You will probably respond more quickly to an emotional word than to a neutral one. For example, you—and most other people—would push the button more quickly at the word DEATH than at the word PAPER. The emotional content of a word seems to give a sort of “turbo-boost” to the decision-making process. At the same time, the emotional words evoke larger brain responses than do neutral words, a reflection of the relatively large amount of information contained in the emotional words.
A PSYCHOPATHIC KILLER, asked by a female interviewer to explain the motivations for his crimes, instead launched into a graphic description of several particularly brutal murders and mutilations for which he had been imprisoned. His account was animated but dispassionate, as if he were describing a baseball game. At first the interviewer tried to appear nonjudgmental and to show only professional interest in the account. However, when her facial expression finally betrayed her revulsion he stopped in midsentence and said, “Yeah, I guess it was pretty bad. I really feel rotten. I must have been temporarily insane.”
Like most people, psychopaths sometimes say and do things solely to impress or shock. However, because of their sparse emotional life they don’t intuitively realize the impact on others of what they say. They use their listeners’ reactions as “cue cards” to tell them how they are supposed to feel in the situation.
When we used this laboratory task with prison inmates, the nonpsychopaths showed the normal pattern of responses—quicker decisions and larger brain responses to emotional than to neutral words—but the psychopaths did not: They responded to emotional words as if they were neutral words.10 This dramatic finding provided strong support for the argument that words do not have the same emotional or affective coloring for psychopaths as they do for other people. Some of our more recent research provides additional support for this thesis, confirming that, for whatever reason, psychopaths lack some of the “feelable” components of language.11
This deficiency has fascinating implications, especially when considered in the context of psychopaths’ social interactions—manipulative deceit uninhibited by empathy or conscience. For most of us, language has the capacity to elicit powerful emotional feelings. For example, the word cancer evokes not only a clinical description of a disease and its symptoms but a sense of fear, apprehension, or concern, and perhaps disturbing mental images of what it might be like to have it. But to the psychopath, a word is just a word.
Brain-imaging technology offers the prospect of gaining exciting new insights into the emotional life of psychopaths. In a collaborative research project at the Mt. Sinai and Bronx VA Medical Centers in New York, led by psychiatrist Joanne Intra-tor, we recently began to obtain brain-images from psychopathic and normal individuals while they performed a variety of tasks. Our preliminary findings from a pilot project (presented at the annual meetings of the Society for Biological Psychiatry and the American Psychiatric Association in San Francisco, May, 1993), suggest that psychopaths may not use the same areas of the brain that normal individuals do when they process emotional words. If these results can be replicated and extended to other forms of emotional information, they would suggest that psychopaths differ from others either in the strategies they use to process emotional material or in the way their brain processes are organized. In either case, we would be considerably closer than we are now to understanding the mystery of the psychopath.
In a book explaining her side of the shooting of her three children, Diane Downs described her casual relationships with a score of men as loveless, motivated only by sex.12 In letters sent to Robert Bertaluccini (“Bert”), a fellow letter carrier, she wrote of her “promises of undying love, endless devotion and oaths that no one else on earth would ever touch me. It was the game I played with men. And I played it best with Bert.” [p. 144] After shooting her children she had an affair with Jason Redding, and wrote, “But Bert was in the past, and Jason was in the present. True, I was writing letters to Bert telling him how much I loved him, that he was the only man on earth for me. When he began to refuse the letters, I started saving them in a notebook, making an entry each night, most of them a paragraph or two, a page at most. The entries were the same, just with different wording: ‘I love you Bert, why aren’t you here, I need you, you’re the only man for me.’ ... I mixed a drink and wrote my hollow words of love to Bert as I sank into a hot bubble bath.... I thought about Bert... Minutes later Jason knocked at the door, and as I flew down the stairs to meet him, my thoughts of Bert flew as well.” [pp. 36-37] Diane’s “hollow words of love” were a source of pride to her, as if their use was entirely intentional, designed for a particular purpose. However, like all psychopaths, her words of love could not be anything but hollow, for she lacks the capacity to impart real feeling to them.
Earlier I discussed the role of “inner speech” in the development and operation of conscience. It is the emotionally charged thoughts, images, and internal dialogue that give the “bite” to conscience, account for its powerful control over behavior, and generate guilt and remorse for transgressions. This is something that psychopaths cannot understand. For them, conscience is little more than an intellectual awareness of rules others make up—empty words. The feelings needed to give clout to these rules are missing. The question is, why?
CANADA’S MOST NOTORIOUS and reviled criminal is Clifford Olson, a serial murderer sentenced in January 1982 to life imprisonment for the torture and killing of eleven boys and girls. These crimes were the latest and most despicable in a string of antisocial and criminal acts extending back to his early childhood. Although some psychopaths are not violent and few are as brutal as he, Olson is the prototypical psychopath.
