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Temporal experience, emotions and decision making in psychopathy

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Notes

  1. For a further phenomenological approach to psychopathy that focusses on issues relating to emotions and self-other-relation see Englebert 2015.

  2. For similar approaches see e.g. Ratcliffe 2015. For a phenomenological approach to psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder see Jacobs 2012, 2014.

  3. Pemmet (2013) refers to this as “acquired sociopathy”, but argues there may also be cases of sociopathy, in which specific moral beliefs of the individual play a central role. I leave this further complication aside here. Jacobs in turn uses the term sociopathy to make clear that her descriptions are based on the ICD and the DSM instead of the Hare scale (Jacobs 2012).

  4. For recent discussions and analysis of these cases see McIlwain 2010; Watson 2013.

  5. As should already become clear in this rough and ready description the rational errors I wish to focus on do not concern the development of sustainable long-term plans, but rather short to medium term decision making. The case of long term decision making has been discussed in detail by Kerrin Jacobs (2012), who draws on Nida-Rümelin’s concept of structural rationality in her discussion.

  6. Of course, the fact that it is part of the PCL-R does not mean that all psychopaths exhibit this tendency. It is in principle possible to be diagnosed as a psychopath without being a pathological liar, insofar as one rates high enough on other items on the checklist.

  7. Thanks are owed to Gwen Adshead for bringing this to my awareness. There may be one problematic exception to this rule. Psychopaths in a prison environment may participate in studies to increase their chances of an early discharge. However, these cases are problematic for two reasons: Subjects here may be motivated to portray themselves as not suffering from any mental condition. They may thus choose to leave researchers in the dark concerning their real motives and experiences. Secondly, psychopaths in a prison environment may (on average) differ from their non-imprisoned peers. For example, their condition may be more severe, or their experience in some other sense atypical, or psychopathy in them might often be mixed with other disorders (such as addiction). All these factors may result in the outcomes of such studies being in some sense skewed.

  8. Although depression is sometimes conceived as a mood disorder under which an individual may suffer for a relatively limited amount of time, this is not the only perspective on the condition, so that similar issues may be of relevance here. See e.g. Jacobs 2013.

  9. The approach I take here is inspired by Owen et al. 2015.

  10. The example is taken from Hare 1999.

  11. This is inspired by Ratcliffe’s talk of a “possibility space” (Ratcliffe 2015). For a discussion of this terminology for the case of psychopathy see Jacobs 2014.

  12. For a differentiation between various forms that this motivational pull can take, see Ratcliffe 2015.

  13. Kennett and Matthews (2009) also mention this idea, without defending it in detail.

  14. Note, however, that Takahashi et al. did not distinguish the reactions of primary and secondary psychopaths, so that it is an open question whether the results are indeed applicable to primary psychopaths. Nevertheless, given the abnormal fear reactions it does seem plausible that this is the case.

  15. There are, however, some limitations here. Lilienfeld et al. 1996 found mixed results on a whole set of temporal tasks administered to psychopaths. Furthermore, we again face the issue that the studies cited did not differentiate between primary and secondary psychopaths.

  16. In this whole passage I rely heavily on the interpretation by Stafford and Gregory (Stafford and Gregory 2006). It should be noted that Heidegger distinguishes difference forms of boredom. I leave these distinctions aside for the purposes of this essay. My aim is not to gain a complete understanding on Heidegger’s account of boredom. Rather my focus is on those parts of the theory that help us to gain a better understanding of psychopathic experience.

  17. I do not want to suggest, of course, that this is the only reason for the aggressive behaviour often seen in psychopaths.

  18. Additionally, there is some indication that boredom may also be relevant for how we value delayed rewards. If we experience time as proceeding much slower than usual, then delays should also seem more costly to us. But if this is the case, then we should find stronger delay discounting in bored individuals (Wittmann and Paulus 2008). While the experiments of Takahashi et al. (2014) indicate that psychopaths do not engage in stronger delay discounting there are some indications that this may not be true for secondary psychopaths (Dean et al. 2013). Further studies differentiating between primary and secondary psychopathy would be needed to substantiate this claim.

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    Anja Berninger

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Berninger, A. Temporal experience, emotions and decision making in psychopathy. Phenom Cogn Sci 16, 661–677 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-016-9466-y

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