A Psychologist Puts Trump and the GOP on the Couch by Michael Bader in AlterNet

A Psychologist Puts Trump and the GOP on the Couch

What's going on in the Republican mind?

By Michael Bader, DMH / AlterNet

September 28, 2015

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NATIONAL HARBOR, MD - MARCH 6, 2014: Donald Trump speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).
Photo Credit: Christopher Halloran / Shutterstock.com

Rather than simply reacting with self-righteous contempt for the current crop of GOP presidential candidates, liberals like myself should try to also understand their appeal, however much we might believe it’s not strong enough to put any of them in the White House. The pre-scripted kabuki dances on display in their debates have made them easy targets for disdain, so easy that it’s a bit like playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey with your eyes open. Trump is an obviously racist bloviator, the creepiest and most blatantly disturbed of the bunch, for sure, but the lot of them come across as empty suits projecting poll-driven personas that their handlers believe will resonate with their base of angry and/or older white men. Moments of “authenticity” (e.g., they love their parents, spouses and children—imagine that!) are, themselves, always wooden, overly-crafted and ginned up with phony emotion and reported breathlessly by a media itself unable to stand on its own two feet and tell truth from fiction when it comes from these conservative wind-up dolls.

The Democrats will stage manage their personalities and manipulate their messages, too. Sanders is by far the most authentic, but he had to pivot in order to re-emphasize his record on race and women’s rights. Hillary will try to “present” herself as a human being (she’s a grandmother, after all), and the other guys—whoever they are—will do something similar when they can.

All of this is politics as usual, dutifully but cynically covered by a press corps that has surrendered even the pretense of critical thinking, instead sucking up to what they see as the basest cravings of their readers and viewers for the political version of reality television.

But while all politicians pander and throw authenticity under the bus of political expediency, the current plague of high-visibility GOP candidates project two especially pathological themes that they’ve decided will resonate with the feelings of millions of voters: paranoia and grandiosity.

As a liberal and a psychologist, I think it’s important to understand the nature and meaning of this resonance. The fears and insecurities that paranoia and grandiosity seek to diminish are feelings that a liberal agenda should be better able to address. Undecided voters can be drawn to the left or the right, and the more we understand the appeal of the American Right, the better able we might be to counter it with a more progressive and healthy message and platform. But we will never know if that’s possible or how to do it if we don’t understand the psychological dynamics behind the appeal of right-wing paranoia and grandiosity.

Let’s start with grandiosity, a term familiar to psychologists in our work with patients who need to inflate their self-esteem and self-assessments in order to ward off feelings of inferiority or helplessness. But just as individuals identify with, say, a sports team, so too do individuals identify with their nation—e.g., Team America. In our case, the political or collective version of personal grandiosity is what is known as “American Exceptionalism,” namely the tapestry of stories about the specialness of the United States when it comes to personal freedom, economic opportunity and growth, and military superiority. These stories have gained mythic proportions. They’re all captured by one unquestioned assumption: We are the greatest country in the history of the world. Period. This is a core part of the relentless drumbeat we hear from the conservative echo chamber.

But this braggadocio—what former Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright called “The Arrogance of Power”—requires that the ideal of American “greatness” be cleansed of any blemishes, just as a grandiose or narcissistic patient has to deny his or her human frailty and fallibility. This is where paranoia comes in handy. It’s easier to believe you are exceptional if you are comparing yourself with others and if you are proving your remarkable strength against naysayers or challengers. It helps, in other words, to have an enemy who is threatening your greatness.

Thus, the rhetoric of the current crop of Republican politicians, including, especially, the GOP clowns running for president, combines grandiosity and paranoia. Our nation’s greatness isn’t threatened by simple human fallibility but by Obama, Muslims, immigrants, Democrats, Planned Parenthood and Big Government. The second Republican presidential debate was laced with echoes of these beliefs, sometimes baldly stated, other times expressed as Obama-bashing. According to Carly Fiorina, “The United States of America is back in the leadership business.” Trump coughed up this hairball:  “We’ll make our country rich again, and we’ll have a great life all together.”

