What is the Sociopathic Stare? | Is it really a Psychopathic Stare?

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 oh this is dr. Grande today's question is what is the sociopathic stare sometimes this is referred to as the psychopathic stare which may actually be a better name for that I'll get to that in a minute so this particular construct the sociopathic stare is sometimes observed with psychopathy and sociopathy the evidence that supports it's really more anecdotal and they're not really a lot of research studies out there that have studied this construct Robert hare who created the psychopathic checklist which is a fairly popular instrument for assessing psychopathy indicated that he would observe a fixated stare a prelude to self gratification or an exercise of power in individuals that he was assessing about psychopathy he also indicated that it was not a stare of interest or of empathy now we've heard the stare referred to by a lot of descriptors for example cold detached emotionless lifeless dead blank empty icy intense piercing and penetrating so a lot of different adjectives to describe this particular phenomenon so to understand the sociopathic stare or the psychopathic stare we need to understand a little bit about psychopathy versus sociopathy and how that relates to antisocial personality so psychopathy is a construct it's an area of study and we see what psychopathy there are two factors factor 1 and factor 2 with factor 1 we see traits like superficial charm grandiosity being callous unemotional this construct of fearless dominance is also referred to as boldness being manipulative having a lack of empathy remorse guilt having shallow effect or a shallow display of emotions and pathological lying again all those characteristics are related to factor 1 psychopathy this factor is sometimes referred to as interpersonal effect now for factor 2 this is referred to as social deviance we see a different set of characteristics we see excitement-seeking a parasitic lifestyle impulsivity irresponsibility poor behavioral controls and criminal versatility so really factor 2 psychopathy is much closer to the diagnosis in the dsm of antisocial personality order then factor 1 psychopathy a lot of times when we talk about sociopathy we're really talking about factor 2 psychopathy which is why earlier indicated that the sociopathic stare is really probably better referred to as the psychopathic stare because a lot of the characteristics with factor 1 psychopathy appear to line up with this particular type of staring like being callous unemotional having fearless dominance and having shallow affect other constructs don't seem to align too well with this particular type of staring like pathological lying being manipulative and superficial charm you would think that these characteristics would be kind of incongruent with the stare because the stare would have an effect when individuals would make them nervous or fearful and really if you're trying to lie that might not be the best strategy and superficial charm seems to be fairly inconsistent as well in terms of being manipulative I guess you could make an argument that it's both congruent and incongruent in some ways with the stare and I'll talk about that in a moment as well so really when we talk about psychopathy and sociopathy antisocial personality we talked about the stare again we're mostly talking about factor 1 psychopathy so this construct of the psychopathic stare is interesting but is it real well as I mentioned before it is supported by some anecdotal evidence there aren't really a lot of research studies that directly support it it may be a characteristic of psychopathy and sociopathy but if it is it's certainly nonspecific so let's talk about some of the research that maybe supports and to some degree refutes this construct so the construct of psychopathy in particular that callous unemotional characteristic we see this is actually associated with impaired eye contact so this information leads us to believe that the psychopathic stare maybe isn't real now we also see decreased reactivity to facial expressions with psychopathy in particular a deficit in the ability to recognize fear and distress so here we believe an individual becomes more focused on their goal because they're not distracted by fear and distress this would tend to support the idea of the psychopathic stare we see in 2016 was an article published by Joyner and colleagues were they theorized that an unblinking stare so a low blink rate may be associated with violence and suicide but really this study was there to draw more attention to this construct and didn't deliver a lot of direct evidence in support of it now we also see in a study published in 2017 by Wickham colleagues that staring can be interpreted in a lot of different ways and we have to consider the nature of staring and how its interpreted so he sustained direct I gaze staring can be interpreted by some as threatening and this can lead to fear but by others it can be interpreted as a sign of attraction interest or even love this is really dependent on who's perceiving the stare if someone's inclined to anxiety or distress they're going to interpret that stare as again threatening and tend to avoid the person doing the staring there's a submissive component here now if somebody's confident secure and dominant they're going to be comfortable and maybe even approach the individual who's staring and confront or challenge them so sometimes if you have two individuals who are both dominant and who are both staring this could result in a verbal argument and maybe even some cases a physical argument so we see some research that gives us maybe a little bit of insight into this construct but as I mentioned before this characteristic is nonspecific so what that means is you really can't use it validly to make an assessment it can be information that's how but it doesn't really point clearly to a diagnosis for example so we have this construct of the psychopathic stare as I mentioned of course of sociopathic stare but also there's a narcissistic stare and this construct tends to be linked to psychopathy there's an overlap between these two constructs we see a stare associate with boy line person a sorter that we think is more based on anger we see a stare with paranoid person is order which is really more of an evaluative stare somebody's trying to determine if they can trust another individual we see a stare associated with OCD obsessive compulsive disorder which of course we think is a compulsion and we see a stare associated with schizophrenia this is usually described as staring into space and eye tracking doesn't occur here so somebody's not going to move their eyes and track you as you move around the room usually with schizophrenia usually they'll just keep staring past you with psychopathy we usually think of the eye tracking as being in place they're going to follow you as you move now we also see what schizophrenia that this may be caused by the negative symptoms like flat effect it could be caused by distraction perhaps from loose Nations and with schizophrenia we also see a low blink rate and of course if someone doesn't blink very often that appears to be staring behavior so what causes the sociopathic or psychopathic stare well here it's really just speculation but if I had to guess I would say it's related mostly to that fearless dominus component also it could be a social cognitive deficit not really understanding how to relate socially how to navigate relationships and also as I mentioned before it could be related to manipulation staring makes people uncomfortable and this could facilitate manipulation in some situations but either way no matter what causes it we need to use caution when considering the psychopathic stare in appraisal there are a number of different possible reasons and they could be staring and again this particular characteristic is nonspecific I hope you found this description of the sociopathic stare or psychopathic stare to be interesting thanks for watching

Channel: Dr. Todd Grande

Views: 651,371

Keywords: sociopathic stare, psychopathic stare, cold, detached, emotionless, lifeless, dead, blank, empty, icy, intense, piercing, penetrating, narcissistic stare, borderline stare, paranoid stare, ocd stare, schizophrenic stare, manipulation, fearless dominance, boldness, psychopathy, sociopathy, lack of empathy, narcissism, callous, unemotional

Id: yvN9LZmW2d8

Length: 8min 49sec (529 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 02 2019