The Dark Triad & Schizotypal Personality Disorder | Schizotypy

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. grande today's question is what is the relationship between schizotypal personality disorder and the dark triad traits so psychopathy narcissism and machiavellianism so I'll start here with schizotypal person and about the dark triad and then look at the relationship between these constructs now I found an interesting study on this question I'll put the reference for that study and description for this video and that's what I'm really using in part to answer this question now schizotypal personality disorder is interesting because we have a few different names for it there's the official person alias order in cluster a and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual so it's in the same cluster as paranoid and schizoid person as we also see other terms like schizotypy and schizotypal personality traits really all these refer to the same set of symptoms but what's important remember here is schizotypal personality disorder again as the official disorder so if somebody needs to meet the full criteria in order to be diagnosed with that disorder if somebody has some of the criteria met or they so signs of some of the criteria but they don't really fully meet any particular criterion this could be a subclinical presentation and this is what we really refer to as schizotypy so everybody has some of the symptoms I'm going to list here to some extent there's a continuum in terms of these symptoms and that's what really talking about again with schizotypy and sometimes with schizotypal personality traits so again moving back to this order let's take a look at these symptom criteria there are nine symptom criteria we see ideas of reference odd beliefs or magical thinking unusual perceptual experiences so these we don't rise to the level of psychosis like they're not loose nations or delusions they would be right below that so we can see a relationship already here between schizotypal personality and schizophrenia next we see odd thinking and speech suspiciousness or paranoid ideation inappropriate or constricted effect so this means that somebody has low variability in their emotions they don't necessarily have the whole range of emotions available sometimes we see this also in a blank stare or somebody smiling or laughing at a story that isn't funny or for example if somebody was telling like a sad story work have a melancholy story somebody with this particular symptom might not recognize that story is sad so moving down the list we have behavior or appearance that's odd peculiar or eccentric that we have lack of close friends and sometimes we see this symptom manifested as having no friends and we also see excessive social anxiety because of paranoid fears so not the type of social anxiety we see with social anxiety disorder or perhaps to some extent with generalized anxiety disorder the symptom criterion here is about paranoia so all these symptoms in the symptom criteria can really be condensed down to three areas positive symptoms negative symptoms and disorganized symptoms so the positive symptoms sometimes we call these cognitive perceptual deficits so unusual perceptual experiences magical thinking ideas of reference and suspiciousness all those would fall under the positive symptoms for the negative symptoms sometimes we refer these as interpersonal difficulties so constricted effect lack of close friends an excessive social anxiety and for the disorganization we see symptoms like odd eccentric behavior and odd speech so again we're taking all the symptom criteria and really just condensing them into positive negative and disorganized so moving from schizotypal personality triad traits so the dark triad traits again psychopathy narcissism and Machiavellianism share a number of characteristics so all three of these constructs have a few things in common for example we see low agreeableness on the five-factor model so being disagreeable we also see that all three are characterized by being callous and unemotional being manipulative although the type of manipulation changes a little from one trait to the next we also see grandiosity and a lack of honesty and humility so if we now look at each one specifically and look for characteristics that the trade spring that aren't shared the unique aspects with psychopathy we see a lot of deceitfulness sensation-seeking poor behavioral control and being impulsive with narcissism we see somebody seeks admiration they have a sense of entitlement they tend to be jealous of other people and they have fantasies of success and power now one thing is interesting about narcissism in terms of the dark triad is the individual who's narcissistic is being narcissistic for gains in ego so they want to feel better about themselves they don't behave in a narcissistic way for material gain with psychopathy and Machiavellianism we do see behavior directed toward material gain so again if you combine all these traits together in the dark triad you see somebody who is trying to inflate their ego and trying to experience material gain now with Machiavellianism we see a different type of manipulation then we see in general with the other two what psychopathy and narcissism it's a strategic manipulation it's a type of manipulation that really appreciates the long game so somebody with Machiavellianism is calculating they have a good impulse control as opposed to what we see with psychopathy they're able to delay gratification also they're not attention seeking so if we look at psychopathy and narcissism we see that those two traits are associated with high extraversion and high openness to experience so for example high positive emotions and a lot of imagination but machiavellianism is associated with low extraversion and low openness to experience so it diverges a bit from what we see in psychopathy and narcissism so looking at some of the prior research on schizotypy and the dark triad we see that there's a positive association between schizotypy and impulsivity and a positive association between schizotypy and grandiose narcissism but we see a negative relationship to machiavellianism so that's kind of a starting point for the paper that i'm referring to here in this video so looking at this particular study they had some different hypotheses about what they would find based on the prior literature they looked at schizotypal personality