In other words, we’re in danger of losing our place in the front of the line, and only a Republican president has enough sinew and muscular confidence in American greatness to make sure that doesn’t happen. Grandiosity and paranoia—we’re the greatest, but we have to vigilantly remind ourselves and everyone else of that fact because we’re also threatened. A great “us” has to be continually reinforced by invoking threats from a demeaned “them.”

The current frontrunners for a “them” that threatens our perfect national collective are immigrants and radical Islamic extremists. Like the Red scares of the 1950s, our current xenophobia is based on the same paranoid view of ourselves and the world. The first thing Ted Cruz would apparently do as president is to “shred Obama’s catastrophic Iran deal.” Trump is the poster child for paranoia with his dumb “we’ll build a wall but put in a beautiful gate” through which we’ll ostensibly let in only beautiful people, and keep out the “bad dudes.” And, of course, his racist demagoguery reached a peak recently when he appeared to welcome a statement from a man in the audience who asserted: “We have a problem in this country. It’s called Muslims. You know, our President is one. You know he’s not even an American.”  

What does psychology tell us about the origins of paranoia and grandiosity? It tells us that pathological attitudes and states of mind are best understood as attempts, however irrational they may seem, to feel safe and secure.  

All of us seek safety and security.  

Paranoia, for example, simply reflects an attempt to locate a frightening or painful thought outside the self, to get rid of threatening feelings, project them onto others, and then turn an internal struggle with bad feelings into an external struggle with bad people. For example, if I’m suffering from feelings of weakness or worthlessness, the belief, however false, that someone else is causing me to feel this way can temporarily help restore my sense of innocence and self-respect. There’s nothing wrong with me that getting rid of you won’t cure. In fact, in this paranoid version of reality, I’m a good or even great guy defending himself against an external danger. What emerges in the therapist’s consulting room is that paranoia solves an internal problem by making it an external one, even at the price of denying reality.   

For example, Donald Trump is actually a balding misogynist, but he doesn’t have to feel like one if he wears a toupee (allegedly made from the hair of the critically-endangered Brown Spider Monkey) and tells himself and others that Megyn Kelly was menstruating and had it out for him.  

In this sense, Trump shows us what happens when the personal becomes political. Like the United States itself, he is great and good, not declining and mean. Paranoia works pretty well when you’re feeling off your game.

Grandiosity works similarly as a defense against painful internal states. Thus, the grandiosity inherent in the axiomatic assertion that “we are the greatest nation in the history of the world” uses stories and images of American perfection, greatness and omnipotence to counteract narratives that we might be a nation in decline, or reeking on the inside from toxic inequality and a callous indifference to the welfare of the unfortunate. Combine grandiosity and paranoia and you have the current Republican talking points.  

When individual psychopathology becomes a collective filter for understanding the political world, we see—as we do in the rhetoric and vision of today’s GOP—a pathological set of values guaranteed to lead to pathological policies. If I were to try to list the essential psychological dynamics underlying grandiosity and paranoia in the patients I see, and you were to simply replace the personal pronoun “I” with “America” or “the American people” and “you” and “them” with one of the scapegoats demonized by the GOP (e.g., people with darker skins, the wrong religion or different sexual orientation), the symmetry between crazy individuals and crazy politics becomes clearer. Again, to oversimplify:

“I’m not small; I’m big.” (American is not small; it’s/we’re big, etc.)

“I’m not bad; I’m the essence of goodness.”

“I’m not hurting others; I’m always helping them.”  

“I’m not failing or losing; I’m a successful winner.”

“The problem isn’t in me; it’s in you.”  

“If I could get rid of you; I’d be great and perfect and happy again.” 

You don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to see that the adolescent tough-guy primping we see on the GOP presidential debate stages is the political manifestation of commonplace psychological mechanisms regularly seen in individuals, namely, desperate attempts to defend against dangerous and painful feelings and fears. And just as in therapy, the important challenge is to understand those feelings and fears, because when a Donald Trump wants to build a wall to protect America, he is subliminally playing to a wish in his supporters to protect themselves. But, again, the question is: protect themselves from what? What is being denied or defended against?

