A recent study by Matthias Burghart, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute in Freiburg, suggests that people with psychopathic traits may struggle with empathy and controlling their emotions due to a condition known as alexithymia.
This condition, also referred to as “emotional blindness,” involves difficulty recognizing and describing one’s own emotions. The research, published in PLOS ONE, sheds light on a potential underlying cause of the emotional deficits seen in psychopathic individuals.
Understanding Alexithymia
The term alexithymia comes from Greek roots, where “a-” means “without,” and “lexis” and “thymos” mean “reading” and “emotion,” respectively.
People with alexithymia often perceive their emotions as mere physical sensations without understanding their emotional basis. For example, emotional tension might only be felt as discomfort or pain without a clear sense of the underlying feelings.
Previous research has linked alexithymia to various mental health problems, including anxiety and depression. However, researchers have not deeply explored how it might connect with psychopathic traits.
According to Burghart, identifying and understanding one’s own emotions is crucial for developing emotional skills such as empathy and emotion regulation. This raises a key question: could the presence of alexithymia in people with psychopathic traits help explain their emotional difficulties?
The Study Setup
To investigate this connection, Burghart and his colleagues from the University of Konstanz conducted a survey with two groups:
- A random sample of 315 people from the general population, recruited through posters, flyers, and social media.
- A group of 50 psychiatric inpatients from four different wards of a forensic clinic. These individuals had been admitted after committing crimes under conditions like reduced criminal responsibility or drug addiction.
Both groups completed a series of self-report questionnaires commonly used in psychological research:
- The Triarchic Psychopathy Measure (TriPM) to assess psychopathic traits.
- The Saarbrücken Personality Questionnaire to evaluate empathy levels.
- The Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20 to measure alexithymia.
- The Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ) to assess emotion regulation strategies.
Key Findings
As expected, the group from the forensic clinic showed higher levels of boldness, meanness, and impulsive behaviors compared to the general population group.
These characteristics align with typical psychopathic traits and confirm findings from earlier studies, which have noted a higher prevalence of psychopathic symptoms in criminal populations.
The new discovery in this study is the significant link between psychopathic traits and alexithymia. Individuals with stronger psychopathic traits struggled more with recognizing and describing their own emotions.
This emotional blindness likely contributes to the well-known lack of empathy and poor emotion regulation in people with psychopathic traits.
Implications for Treatment
The study suggests that if people with psychopathic traits can learn to recognize and describe their emotions, their empathy and ability to regulate their emotions could improve.
Burghart believes that focusing on increasing emotional awareness in therapy could be an effective approach. This might not only enhance their emotional skills but could also reduce the likelihood of re-offending among criminal offenders.
The Bigger Picture
These findings highlight the importance of understanding the emotional lives of people with psychopathic traits. By addressing their difficulties in recognizing their own emotions, it may be possible to improve their social and emotional functioning.
This approach has the potential to change how therapists work with such individuals, aiming for better emotional awareness as a way to foster empathy and reduce harmful behaviors.
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The research findings can be found in PLOS ONE.
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