If you inhabit the broadly defined range of psychological normalcy, you have a strong, visceral reaction when you see fear. Your amygdala goes bonkers. Your heart rate increases, you become more alert, you look for something to do.
Generally, what you want to do is help. You want to make the frightened person stop being afraid. Your sympathy and empathy ramp up. It’s an effect that is difficult to overcome even in situations like wartime, where the intent is rather to do things that quite reasonably make the enemy afraid.
As with many hardwired psychological traits, our characteristic human expression, recognition, and response to fear (which hold invariable across cultures) plausibly serve multiple purposes. One of the results of this fear complex is prosocial behavior: giving assistance to our fellow humans. Certainly “seeing fear” is not the only reason nor motivation to help others, but, interestingly, there is a very high correlation between how strongly a person reacts on an unconscious physical level to seeing fear in others and the overall extent to which he or she does in fact exhibit prosocial impulses and actions (even when fear isn’t immediately in the picture). The greater the innate physical response to fear, the more someone wants to help other people in general.
The implication there is worth noting: there is a range in that amygdala response, all the way from OHMYGODOHMYGODOHMYGOD *spontaneous human combustion* to…nothing at all. Most of us, as usual, fit somewhere in the middle.
Interestingly, those rare end-cases who have little or no gut-level reaction to fear actually seem unable to recognize the emotion at all. It’s not that they’re ignoring it. They just have absolutely no idea what it is.
A Scientific American blog post discusses the issue, with a stunning anecdote that I will repeat here about what happened when a convicted murderer was asked to perform the simple task of looking at photographs and naming the emotion that the people depicted were showing. She did fine until she got to fear:
When the murderer saw the picture of the fearful face, she scratched her head and said: “I don’t know what that expression is called, but I know it’s what people look like right before I stab them.”
So, at the far end of the fear-response continuum: we have psychopaths. People who do not recognize fear in others and have no reaction to fear in others, people who, perhaps not incidentally given the prosocial correlation, see no interest but self-interest. (Do all psychopaths share this physical non-response trait? Unknown, to the best of my knowledge, but I am not aware of any studies showing that they do anything but fail at the fear-recognition task.) And while psychopathy is a clinical diagnosis – you are or you ain’t – I do not think it is without value to recognize that there is generally a spectrum in such matters (just as you can be schizotypic and very, very weird and/or very, very flat without being a full-blown clinical schizophrenic, or with autism, etc. etc.). There is certainly a spectrum of amygdala response to fear.
Along with not recognizing fear, psychopaths are quite understandably poor at expressing it. It is difficult to say how much they feel fear – self-reports are unreliable at best, and we are not dealing with the most trustworthy constituency in this regard.
In that sense, it is conceivable that psychopaths or psychotypics (heh, whatever you would call the subclinical version) are not just all but incapable of prosocial behavior (lacking the motivation or interest), they are also all but incapable of courage (lacking fear to overcome). There may be something sad about this sort of lack of fear, but there is nothing commendable in it – for all that the psychopath may boast of his fearlessness to others, and even win their admiration. It’s like a color-blind man bragging that garish shades don’t hurt his eyes. Well – yes, presumably.
Psychopathy and psychopathic behaviors are thankfully rare, and when people do dismal or cruel things it is usually because they are being assholes, not that they are fundamentally miswired. But it is important to remember that there is a small set of destructive people who are extremely challenged, to say the least, in responding with any shred of what we would consider normal human decency. “I am scared because I am going to lose my house and have no way to feed my children” will have an effect on an asshole. He may get mad, he may not help you out, but he’ll care on some level. You have a chance with him. You may be able to reason or plead with him. He’s operating in the same world you are. The psychopath – no. All you’re doing is annoying him by making noises come out of your mouth. All the psychopath knows how to do is double down.
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Doug Socks
Titus Andronicus
Ron Robinson
XJS AND ME
BOKO
GaryBaumgarten
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Comments
However, psychopaths are definitely not empathetic, ever. They are generally quite charming (which is probably part of why they're sometimes classified in the narcissism spectrum) when they choose to behave in that manner, but they have precisely zero empathy. They can glibly fake it when it serves their purposes, but that generally doesn't hold up under close observation or prolonged contact, heh.
They do have a good eye for anger. I guess that's probably the baseline that informs their entire world-view. Ugh.
And it just seems odd, although one can't argue with the repeated and repeatable observations, that they can't at least learn to FAKE recognizing fear, the characteristic rounded eyes, etc. etc., even if they have (an unproven belief I obviously lean towards) an impaired ability to feel fear themselves. But then recognizing emotions, which seems like the most basic, obvious thing, is actually a massively complicated affair (people who have lived their lives being entirely pleasant and amiable sorts but then suffer brain injuries very occasionally lose part or all of this expression-perceiving ability, even if their intelligence and physical functions remain intact...aaaand, they kind of lose their ability to relate with other people as a result).
You do have to wonder what the psychopath's role in society is. There are manifest greater-good gains (for broader human social organizations) from all sorts of variability in individual personality (even while this variability can be individually painful or disadvantageous) -- are psychopaths a "whoops, just happened" undesirable but hopefully systemically bearable result, or does it actually do something for social organization to have a small, cruel population of monsters in the mix?
Borderlines used to be put in the "no hope" category...just write 'em off and protect yourself with distance, because they don't change and there's nothing you can do. But Marsha Linehan (and others) have actually had some very real success in using STRICT behavioral techniques on borderlines. Kind of stepping them through appropriate social responses -- and you have to do this RELENTLESSLY and HARD -- until the borderline gets sufficiently rewired to function reasonably normally. It's a meaningful and important gain, because while the jury may be out on psychopaths, borderlines genuinely do feel (usually) at least some empathy and certainly a great deal of personal pain -- they WANT to be connected to other people, they just have a terrible, destructive set of responses that guarantees they won't be.
I can actually see some adaptive and beneficial-for-society (if utter-misery-for-individuals) purpose in the borderline pattern...depending, of course, on the specifics of any given situation and particularly the society at the time. They're shock troops. They can be absolutely fantastic in an immediate, pressing emergency (cf., maybe, Hitler's actually quite brave performance in WWI running messages between the trenches -- yikes), for all that they are universally dreadful over the long haul. They are black-and-white thinkers, and their relationships to others are characterized by turning on a dime. You're the best person in the world, they will die for you! No -- wait -- you are Satan, actually, and need to be exterminated. Oh, that was LAST second; now you are the greatest thing since pie! They are highly manipulative and adroit at getting people to invest in them personally through a variety of typical mechanisms (won't go into 'em here, I am already running on long enough :) ) -- in short, in a dangerous, fast-changing environment, they are masters of forming strong but EXCEEDINGLY fleeting social bonds.
However, they don't have another mode. They are always shock troops, even when there's no emergency. Also, when there's no emergency, they'll *make* an emergency. Lots upon lots upon lots of danger in that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darth_Vader#Characteristics
Joseph Conrad was cool