The answer is that the threats that grandiose and paranoid attitudes defend against involve feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, loneliness and self-hatred—all of which are arguably greater now than ever in our culture. American exceptionalism and xenophobia offer symbolic antidotes in the political world to the more personal distress of millions of Americans today. Trump and the other airheads on the GOP stage today offer a distorted vision of the world that, like the Donald’s orange wig, helps to cover up genuine feelings of vulnerability and impotence.  

For many people, the Great Recession of 2008 dashed the American Dream to which they had come to aspire or which they believed they were actually living. Millions of people lost their homes, their IRAs and other savings that were allocated for retirement and for their children’s education. These losses—the result of financial shenanigans far, far away—were accompanied by great feelings of helplessness that caused stress levels to go through the ceiling. Mortgages went underwater and people took on second or third jobs, reinforcing a sense of insecurity along with feelings of helplessness and depression. And while being overwhelmed and powerless to stop the feeling of losing ground, people saw hedge fund managers and bankers getting bailed out. Because we think we live in a meritocracy in which rewards are distributed according to ability, people blamed themselves for not being able to make ends meet, or hold on to their jobs, or for losing money in the stock market, or for having tapped into their home equity too much. I heard these self-criticisms and doubts in my consulting room every day—feelings of helplessness, pessimism, isolation and self-blame.

In 1990, a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll found that 50% of Americans thought their children would be better off in 20 years. In 2015, a full 76% of Americans expressed skepticism that their children’s lives would be better off than their own. Even though millions of Americans were in the same boat, feelings of isolation and self-blame became more prevalent and debilitating. The ethic of individualism in our culture invariably leads people to blame themselves for their “lot” in life, even if that lot was caused by forces beyond their control. So, as the quality of life has deteriorated, the amount of depression and self-blaming has increased.  

Further, as researchers such as John Cacioppo and Robert Putnam have documented, the breakdown of community organizations and bonds has resulted in increased social isolation, especially among the elderly (an important part of the Republican base, of course). In 2009, a study by Kodak revealed that most Americans felt that “we have fewer meaningful relationships than we had five years ago.” This trend has only worsened.

So we have a social landscape in which people feel increasingly pessimistic, helpless, isolated and self-blaming—feelings perfectly addressed by GOP platitudes intended to reassure us that we’re really great, all-powerful, and that it’s someone else’s fault if we’re not. 

Ultimately, the appeal to an imaginary but reassuring sense of community undergirds all of these platitudes about American greatness, strength and antipathy toward the “other.” The latent message is: there is an “us” here, a great “us” full of power and noble intentions, an “us” to which everyone can belong as long as we keep “them” away or subjugated in ways that render them non-threatening (bombing them, building walls, deportation, etc.). Who doesn’t want to belong? To be part of an “us?”  

The myths of American greatness serve this purpose perfectly. What is a better tonic to the pain of isolation and helplessness brought on by our market-driven and pathological ethos of individualism than to belong to Dream Team America, the greatest and most powerful nation that ever existed in the history of the world?  

That the GOP has been instrumental in creating the conditions that it then seeks to heal with its so-called “muscular” foreign and military policy and jingoistic attacks on immigrants is an inconvenient truth that isn’t mentioned, but has been thoroughly described and discussed by progressive political analysts and sociologists. The Right helped create the problems that their racist warmongering and so-called patriotism aim to remedy. Psychology can’t fix these problems, but it can hopefully help us understand the mindset behind a system in which victims support their victimizers.

 

Michael Bader is a psychologist and psychoanalyst in San Francisco who has written extensively on issues found at the intersection of psychology, culture, and progressive politics. His recent book, More Than Bread and Butter: A Psychologist Speaks to Progressives About What People Really Need in Order to Win an Change the World is available on Amazon.com and on his website:www.michaelbader.com

The Genetics of Blond Hair (by Elizabeth Pennisi)

Liz is a staff writer for Science.

