Psychopathy and Sexual Fantasy

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 hello this is dr. Gandhi today's question asks about psychopathy and sexual behavior so what's the relationship between psychopathy and sexual behavior and I've also seen a few questions on the relationship between psychopathy and sexual fantasies so I'll try to answer both of those questions so I used a number of articles here for this video and I'll put the references for those articles in the description for this video so let's first start with the construct of psychopathy so psychopathy is an interesting construct it's not a mental disorder it has a relationship to antisocial personality disorder which is a cluster B personality or in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual but psychopathy is really a set of personality traits it's again a construct and it's measured on a continuum so there really isn't an agreed-upon definition of what score somebody would have on some sort of measure of psychopathy for them to be referred to as or considered to be a psychopath we really don't have that type of clarity certainly if we see extreme behaviors and somebody appears to have all the traits it would be more likely that we think of that person as psychopathic but either way it's important to remember that it has a subclinical component so somebody could have psychopathic traits and not qualify for a diagnosis of antisocial personality sorter but also there appears to be a clinical element at the higher expression a more extreme expression of psychopathy so there we may see a stronger relationship with antisocial personality now psychopathy also has two different types so we see factor 1 and factor 2 psychopathy sometimes called primary and secondary so the factor 1 we see a superficial charm so this is when somebody is charming but there doesn't appear to be a lot of depth there a lot of emotion we see grandiosity similar to what we see with narcissism we see somebody who's callous unemotional we see pathological lying manipulation and also a lack of remorse or a lack of guilt with factor-2 psychopathy we see some of the traits that more closely aligned with antisocial personality like impulsivity irresponsibility and engaging in criminal behavior so psychopathy isn't really a simple construct there's a lot to it and its relationship again with Mal disorders is not one-to-one it's not perfectly correlated with mental disorders like again antisocial personality or for that matter a disorder like narcissistic personality sorter now we talked about psychopathy and sexual behavior or sexual fantasies on a star here by discussing the callous unemotional traits that sometimes we see in adolescence so if we look at psychopathy as a construct somebody can have psychopathic traits at any age somebody can only have antisocial personality sorter if they're aged 18 or older when somebody's under 18 and they exhibit wadis characteristics sometimes they get diagnosed with conduct disorder and there's one particular specifier with conduct disorder we see is closely related to psychopathy and this is limited pro-social emotions and this is the same thing as the callous unemotional traits so low levels of guilt lack of empathy being callous and being uncaring so we just put those characteristics under that specifier limited pro-social emotions now we see here that there's studies that show that male adolescents who have elevated callous unemotional traits are more likely to engage in frequent violent and planned sexual offenses so these traits really have some negative consequences associated with them in the area of sexual behavior we also see that the callous unemotional traits and adolescents are associated with an increased number of sexual partners unprotected sex causing or experiencing pregnancy and contracting a sexually transmitted infection so again just a lot of negative consequences with conduct disorder and that limited pro-social emotion specifier so if we move over to the idea of sexual fantasy here we don't see a lot of studies with the cow on emotional traits but we do see a few studies with psychopathy and adults and what we know about sexual fantasy is it's actually very common the vast majority of individuals in the general population have sexual fantasies and there are some differences with sexual fantasies based on sex we know that men tend to have more fantasies about multiple partners within a single sexual encounter as compared to women and we know that women tend to have more fantasies about Submission committed partners and romantic settings as compared to men so again there are some sex differences there to keep in mind with sexual fantasies in general now I'm talking about psychopathy and sexual fantasies and sexual behavior we know that varied and uncommitted sexual behavior seems to be really connected to psychopathy we know that psychopathy has a relationship with more sexual aggression sexual coercion sexual deception and deviant sexual behavior and when we use the term deviant sexual behavior in research we're really talking about the paraphilias like sadism voyeurism exhibitionism those different paraphilias and specifically with sadism we see research that shows there's an incredibly strong relationship between sadism and psychopathy now I know that psychopathy is positively associated to a preference for non romantic sexual fantasies and also sexual fantasies that involve anonymous and uncommitted partners we see here that participants who reported high levels of fantasizing about these sexual themes were more likely to engage in that behavior if they also reported high levels of psychopathic traits so here we see a connection between psychopathy and acting out a sexual fantasy so it's really more than just we see these increased sexual fantasies with people who are psychopathic there seems to be a relationship where there's a follow-through so somebody has high levels of psychopathy high levels of psychopathic traits they're more likely to engage in real-life sexual behavior that's consistent with those fantasies so at first looking at this finding some may theorize well the psychopathic traits must lead to an increased level of fantasizing and that fantasizing leads to the acting out in the sexual behavior so it leads to the actual sexual behavior that lines up with the fantasy but there are a few different theories that could be at work here what if an individual has high levels of psychopathic traits and then they happen to engage in a particular sexual behavior and because of the psychopathic traits that are more likely to fantasize about that activity so all the components would still be there somebody would have psychopathic traits they would be engaging in sexual behavior and there would be a lot of fantasies