Can you spot a psychopath by looking at their eyes?

welcome to my scientifically informed insider look at mental health topics if you find this video to be interesting or helpful please like it and subscribe to my channel this is dr. grande today's question asks if you can tell if someone is a psychopath by looking at their eyes right so what this is really getting at is this idea that pupil dilation in Psychopaths is different than what we see in people who are non psychopathic or who are low in psychopathy so the basic idea of this is that effectively charged stimuli so stimuli that has an emotional piece to it can lead to pupil dilation and that psychopaths find different types of stimuli boring exciting or threatening when compared to non Psychopaths so their pupil dilation would be different before we get into psychopathy what happens with pupil dilation normally and people without psychopathy or with low levels of psychopathy we see that unpleasant stimuli tends to lead to greater emotional response than Pleasant or neutral stimuli so that's the first thing unpleasant seems to have more of an effect than Pleasant or neutral the greater emotional response we see with unpleasant stimuli is associated with larger pupil dilation so that's what we see before we even get into the issue of psychopathy at all just what we see in the population so now moving to take a look at psychopathy we see that in the research literature pupil dilation seems to be somewhat based on the type of psychopathy so I'm going to briefly cover the two types of psychopathy now what gets confusing here a little bit is that each type of psychotic has several different names so the first type is called factor 1 psychopathy also known as primary psychopathy and interpersonal affective psychopathy and with this type of psychopathy with factor 1 we see traits like being callous unemotional manipulative being deceptive having fearless dominus and lacking remorse individuals with factor 1 psychopathy tend to be low in neuroticism so they tend to be emotionally stable now moving to the second type of psychopathy factor to psychopathy this is also called secondary psychopathy sociopathy and lifestyle antisocial psychopathy so here we see characteristics like being impulsive irresponsible having a high level of neuroticism so not being emotionally stable engaging in criminal behaviors and being sensation-seeking so this type of psychopathy has a close relationship with antisocial personality disorder so here's the idea with psychopathy some theorists believe that Psychopaths have what's referred to as an affective deficit so stimuli that contains affective or emotional content fails to induce the expected behavior emotional state or physiological reaction now this is actually somewhat of a controversial position as some research shows that Psychopaths have a similar capacity for experiencing emotions when compared to non Psychopaths but the valence for emotional stimuli is lower so what that means is that the psychopath doesn't really value emotions in the same way so they can experience emotions in the same way but they don't put a lot of value on it so they're not motivated to act on emotional stimuli other research shows that Psychopaths have a reduced capacity to feel all emotions so it's really a global deficit so it's not specific to negative or positive emotions now the pupil dilation theory is based on the idea that Psychopaths have a deficit specifically in experiencing negative emotions and there's a reasonable amount of evidence to support this particular theory for example we see that when we're looking at the startle response that's when a person jumps from the hear a loud noise for non psychopathic individuals aversive images increase the reaction to a loud noise right so somebody does not have psychopathy and they're looking at like a negative image and when that loud noise is presented they have a stronger reaction that noise a stronger startle response in those same people individuals who score low and psychopathy positive images decrease the startle response right so negative images tend to increase it positive images tend to decrease it but for Psychopaths the findings are different aversive images do not seem to produce the same increase in the startle response and interestingly they may even cause a decrease in the startle response so if a psychopath is looking at an aversive image and a loud noise goes off they might have a less pronounced startle response when positive images are shown to psychopathy they demonstrate a typical startle reflex so moving forward this idea we end up looking at the area of pupil llama tree right so this is when researchers measure pupil dilation pupil llama trait we see here that both negative and positive stimuli produce pupil dilation this is true for visual images including images of faces and for sounds now there are some exceptions here for example images like cute animals or babies don't cause as much pupil dilation so the theory here is the stimuli must be the type that would normally demand immediate attention in real life for example a threatening situation violence or the opportunity to have sex so the degree of pupil dilation is related to the extent to which the image or sound taps into the defensive motivational system now pupil dilation is controlled by the amygdala the part of the brain that processes threatening stimuli and regulates fear the amygdala also responds to some types of positive imagery and it responds to intriguing or unusual images so the idea here is that by studying pupil dilation we can get a look at what's going on in the amygdala so if the amygdala of a psychopath responds differently to stimuli as compared to a non psychopath we would see that in the pupils so with all this in mind what do we see in the research literature well for low levels of psychopathy so usually thought of a subclinical psychopathy psychopathy that would not be the focus of treatment like mental-health treatment we see there is no onyx affected pupil dilation in response to negative or positive images so we really don't see anything going on at the lower levels of psychopathy but what about experiments that use the sample that had a higher level of psychopathy here we see a different finding looking at a few types of stimuli here and starting with images we see that individuals who are high in factor one psychopathy that's that interpersonal affective type of psychopathy show reduced pupil dilation when looking at negative images when looking at positive images they have a typical reaction so no difference between a factor one psychopathy and anyone else for individuals with factor two psychopathy they had the expected pupil dilation so again typical reaction nothing unusual here so again that's with visual images what about sounds we see no effect here again a typical reaction and moving to faces specifically happy faces we see that individuals high in psychopathy have an increase in pupil size when they see happy faces individuals who are low in psychopathy have a reduction in pupil size so what's going on here well it could be that Psychopaths don't tend to trust people who are smiling right they have low trust in general so when they see someone who's smiling they may feel threatened that's the theory anyway but we really don't know what's going on there with the happy faces now something else that's important to touch on here is the time involved the reduced pupil responses when the negative stimuli is presented are only really noticeable within the first two seconds so this really suggests that the deficit may really manifest as a delay in processing so the ability of processed negative feelings just takes more time for a factor one psychopathy the deficit is not a global persistent insensitivity so these findings seem to support what's called the negative specific deficit for factor one psychopathy and of course only for visual images so again just for factor one Psychopaths the processing of negative visual images will be a little slower so a very narrow finding when we think about the types of psychopathy and the fact of course that most people would be low in psychopathy and all the different types of possible stimuli so at these findings in mind does this mean that everyone can run out and start identifying Psychopaths by looking at their pupils well the answer here is no and there are a lot of reasons why the answer is no first they're simply not enough research to solidly support this idea we see some support and I think it's quite interesting but it's not enough it is enough however to continue researching the topic but that's about it for now second other factors can cause pupil dilation like medication for example those factors are controlled for in a study but would not be controlled for just walking around in public third mental disorders characterized by psychosis like schizophrenia have an association with pupil dilation so again this factor is only really controlled for in experimental environments fourth even if these findings are correct and that's a big if we're talking about a two second delay in processing so this would be very difficult to spot so I know whenever I talk about psychopathy there'll be a variety of opinions please put any opinions and thoughts in the comment section they always generate a really interesting dialogue as always I hope you found this description of psychopathy and pupil dilation to be interesting thanks for watching

Channel: Dr. Todd Grande

Views: 287,055

Keywords: Psychopathic eyes, psychopathic stare, sociopathic eyes, sociopathic stare, Psychopathy, sociopathy, pupil dilation, pupillometry, factor 1 psychopathy, factor 2 psychopathy, primary, secondary, interpersonal affective, lifestyle antisocial, callous, unemotional, lack of empathy, pathological liar, sensation seeking, impulsive, irresponsible, criminal, amygdala, personality, mental health, counseling

Id: T2pcvaB2FVM

Length: 10min 15sec (615 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 16 2019