Sunday, June 1, 2014 - 1:15pm

For all those brunettes wishing they were naturally blond, a small genetic change could have made all the difference. Scientists have found that replacing one of DNA’s four letters at a key spot in the genome shifts a particular gene’s activity and leads to fairer hair. Not only does the work provide a molecular basis for flaxen locks, but it also demonstrates how changes in segments of DNA that control genes, not just changes in genes themselves, are important to what an organism looks like.

“It really is a nice story that pulls together and helps make sense of a lot of the biology that we have partially understood up to this point,” says Richard Sturm, a molecular geneticist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, who was not involved with the work.

Because our appearance is so strongly influenced by the color of our skin and hair, geneticists have long sought to understand the genetic bases of these traits and when they evolved. Over the past 6 years, studies of genetic variation in thousands of people have linked at least eight DNA regions to blondness based on the fact that a certain DNA letter, or base, was found in people with that hair color but not in people with other hair colors. Some of those base changes, or single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), were in genes involved in the production of pigments, such as melanin. Mutations in these genes typically change skin and hair color. Other SNPs lay outside genes but could be part of the regulatory DNA that helps control the function of genes nearby. Changes in that regulatory DNA could result in hair color but not skin color change, or vice versa, because regulatory DNA can change gene activity in just certain parts of the body.

In northern Europeans, the closest gene to an SNP that was strongly linked to blondness wasKITLG, which codes for a protein that is key to making sure cells go to their proper places in the body and specialize accordingly. That SNP caught the eye of David Kingsley, an evolutionary geneticist at Stanford University in California. He and his colleagues had found that this gene was key to altering the coloration of fish called sticklebacks that had become isolated in freshwater rivers and lakes when glaciers receded. In each freshwater location, these fish were evolving independently, yet time and time again, changes in the regulation of this gene led to fairer or darker skin, depending on the murkiness of the water. “We had a choice,” Kingsley recalls. “We could study skin color in fish or in humans—it was the very same problem in the very same gene.”

To learn whether that SNP was part of the regulatory DNA for human KITGL, Kingsley’s team turned to mice. The researchers knew they were on the right track because mice with DNA that’s backward in that region were lighter or even white, instead of the usual brown. They made two variations of the human version of that DNA to put into mice. In one variant, they left the blond-generating SNP intact; and in the other variant, they changed that SNP to another base, so that the DNA looked like it does in brunettes. They inserted just one copy of one DNA variant into each mouse.

Mice with the blond-generating SNP were lighter than mice with the other variant, Kingsley and his colleagues report online today in Nature Genetics. When he and his colleagues studied this regulatory DNA in human cells grown in a laboratory dish, they discovered that the blond-generating SNP reduced KITLG activity by only about 20%. Yet that was enough to change the hair color. “This isn’t a ‘turn the switch off,’ ” Kingsley says. “It’s a ‘turn the switch down.’ ”

“This study provides solid evidence” that this switch regulates the expression of KITLG in developing hair follicles, says Fan Liu, a genetic epidemiologist at Erasmus MC in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, who was not involved with the work. He and his colleagues have found they can predict red and black color pretty accurately based on looking at 22 hair-color-related SNPs that a person has, but distinguishing blonds and brunettes is “much more difficult,” he says.

“Regulatory DNA is very likely to play an important role in pigmentation in general,” adds Eiríkur Steingrímsson, a molecular biologist at the University of Iceland, Reykjavik, who was not involved with the work.

Blond hair may not be important to survival, but the story of one of its genetic causes helps clarify how evolution can occur. KITLG is active in many places in the body, and any mutation in the gene itself would result in widespread problems in the body and even death. Yet it is bracketed by sections of regulatory DNA, any one of which may take control in a different tissue. “This finding explains why the effect of KITLG is specific to hair but not eye and skin, which is quite unique compared to most other pigmentation genes known today,” Liu says. Thus, the change that led to blond hair did not affect the gene elsewhere in the body. “It’s literally only skin deep,” Kingsley says.

An Old Poem Written Twelve Years Ago...

A Wish:
Some sunlight to keep one's spirits bright.
Some drizzle to be grateful for the light.
Some contentment to keep the soul alive.
Some anguish so joy is not contrived.
Some gain to satisfy real need.
Some loss to keep away the greed.
Some hellos to transform the last goodbye,
One love that can never die.