so we can't really make any clear determinations here about what behavior or what characteristic causes another we don't know for sure that psychopathic traits lead to more fantasies and that leads to more behavior it could be that the behavior and the traits occur at the same time and then the fantasies are just more likely to occur because of those psychopathic traits again these constructs are complex and the relationship to one another is complex and we really need more studies to try to figure out what comes first what may lead to another behavior or another characteristic now another area we hear about what psychopathy quite a bit is pornography and there's different theories with pornography like individuals who have psychopathic traits are more likely to use pornography and this leads to different problems and what we see from this study is psychopathy is related to greater pornography use but that relationship didn't add to the prediction of real-life sexual behavior so using or not using pornography didn't have any connection to how often somebody who's psychopathic acted out sexual fantasies were engaged in sexual behavior somewhat consistent with those fantasies so the role of pornography really isn't clear when it comes to psychopathy another theory we hear about psychopathy sometimes is that if a male has psychopathic traits they're more likely to engage and fantasize sexual behaviors as compared to a female this study found that that really wasn't the case if that the participants sex did not moderate the relationship between psychopathy and engaging in fantasized sexual behaviors moderate there means it didn't change the strength or direction so if we look at the findings from this study we see that the sexual behavior of individuals who have psychopathic traits is probably due to a preference for sexual activity that's outside of a committed loving relationship as opposed to an inability to form those types of relationships so we're not really talking about compensating for a deficit here a lot of times I think that's what people believe about psychopathy individuals with psychopathy engage in these different sexual behaviors that have these fantasies because they can't have a romantic loving committed type relationship they can't have a more normative sexual relationship that's how we usually think of sexual relationships they involve some sort of degree of commitment love and affection but the reality is that's not what's going on this isn't again about compensation this is about a preference for a particular type of sexual activity that's more cold and distant and I think this is an important element in terms of treatment I've seen over the years of my clinical experience many instances where somebody appears to be in a relationship with somebody who has psychopathic traits now a member from the position of a counselor we really don't know that unless we were to assess that other person in the relationship which of course isn't something that would happen we don't really know if somebody has psychopathy or not but still there appear to be traits based on what a client says and the client believes that if they engage in the sexual fantasies that the psychopath wants then somehow they'll uncover a caring loving demeanor underneath of that somehow they'll get to the core of that person and they'll find that they're really caring and loving this whole time along that they just needed those sexual fantasies to get to that romantic point and that may be true some of the time again we don't really know what the characteristics are that other person but a lot of times wife is there's not a loving core underneath of those sexual fantasies so people come into counseling and they'll give in to their partner sometimes for years and nothing really changes sometimes actually giving in to the sexual fantasies and allowing them can make things worse so again this is really just stressing the importance of seeking counseling and being open to different ideas in terms of insight and looking at characteristics realistically rather than just giving in automatic way of just hoping things will work out sometimes there's not another level a lot of times with human behavior and cognition we want to believe the best with people we want to believe that the level we're looking at now is one tier but there's some other level of complexity or lovingness that's unseen and sometimes particularly psychopathy and some other types of traits sometimes that's just not there and I think that's really where this finding connects with clinical practice probably more closely than some of the other findings in the study although they're all fairly interesting findings now it's also important to note here that not all the sexual fantasies are necessarily abusive sometimes people engage in these fantasies and both people are satisfied with that what I'm really talking about here with psychopathy and somebody holding a hope is the abusive type fantasies they participate in sexual behavior so they don't really want to participate in again in hopes that they'll find something else in that person so that's what I'm really talking about here not consenting adults that both want to engage in some sort of sexual fantasy that's played out and they agree to it and it's what they want to do and they have good communication about it I'm not really talking about that with this example another element that's important to separate out here is the idea between narcissism and Machiavellianism and psychopathy these three traits put together are called the dark triad and the research shows us that the dark triad is associated with deviant sexual fantasies but psychopathy has a much strong relationship to deviant sexual fantasies as compared to narcissism or Machiavellianism so you can't really treat all three of those the same in terms of their impact or in terms of thinking about what potential impact they may have so that's kind of my summary here of psychopathy and sexual behavior and sexual fantasies if you have any opinions or thoughts on this please put those in the comments as always I hope you found this description of psychopathy and sexual behavior to be interesting thanks for watching

Channel: Dr. Todd Grande

Views: 125,879

Keywords: Psychopathy, sociopathy, psychopath, sociopath, sex, sexual behavior, sexual fantasies, pornography, mental disorder, antisocial personality disorder, Cluster B, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, DSM, Factor 1, Factor 2, primary, secondary, superficial charm, grandiosity, narcissism, callous, unemotional, pathological lying, manipulation, lack of remorse, impulsivity, irresponsibility, criminal behavior

Id: efd2cWEwU6Y

Length: 13min 53sec (833 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 18 2019