Psychopathy

A Very Short Introduction

De: Essi Viding

Narrado por: Esther Wane

Duración: 3 h y 17 m

Resumen del Editor

Psychopathy is a personality disorder that has long captured the public imagination. Newspaper column inches have been devoted to murderers with psychopathic features, and we also encounter psychopaths in films and books. Individuals with psychopathy are characterized in particular by lack of empathy and guilt, manipulation of other people and, in the case of criminal psychopathy, premeditated violent behavior. They are dangerous and can incur immeasurable emotional, psychological, physical, and financial costs to their victims and their families.

Despite the public fascination with psychopathy, there is often a very limited understanding of the condition, and several myths about psychopathy abound. For example, people commonly assume that all psychopaths are sadistic serial killers or that all violent and antisocial individuals are psychopaths. Yet, research shows that most psychopaths are not serial killers, and, equally, there are plenty of antisocial and violent offenders who are not psychopaths.

Viding explores the latest genetic, neuroscience, and psychology evidence in order to illuminate why psychopaths behave and develop the way they do, and considers whether it is possible to prevent or even treat psychopathy.

©2019 Essi Viding (P)2020 Tantor

Very informative but extremely redundant

Wish the author could have come up with an abbreviation for the phrase "children at risk for psychopathy," also uses the word empathy a ton in the first couple chapters. Basically says for most of the book that empathy and concern for others and cooperation are the default mode for most humams.... I must have heard the word empathy about 1000 times

Helpful

Very good information, provided relevant distinctions not typically present in pop culture. And, data galore!

Author writes, "No one is born a psychopath."

Know before you buy that the author, despite a background in neuroscience, opens with the offhanded statement that nobody "is born a psychopath." For those up to speed on the role of fMRI in studying psychopathy, that is just a bizarre claim for a treatment published in 2020.

Insightful

Insightful & brilliant.... I have listened to this book multiple times, absorbing this window into psychopathy.

Best introduction on the topic possible.

Viding is a clear writer. Which is all the more needed on this potentially cloudy issue.

She outlines some problems with current research, while not being overly dramatic about what has been discovered.

She also credits her PHD students which is always admirable.

Impossibility difficult issue, encourages that someone like Viding is also a great writer as well as a valued scientist.

If anyone is starting in this field you can’t do any better right now.

Take this thing back to the Audiobook Store

This book came across as a very gendered and classed introduction to pyschopathy, creating the impression that your modern psycho is a poor, poorly raised, and poorly educated drug dealing male thug.

While informative with respect to defining a psychopath as one as who lacks empathy, along with outlining diagnostic tests used to arrive at this definition, and while further interesting with respect to differentiating psychopathy from other conditions, and while even further interesting in discussing traditional questions about genetics, epigenetics, and the deterministic relationships between brain structure and behavior, it seemed like much of data utilized to define psychopaths in this introduction stemmed not from society but from British and American penal systems open to using the masculine bi-products of late-Capitalism as guinea pigs. Vidding, together with her bevy of predominantly white, Anglo, female PhD students, came across as Clarisse Starling type figures, "interested," "fascinated" and "intrigued" when the post-industrial underclass criminal tells her, the wealthy privileged, and educated middle-class woman, that he has trouble recognizing fear in a picture of a human face.

It now also appears the diagnosis of psychopathy is being used by the psychological industry as an updated version of "juvenile delinquency" for children in order to demand that tax-payer resources be channeled into paying psychologists to counsel these troubled psychopathic kiddies.