The Conservative March Toward a Society of Sociopaths by Allen Clifton

Last night I spent some time with a close friend (let’s call him Jake) and as we often do when we get together, we discussed politics.  You see, he’s a fantastic source for political insight because he doesn’t really follow politics or have any kind of political affiliation.  Hell, I don’t know if he’s ever even voted.

But Jake is a great source because he has another close friend, let’s call him Stan, who’s a far right-wing conservative.  Therefore he hears my side and Stan’s side, watches the news, reads the paper and based on only what he sees as logical and rational he molds his opinion.  Which to this point he often tells me most of the stuff Stan says to him just doesn’t make any sense.

Last night when discussing Stan and some of what I refer to as his asinine political beliefs, it occurred to me—Stan is exactly how Republicans want Americans to behave.

And Stan is a sociopath.

He’s a white male, strongly opposed to most other races and immigrants.  Believes every single far right-wing economic theory imaginable and actually cited Argentina as a “beacon for true capitalism.”  He has no remorse for others, seems to live in a world where he’s the focal point but he presents himself as extremely charming and personable when you first meet him.  He has no problem ignoring social ethics or morals if it benefits his self interest.  He’s told my friend that people should only worry about themselves, and not care about the struggles of others.  That in life, self interests should trump everything else
.

Then, and I kid you not, he apparently followed his “only worry about your own self interest” speech by pressing my friend on why he’s not more involved in church.

See, Stan is exactly the kind of person Republicans want to create.

A society of people who only worry about themselves.  People who ostracize everyone that’s not like them.  Humans that value possessions over people, and while they might give money to their church, it’s only because their church is filled with people just like them.  And while these people go to church and call themselves “Christians,” they’ve somehow convinced themselves that Jesus Christ was some selfish, hateful, judgmental person who valued his own self interest over the betterment of others less fortunate than himself.

And Stan is a perfect example of this.  Somehow in one discussion he preached to my friend Jake on why he should only worry about himself, while also questioning why he isn’t more involved in church—a place that’s supposed to emphasize generosity and helping others.

Stan will talk about Jesus and how he himself is a Christian—then follow that by calling African Americans derogatory names, claim as humans we only need to worry about ourselves, thinks Muslims should leave the country (and would prefer they didn’t exist at all) and shows no sign of any kind of moral obligation to those in society who are less fortunate than he is.

Because see, in a society of sociopaths, greed is good.  Greed is the driving force behind their existence.  It’s acceptable in a society of sociopaths for people like the Koch brothers to oppose minimum wage and health care, while being worth tens of billions of dollars, because a sociopath doesn’t feel they owe anything to anyone.

If their workers are underpaid, overworked, lack benefits or safe working conditions, in the mind of a sociopath—who cares?  Quit and get another job or stop complaining because they don’t owe workers anything.  They only have an obligation to themselves and their own self interests.  If workers want better pay, safer working conditions or benefits—find another job.  If you can’t find a job which offers any of that—too bad.

That’s not for the sociopath to worry about.  The sociopath is only concerned about themselves and what makes them feel good.

Which is where church comes in.  These right-wing sociopaths go to church, and largely excuse their hypocrisy and lack of morality by citing church attendance as why they’re not horrible people.

After all, they go to church 2-3 times a week, that makes them a Christian, right?  They’re not morally bankrupt individuals suffering from a psychological disorder—they’re “good American Christians.”

Because that’s exactly what their leaders tell them that they are.  Which of course is another sign of a sociopath.  The ability to charm and manipulate people into getting what they want.

Kind of like a political party that’s convinced millions of low-income and middle class Americans that their economic salvation is found by giving people worth billions tax breaks, while eliminating the minimum wage and cutting programs which the poor and middle class benefit from.

And that’s exactly what Republicans advocate—policies which benefit 2% of the richest people at the expense of the other 98%.  Because they’ve somehow convinced these people that if they just “work hard enough” they can become part of that elite 2%.

Which of course, 98% of us will never be a part of.