Consider the following quotations from a newspaper article written around the time of his trial: “He was a braggart and a bully, a liar and a thief. He was a violent man with a hairtrigger temper. But he could also be charming and smooth-tongued when trying to impress people ... Olson was a compulsive talker ... He’s a real smooth talker, he has the gift of gab ... He was always telling whoppers ... The man was just an out-and-out liar ... He always wanted to test you to the limits. He wanted to see how far he could go before you had to step on him ... He was a manipulator... Olson was a blabbermouth ... We learned after a while not to believe anything he said because he told so many lies.” [Farrow, 1982] A reporter who talked with Olson said, “He talked fast, staccato ... He jumped from topic to topic. He sounded glib, slick, like a con trying to prove he’s tough and important.” [Ouston, 1982]
These reports by people who knew him are important, for they give us a clue to why he was able to get his young, trusting victims alone with him. They may also help to explain the Crown’s decision to pay him $100,000 to tell them where he hid the bodies of seven of the eleven young people he had killed. Not surprisingly, public outrage greeted disclosure of the payment. Some typical headlines were: KILLER WAS PAID TO LOCATE BODIES; MONEY-FOR-GRAVES PAYMENT TO CHILD KILLER GREETED WITH DISGUST.
In the years since his imprisonment Olson has continued to bring grief to the families of his victims by sending them letters with comments about the murders of their children. He has never shown any guilt or remorse for his depredations; on the contrary, he continually complains about his treatment by the press, the prison system, and society. During his trial he preened and postured whenever a camera was present, apparently considering himself an important celebrity rather than a man who had committed a series of atrocities. On January 15, 1983, the Vancouver Sun reported, “Mass killer Clifford Olson has written to the Sun newsroom to say he does not approve of the picture of him we have been using ... and will shortly be sending us newer, more attractive pictures of himself.” [Quotes are from articles by R. Ouston, Vancouver Sun, January 15, 1982, and M. Farrow, Vancouver Sun, January 14, 1982]
At this writing Olson has written to several criminology departments in Canada offering to help them establish a course devoted to studying him.
BELOW THE EMOTIONAL
POVERTY L
INE
If the language of psychopaths is bilateral—controlled by both sides of the brain—it is possible that other brain processes normally controlled by one hemisphere are also under bilateral control. Indeed, although in most people the right side of the brain plays a central role in emotion, recent laboratory evidence indicates that in psychopaths neither side of the brain is proficient in the processes of emotion.13 Why this is so is still a mystery. But an intriguing implication is that the brain processes that control the psychopath’s emotions are divided and unfocused, resulting in a shallow and colorless emotional life.
Ted Bundy may have been indignant when someone referred to him as an emotional robot with nothing inside. “Boy, how far off can he be!” said Bundy. “If they think I have no emotional life, they’re wrong. Absolutely wrong. It’s a very real one and a full one.”14 However, it is abundantly clear from his other comments and the shallow explanations for his murderous behavior that the description is apt. Like all psychopaths, Bundy had only a vague comprehension of the extent of his emotional poverty.
Many people are attracted to pop-psych movements that emphasize a search for self-understanding—“getting in touch with your feelings.” For psychopaths, the exercise—like the search for the Holy Grail—is doomed to failure. In the final analysis, their self-image is defined more by possessions and other visible signs of success and power than by love, insight, and compassion, which are abstractions and have little inherent meaning for them.
WATCH THEIR HANDS
Watch the way someone talking to you moves his or her hands: Do they move infrequently or do they fly all over the place? Do the hand gestures help you to understand what is being said? Some do, for they provide visual enhancement to the speaker’s words—for example, moving the hands wide apart while saying, “It was a really big fish,” or tracing out the shape of a person being described.15
However, most language-related hand gestures convey no information or meaning to the listener. “Empty” hand gestures called beats are small, rapid hand movements that occur only during speech or pauses in speech but are not part of the “story line.” Like other gestures and body movements, they are often part of the “show” the speaker puts on (I’ll have more to say about this in the following chapter) or a reflection of a culturally based style of communication. But beats occur for other reasons as well. For example, many people make these hand gestures while talking on the telephone. The listener can’t see these gestures, so why does the speaker make them?
The answer may be related to evidence that the brain centers that control speech also control the hand gestures made during speech. In some unknown way—perhaps by increasing overall activity in these centers—beats seem to facilitate speech: They help us to put our thoughts and feelings into words. If this sounds strange, watch the frantic hand movements someone makes the next time he or she has trouble finding a word. Or, make a point of not using your hands when you speak; is there an increase in the number of hesitations, pauses, and stumbles in your speech? If you speak two languages, you will probably make a lot more beat gestures when speaking in your second language than when speaking in your native tongue. In some cases, a high rate of beat gestures appears to reflect difficulty in converting thoughts and feelings into speech.
Beats may also tell us something about the size of the “thought units,” or mental packages, that underlie speech. A thought unit can vary from something small, simple, and isolated—a single idea or word, a phrase, a sentence—to something larger and more complex—groups of ideas, sentences, or complete story lines. The ideas, words, phrases, and sentences that comprise large thought units are likely to be well integrated, tied together in some meaningful, consistent, or logical fashion to form a script. Beats appear to “mark off” these thought units: The greater the number of beats, the smaller the units.
