Psychopaths: cold as ice?

People who aren’t in touch with their emotions can’t regulate them

Psychopathic people have great difficulty or are even unable to show empathy and regulate their emotions. According to a new study by Matthias Burghart, a Max Planck researcher in Freiburg, this could be because these people suffer from alexithymia, also known as emotional blindness.

The term alexithymia is an amalgam of the Greek prefix a- (without) and the words lexis (reading) and thymos (emotion). It refers to the inability of a person to recognize and describe their own emotions. People with alexithymia tend to perceive their feelings as purely physical sensations. For example, emotional tension is registered as mere physical discomfort or pain.

Previous research has linked alexithymia to mental health issues such as depression and anxiety. “However, research in clinical psychology shows that the ability to properly identify and understand one’s own emotions is essential for the healthy functioning of other emotional abilities such as empathy and emotion regulation. For us as scientists, this raises the question: Is psychopathy related to alexithymia and, if so, could this relationship (at least in part) explain the many other emotional deficits often observed in psychopathy?” explains Mathias Burghart, a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law in Freiburg.

To answer this question, Burghart and colleagues from the University of Konstanz conducted a survey of two groups: a randomly selected group of people from the general population (315 people), who were recruited through posters, flyers, and social media ads, and a group of 50 inpatients from a psychiatric clinic. The latter group consisted of patients from four different wards of the clinic; what they all had in common was that they had been admitted to the forensic clinic after having committed crimes under conditions such as diminished criminal responsibility or drug addiction.

Both groups completed the following self-report questionnaires, which are commonly used in psychological research:

• the Triarchic Psychopathy Measure (TriPM) to assess psychopathic traits;
• the Saarbrücken Personality Questionnaire to measure empathy;
• the Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20 to assess alexithymia;
• the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ) to assess emotion regulation strategies.

The result: the “forensic sample” was found to exhibit significantly higher levels of boldness, meanness, and disinhibition compared to the general population cohort. These characteristics are considered typical psychopathic traits. This result corresponds to earlier studies and indicates that there is a higher proportion of people with psychopathic symptoms in groups of offenders from forensic clinics than in the general population.

What is new, however, is the scientific finding that individuals with strong psychopathic traits tend to have greater difficulty recognizing and describing their own emotions (i.e., to be suffering from alexithymia), which in turn contributes to a lack of empathy and poor emotion regulation. Conversely, this means that therapeutic measures to improve emotional awareness could be helpful for people with psychopathic personalities. “If these people manage to recognize and describe their own emotions, their empathy and ability to regulate their emotions may also improve,” says Burghart. Ideally, this therapeutic approach could reduce the risk of recidivism in offenders.