But Republicans enforce this belief that we must only concern ourselves with what we need, and any regulations or laws which seek to help others are the enemy.  It’s these programs that help others which cause 98% of Americans to flounder outside of that illustrious 2%
.

It’s not the greed of the 2%, it’s the laziness of the poor.

Which leads us to the rapidly de-evolving Republican party.  A party that doesn’t care about the environment, health care access for Americans, children, education, the well-being of our military or the poor.

They only care about themselves and how much they can possess.  People who place value on inanimate objects like guns or money before human beings.  Then nothing you can tell these people will convince them of anything, because your opinion doesn’t matter.

Because the sociopath isn’t concerned about what you, I or anyone else thinks of them—only what they think of themselves.  Which is why any type of disgusting behavior they exhibit is perfectly acceptable.  That behavior got them something that they wanted—and to a sociopath their own self interests are all that really matter.

And that’s exactly the type of society conservatives are trying to march us toward.

Are Shrinks Nuts? by Cecil Adams

Are shrinks nuts?

September 28, 2012

Dear Cecil:

Is it true that, as a class, psychotherapists and other mental health professionals are crazier than average? And that despite their training and experience, they can recognize their own issues less readily than the average nutcase?

— Paul

Cecil replies:

I defer judgment on whether shrinks don’t recognize their problems. On the contrary, there are indications some mental health professionals enter the field because they do recognize their problems and think their work will help them get a grip.

I can hear you saying: that’s like becoming a cop so you can work on your anger management. Please, a little sympathy. The best way to understand shrinks is to put yourself in their shoes.

Let’s suppose you dedicate yourself to healing the psychic wounds of others. Are you probably nuttier than average? Depends how we define nutty. I haven’t seen good evidence you’re statistically likely to hear voices, think you’re the angel Gabriel, or otherwise show signs of clinical insanity. On the other hand, are the odds decent that you'll show signs of what we might call maladjustment? No question, they are.

It’s easy to see why. Psychiatry and psychology, like police work, have long been recognized as high-stress fields of practice due to constant exposure to humanity’s dark side. In interviews with medical students about their perceptions of psychiatry, researchers found a common concern was that (as one subject put it) “working with crazies will make you crazy.”

For all that, the prevalence of mental disorders among mental health workers didn’t receive much attention until the 1980s. A widely noted study from 1980 found 73 percent of psychiatrists had experienced moderate to incapacitating anxiety early in their careers, and 58 percent had suffered from moderate to incapacitating depression.

To some extent this is simply a result of working in medicine — physicians in general suffer from higher stress levels and depression than the general population and have a higher suicide rate. But research suggests mental health specialists are particularly at risk. One British study found psychiatrists had nearly five times the suicide rate of general practitioners, and U.S. research indicates psychiatrists commit suicide at two to three times the rate of the general population.

Similarly, depression, stress, and burnout are high among physicians but higher among psychiatrists; the same is true of alcohol and drug abuse. Psychiatrists have a divorce rate 2.7 times that of other physicians and as much as five times that of the general public. From a quarter to a half of psychiatrists say they’re suffering from burnout at any given time.

A study of more than 8,000 Finnish hospital employees found the psychiatric staff was 81 percent more likely to suffer from a current or past mental illness and 61 percent more likely to miss work due to depression. Psychiatric staff were twice as likely to smoke as other hospital staff and had much higher rates of alcohol use. A 30-year study of 20,000 UK medical workers found psychiatrists were 46 percent more likely than their peers to die from injuries and poisoning, and at 12 percent greater risk of dying overall.

If you were a woman in the mental health field, Paul, you’d have an especially tough time of it. Compared to other female physicians, female psychiatrists have a 67 percent greater likelihood of suffering from psychological problems, primarily depression, and have a 26 percent greater likelihood of having a family history of psychological problems. They’re twice as likely to smoke, drink 50 percent more alcohol, and rate their personal health much lower than their peers do.

As a male, you may find other ways to alleviate your stress. The California Medical Board found male psychiatrists were almost twice as likely to be disciplined for unethical sexual relationships with patients as their peers.

