased against manuscripts that reported results that contradicted their own theoretical perspectives. This can have a deleterious effect as ideas that have long since been contradicted can persist in the literature.9,10 Researchers’ biases caused by preference for their own ideas can cause a serious COI when they present their own work and when they are involved in any aspect of peer review. Nonetheless, much more attention is paid to COIs owing to external influences such as money than to COIs related to researchers’ inherent biases.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2783432/

We have had discussions in the past relating to the medical industry and you know very well I don't simply blindly trust anything some one with a PHD says as fact. In fact I have a severe distrust for the medical industry as a whole. I have been closely monitoring technology relating to the mind for many years because I find it extremely interesting. I have through my experience seen many technological developments that in my own opinion as some dude on the internet, leads me to believe that this type of thing is possible. There are many sources you can find on the internet supporting and refusing my conclusions. I am not a doctor and I doubt anyone here is, so we could all stand here arguing and trying to prove each other wrong, or maybe we could just learn for ourselves if we care so much.

I didn't mean it as anything personal, or even really to critique your argument. I just feel the need to counter anything that appears to accept scientific literature as authoritative because I've learned first hand there there are all these huge systemic problems that need not be there if people just changed their attitudes.

[TECSHARE]

I don't mean this personally either, but IMO refuting ANY argument just because it comes from people in or associated with the medical industry in anyway is equally as ignorant as believing anything they say.

[justusranvier]

This isn't something they learned, it was something they were BORN with. How do I know this? EEG and active MRI technology now enables anyone with the correct equipment and training to demonstrate which areas of the brain are active during specific activities designed to activate target brain areas while under observation.

They are born with a susceptibility to sociopathy, but it requires environmental triggers to manifest.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx8RxRn6dWU

James Fallon was born with the brain of a sociopath but didn't become one due not experiencing the environmental triggers during early childhood.

[bb113]

I don't mean this personally either, but IMO refuting ANY argument just because it comes from people in or associated with the medical industry in anyway is equally as ignorant as believing anything they say.

Agreed 100% what matters is the data, methods, and logic of the inference. Anyway this thread is OT now...

For those who suspect you know, knew a sociopath, how long did it take you to come to that conclusion? The main giveaway is usually lying, which in my experience, takes about 2 years to really realize.

[grondilu]

Not sure what is the exact difference between a sociopath and a psychopath, but here is a funny video about psychopaths:

Is Lance Armstrong a Psychopath?  You be the Judge

[TECSHARE]

Yeah lying is part of it but they don't always manifest as compulsive liars, I find more often than not they use lies more like a tool to an end rather than a method of self gratification. One thing I did find telling was how they react to people being seriously injured. If you can get a look at their face without being too obvious the very moment they see something revoltingly violent, some times you can catch a weird creepy smirk. It looks a little like this...

[bb113]

I dunno. People can act weird under weird circumstances. Spot the sociopaths:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vd7dxmBLg48

[Luno]

I dunno. People can act weird under weird circumstances. Spot the sociopaths:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vd7dxmBLg48

Interesting video. Most are in denial. Some are also teachers with the students of her class, putting up a smile not to scare them.

I watched it live broadcasted  too in 1986, and wondering if the main tank had separated early and the shuttle continued unpowered in a glide, which would be hard to spot.

Ground spectators have no info besides what they see, Better not be the first to scream.

When they retreived the wreckage from the florida sumps, a few days later, some were still hoping.

[TECSHARE]

I dunno. People can act weird under weird circumstances. Spot the sociopaths:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vd7dxmBLg48

Seriously? You just enjoy arguing for the sake of arguing admit it. I don't know what a video of a decades old disaster is supposed to be evidence of, but if you want to spot a sociopath, it helps if you actually know them. I am not sure what your video bait is supposed to be used for here, but I am not biting.