A survey of friends, family members and partners of psychopaths has concluded that with age, their behaviour is just as bad if not worse.
The report just published in the International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology was co-authored by Professor Martin Sellbom from Otago University's Department of psychology.
Psychopathy is a complex personality disorder, he told Jesse Mulligan.
Photo: Steinar Engeland / Unsplash
“But one of the core characteristics is just this absence of experiencing strong emotions, especially for the people that tend to be callous and how they relate to others.
“Thus, they're sometimes sadistic, or aggressive, towards others, if they need something. They tend to have big tickets on themselves. And many of those, especially the ones who end up in prison, tend to also be quite impulsive, act without thinking about the consequences of a complete disregard for social rules and standards.
“They manipulate, they exploit and lie to people in order to meet their own needs.”
The research was based on interviews with associates and partners of psychopaths, he says.
“Donna Andersen, who was the lead author, she has an organisation which is essentially a victim advocacy called love fraud. And on her website she invited individuals from all over the world who had a relationship with someone they believed to be psychopathic - partners, romantic partners, family members, friends, or colleagues and so on, to report on these individuals and we have a screening tool in that survey, where they also have to rate the individual on psychopathic personality traits, so we could ensure that, we're looking at only those victims of actual people with psychopathy.”
One of the key questions was whether or not individuals got any better after they turned 50 and the results were pretty conclusive, he says.
“There's been some research suggesting that as psychopaths grow older, they mellow out or burn out. But that's simply not the case.”
If people are waiting for these individuals to change or grow up, it's not going to happen, he says.
“The great majority of individuals, after [they] turned 50 were reported by these victims as not getting any better. In fact, quite a few of them actually got worse.”
The results didn’t come as a great shock to him, he says.
“I know full well that these individuals might change their behaviour slightly in the sense that if you're less physically strong as you age maybe are not as violent, physically violent, but they find other ways to exploit, manipulate and harm people.”
Psychopathy is a spectrum of behaviour, he says.
“Some are perhaps a lot more impulsive and overtly aggressive than others, whereas some are more manipulative and scheming and perhaps more calculating than others.”