Many of the problems you’ll encounter as a mental health professional have a lot to do with the nature of the work — hey, skimming through my inbox any given week is enough to make me reach for the Thorazine. Jung called the transference of psychological problems from patient to doctor an “unconscious infection.”

Patients can get violent, either with you or themselves. Dealing with certain types of patients can be emotionally draining, such as those with borderline personality disorder or victims of sexual abuse. You’ve also got stressors such as overwork, job instability, liability fears, paperwork overload, and disciplinary actions and monitoring.

But let’s get back to the point I made at the outset. Does the mental health field attract people with mental problems? Research is thin, but some studies have found mental health workers are more likely than average to have experienced early abuse and trauma. A much-cited 1963 study reported that 24 out of 25 psychiatrists had entered the field because of a wish to explore some personal conflict.

That gives one pause. Sure, there’s value in consulting a health professional who’s been down the same road as us. But who wants their therapist thinking, “Maybe after I get this head case straightened out, I’ll figure out what’s wrong with me”?

— Cecil Adams

 

How to spot psychopaths: Speech patterns give them away by Wynne Parry

Psychopaths are known to be wily and manipulative, but even so, they unconsciously betray themselves, according to scientists who have looked for patterns in convicted murderers' speech as they described their crimes.

The researchers interviewed 52 convicted murderers, 14 of them ranked as psychopaths according to the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised, a 20-item assessment, and asked them to describe their crimes in detail. Using computer programs to analyze what the men said, the researchers found that those with psychopathic scores showed a lack of emotion, spoke in terms of cause-and-effect when describing their crimes, and focused their attention on basic needs, such as food, drink and money.

While we all have conscious control over some words we use, particularly nouns and verbs, this is not the case for the majority of the words we use, including little, functional words like "to" and "the" or the tense we use for our verbs, according to Jeffrey Hancock, the lead researcher and an associate professor in communications at Cornell University, who discussed the work on Monday (Oct. 17) in Midtown Manhattan at Cornell's ILR Conference Center.

"The beautiful thing about them is they are unconsciously produced," Hancock said.

These unconscious actions can reveal the psychological dynamics in a speaker's mind even though he or she is unaware of it, Hancock said.

What it means to be a psychopath

Psychopaths make up about 1 percent of the general population and as much as 25 percent of male offenders in federal correctional settings, according to the researchers. Psychopaths are typically profoundly selfish and lack emotion. "In lay terms, psychopaths seem to have little or no 'conscience,'" write the researchers in a study published online in the journal Legal and Criminological Psychology.

Psychopaths are also known for being cunning and manipulative, and they make for perilous interview subjects, according to Michael Woodworth, one of the authors and a psychologist who studies psychopathy at the University of British Columbia, who joined the discussion by phone.

"It is unbelievable," Woodworth said. "You can spend two or three hours and come out feeling like you are hypnotized."

While there are reasons to suspect that psychopaths' speech patterns might have distinctive characteristics, there has been little study of it, the team writes.  

How words give them away

To examine the emotional content of the murderers' speech, Hancock and his colleagues looked at a number of factors, including how frequently they described their crimes using the past tense. The use of the past tense can be an indicator of psychological detachment, and the researchers found that the psychopaths used it more than the present tense when compared with the nonpsychopaths. They also found more dysfluencies — the "uhs" and "ums" that interrupt speech — among psychopaths. Nearly universal in speech, dysfluencies indicate that the speaker needs some time to think about what they are saying.

With regard to psychopaths, "We think the 'uhs' and 'ums' are about putting the mask of sanity on," Hancock told LiveScience.

Psychopaths appear to view the world and others instrumentally, as theirs for the taking, the team, which also included Stephen Porter from the University of British Columbia, wrote.

As they expected, the psychopaths' language contained more words known as subordinating conjunctions. These words, including "because" and "so that," are associated with cause-and-effect statements.

"This pattern suggested that psychopaths were more likely to view the crime as the logical outcome of a plan (something that 'had' to be done to achieve a goal)," the authors write.