and schizotypy in general and they saw a reckless and eccentric characteristics at there so they thought well this will be positively associated with psychopathy specifically the cognitive perceptual deficits and the disorganization now the construct of narcissism they hypothesized there'd be a negative relationship here so they believed as schizotypy increased you would see a decrease in narcissism or it could of course be the other way around so the reason they thought this is because the narcissists ego identity goals are met through attention and admiration from their social network so this is inconsistent with social withdrawal or social anxiety like we see with skits at IPPY so again a negative relationship was hypothesized here and with machiavellianism they looked at the characteristics of Machiavellianism and they see someone who's cautious and cool-headed it has good again strategic planning skills so they thought well this doesn't really seem to be related with positives gets it to be or disorganization in a positive way so they theorized a negative relationship here as Machiavellianism was higher there would be less positive schizotypy and less disorganization again this is what was hype prophesized so now looking at the results of this study some of these results are really not surprising and one of them is quite a bit surprising so at the first hypothesis this was the relationship between psychopathy and schizo Tippie again the hypothesis was a positive relationship while they found this so no surprise there they found that with increased psychopathy we see more cognitive perceptual deficits and more disorganization now moving over to narcissism they also found what they expected to find so this finding understandably could be confusing for some when we think of narcissism we would think of somebody who does struggle with interpersonal difficulties therefore we would think that as narcissism increased schizotypy would increase and of course that's not what was found here but if we think about the nature of relationships with narcissism this actually does make sense we know that individuals who are narcissistic in particular grandiose narcissism we see the individuals of grandiose narcissism do tend to make good first impressions and in the short run they do pretty well with relationships in the long run people tend to dislike them so if we think about the feelings from the perspective of someone who's narcissistic these short-term relationships these good impressions may provide positive feedback and may satisfy the individuals ego so these relationships could provide enough fuel to preserve the sense of grandiosity so from the perspective of someone who is narcissistic there aren't any interpersonal difficulties again we're talking about grandiose narcissism so in this instance it does kind of make sense that we would see high narcissism associated with low schizotypy so these first two findings around psychopathy and narcissism we don't really see any surprises although the narcissism result requires a little bit of explanation but it was hypothesized anyway it was the expected result but with Machiavellianism there was a different finding again if we look at the original hypothesis there would have been a negative relationship to positive schizotypy and disorganization this was not found' but a positive relationship with interpersonal difficulties was found so individuals who are Machiavelli mystic tend to have trouble in relationships so their strategy seems to be effective in some ways for material gain they are manipulative in the long run they have good impulse control but this does result in problems with relationships and a sense of loneliness so the Machiavellian is extracted some goals but it doesn't work well to meet any type of relational goal or to be relationally satisfying so again this was a bit of surprise this was different than the original hypothesis so with skits ativy and the dark triad traits we see an interesting relationship we see that some of the findings are a little bit surprising in some ways and some need some explanation and really it just speaks to the complexity of the dark triad traits and I think one of the issues with the dark triad is some of the traits pull in different directions and I mentioned that before so we see in one sense impulsivity with psychopathy another sense impulse control with Machiavellianism and a few other conflicts and of course a lot of things that they share a lot of characteristics that all these traits share so it shouldn't be surprising there's an interesting relationship with schizotypy again when we talk about schizotypy and the dark triad traits we are talking about subclinical trace we're not talking about something necessarily rises to schizotypal personality disorder for example or to antisocial personality order or a narcissistic personality disorder all these characteristics can exist at a subclinical level and we look specifically at the dark triad it's theorized as subclinical as a construct so we talk about the dark triad we are talking about a subclinical presentation if we do look at this from the point of view of disorders it is interesting because you have skits a typical person which is cluster a and you have potentially antisocial personality sorter or a narcissistic personality expand beyond the dark triad and those of course are both in cluster B so we see a little bit of a relationship potentially there between cluster a and cluster B but only if we move to the pathological level so this is an interesting topic if you have any thoughts on schizotypal personality sorter and how it may relate to the dark triad traits please leave those in the comments as always I hope you found this description of skits a tippy and a dark triad to be interesting thanks for watching

Channel: Dr. Todd Grande

Views: 37,397

Keywords: schizotypal personality disorder, schizotypy, schizotypal personality traits, Dark Triad, psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism, ideas of reference, odd beliefs, magical thinking, unusual perceptual experiences, odd thinking, suspiciousness, paranoid ideation, constricted affect, eccentric, lack of close friends, excessive social anxiety, grandiose narcissism, superficial charm, grandiosity, pathological lying, manipulative, lack of empathy, callousness

Id: ytGkXYo_-Qw

Length: 13min 53sec (833 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 02 2019