Recent evidence suggests that psychopaths use more beats than do normal people, particularly when they talk about things generally considered emotional—for example, describing the way they feel about family members or other “loved ones.”16 We might infer two things from this evidence:
• Like a tourist using high-school French to ask directions in Paris, psychopaths have trouble putting into words emotional ideas because they are vague and poorly understood. In this sense, emotion is like a second language to the psychopath.
• Psychopaths’ thoughts and ideas are organized into rather small mental packages and readily moved around. This can be a distinct advantage when it comes to lying. As psychologist Paul Ekman pointed out, skilled liars are able to break down ideas, concepts, and language into basic components and then recombine them in a variety of ways, almost as if they were playing Scrabble.17 But in doing so, the psychopath endangers his overall script; it may lose its unifying structure or become less coherent and integrated than if he were dealing in large thought units. For this reason, the competent liar often uses a thin “truth line” to help keep track of what he says and to ensure that his story appears consistent to the listener. “The most mischievous liars are those who keep sliding on the verge of truth.”18
A FRAGMENTED TRUTH LINE
Although psychopaths lie a lot, they are not the skilled liars we often make them out to be. As I discussed earlier, their speech is full of inconsistent or contradictory statements. Psychopaths may play mental Scrabble, but they sometimes do it badly because they fail to integrate the pieces into a coherent whole; their truth line is fragmented and patchy, at best.
Consider the inmate quoted earlier who said he had never been violent but once had to kill someone. We understand this as a contradictory statement because we treat it as a single thought unit. However, the inmate may have been dealing with two independent thought units: “I never committed a violent offense,” and, “I once killed someone.” Most of us are able to combine ideas so that they are consistent with some underlying theme, but psychopaths seem to have difficulty doing so. This helps to explain the wild inconsistencies and contradictions that frequently characterize their speech. It may also account for their use of neologisms (combination of the basic components of words—syllables—in ways that seem logical to them but inappropriate to others).
The situation is analogous to a movie in which one scene is shot under cloudy conditions and the next scene—which supposedly takes place a few minutes later—is shot in brilliant sunshine. Obviously the scenes were shot on different days, and the director failed to take this into account when putting them together. Some moviegoers—like some victims of psychopaths—might not notice the discrepancy, particularly if they are engrossed in the action.
One other point about the way in which psychopaths use language: Their “mental packages” are not only small but two-dimensional, devoid of emotional meaning. For most people, the choice of words is determined by both their dictionary meaning and their emotional connotations. But psychopaths need not be so selective; their words are unencumbered by emotional baggage and can be used in ways that seem odd to the rest of us.
For example, a psychopath may see nothing wrong in saying to a woman, “I love you,” just after beating her up, or in telling someone else, “I needed to beat her up to keep her in line, but she knows I love her.” For most people these two events (statement of love, assault) would be logically and affectively incongruous.
Consider this bizarre statement by a man with a high score on the Psychopathy Checklist who served three years in prison for fraud and theft—he tricked his widowed mother into obtaining a $25,000 mortgage on her house, stole the money, and left her to pay off the debt from her meager income as a store clerk: “My mother is a great person, but I worry about her. She works too hard. I really care for that woman, and I’m going to make things easier for her.” When asked about the money he had stolen from her he replied, “I’ve still got some of it stashed away, and when I get out it’s party time!” His expressions of concern for his mother were inconsistent not only with his documented behavior toward her but wi
th his stated plans for the money. When this was pointed out to him he said, “Well, yeah, I love my mother but she’s pretty old and if I don’t look out for myself, who will?”
WHERE WAS I?
It now appears that the communications of psychopaths sometimes are subtly odd and part of a general tendency to “go off track.”19 That is, they frequently change topics, go off on irrelevant tangents, and fail to connect phrases and sentences in a straightforward manner. The story line, though somewhat disjointed, may seem acceptable to the casual listener. For example, one of our male psychopaths, asked by a female interviewer to describe an intense emotional event, responded as follows:
Well, that’s a tough one. So many to think about. I remember once—uh—I went through this red light and there was no traffic, right? So what’s the big deal? This cop started to hassle me for no reason, and he really pissed me off. I didn’t really go through the red light. It was probably only yellow ... so what was his—uh—point? The trouble with cops is they are—uh—most are on a power trip. They act macho, right? I’m not really into macho. I’m more of a lover. What do you think? I mean, if I wasn’t in prison say we met at a party—uh—and I asked you out, and, I’ll bet you’d say yes, right?
This narrative was accompanied by expansive hand movements and exaggerated facial expressions—a dramatic display that blinded our interviewer to what was happening. However, the videotape of the interview clearly revealed to everyone—including our embarrassed interviewer—that the man not only had gone off track but had trapped her into a flirtatious exchange.
Psychopaths are notorious for not answering the question posed them or for answering in a way that seems unresponsive to the question. For example, one psychopath in our research, asked if his moods went up and down, replied, “Uh—up and down?—well, you know—some people say they are always nervous but sometimes they seem pretty calm. I guess their moods go up and down. I remember once—uh—I was feeling low and—my buddy came over and we watched the game on TV and—uh—we had a bet on and he won—and I felt pretty shitty.”
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