And finally, while most of us respond to higher-level needs, such as family, religion or spirituality, and self-esteem, psychopaths remain occupied with those needs associated with a more basic existence.

Their analysis revealed that psychopaths used about twice as many words related to basic physiological needs and self-preservation, including eating, drinking and monetary resources than the nonpsychopaths, they write.

By comparison, the nonpsychopathic murderers talked more about spirituality and religion and family, reflecting what nonpsychopathic people would think about when they just committed a murder, Hancock said.

The researchers are interested in analyzing what people write on Facebook or in other social media, since our unconscious mind also holds sway over what we write. By analyzing stories written by students from Cornell and the University of British Columbia, and looking at how the text people generate using social media relates to scores on the Self-Report Psychopathy scale. Unlike the checklist, which is based on an extensive review of the case file and an interview, the self report is completed by the person in question.

This sort of tool could be very useful for law enforcement investigations, such as in the case of the Long Island serial killer, who is being sought for the murders of at least four prostitutes and possibly others, since this killer used the online classified site Craigslist to contact victims, according to Hancock.      

Text analysis software could be used to conduct a "first pass," focusing the work for human investigators, he said. "A lot of time analysts tell you they feel they are drinking from a fire hose."

Knowing a suspect is a psychopath can affect how law enforcement conducts investigations and interrogations, Hancock said.

Random Thougths on a Chilly Day

I sit at a rapidly aging computer in my unadorned office at home pressing, sometimes banging keys, that I hope will yield some semblance of worthwhile reflections.

I have concluded that christian fundamentalists, particularly those who believe in creationism, are of two types: 1. the ones who are wholly ignorant of science because they have never been exposed to it, who were brought up in households that questioned nothing, and 2. the intellectually lazy, who could read and study science but choose not to. I suppose both types could reside in the same individual; how depressing...

Thanks partly to fundamentalists but perhaps more likely due to our wealth-induced sloth and entitlement, the United States ranks near the bottom in scientific literacy among all westernized nations.. Carl Sagan estimated we have a 95% scientifically illiterate populace: less than half know that the earth requires a year to go around the sun, for example, and just under one half think that people and dinosaurs lived together. Know what creationists say when you show them carnivorous dinosaur teeth? They claim that just because they had sharp teeth doesn't mean they didn't eat plants!

I have debated via the internet with a number of creationists. One claimed to be sure that man not only coexisted with dinosaurs but that the bible proved that Jesus kept dinosaurs as pets. I plead with you to draw a line in the sand between insanity and reason and to place these people on the other side of it.

If I"m being honest, I think Christians shortchange their god on a regular basis. For example, if I spend my time in seeking real truth, investigate the natural world using sound methodology, and do it with utmost integrity, do good works otherwise, but do not believe in a supernatural judging, supervising, thought-examining and penalizing cop in the clouds, a problem arises upon my death. If I meet the God I am so sure does not exist and to whom I never pledged my servitude, would "he" send me to hell? Christians say yes. Does this not make their god an immoral, evil thing?

It must be oh so very convenient to not have to study the real world, to be able to yell "Jesus" whenever there is any hint of mother nature exposing herself, to be able to sleep at night believing they are doing something good for their world without the slightest effort, a contradiction in itself. They are very smug in their certainty that learning about the real world can so easily be trumped with their supernatural one - any time, any place, and in full view of any proof of fact.

It continually astonishes me when I hear their explanations of the vast internal inconsistencies of their bible. They hem and haw regarding the absolute certainty that the bible is a collection of materials written in some cases centuries before by many men, interpreted by others, added to, mistranslated, and so forth. Yet they dismiss that. The claim is always the same: you don't understand. In their last gasps of exasperation, they will get angry at me, telling me that their god doesn't require an explanation! Then why did "he" create curiosity and reason?

As a young child I desperately wanted mother nature to give up her secrets, to confess her strategies, to yield to my primitive investigative methodologies. Back then, she only whispered in my ear, "You have a long way to go." I am all right with that answer, because uncertainties grow my curiosity, and I am motivated still further to discover. As primates with such exquisitely large and complex brains forged by millions of years of natural selection, should we allow it to be any other way?