Κυριαρχία, βιοτικό επίπεδο και φιλότιμο

@seduced mind

Ναι, αλλά ξέρεις τι ωραία που είναι να νομίζεις οτι ζεις στη Ζιμπάμπουε, νομίζοντας οτι η Ζιμπάμπουε ένσι αχυροκαλύβες πέριξ ζούγκλας κι οτι όλα είναι πρωτογονισμός;

 

Το ερώτημα είναι αδιέξοδο.
Ωστόσο θεωρητικά η προσφορά της υ/σ θα έτεινε να είναι μεγαλύτερη στο να παραμείνει.
Αντίθετα ο Κ καλά θα έκανε να την έδιωχνε.
Καμιά φορά χρειάζεται να σηκώνουμε το βάρος της ύπαρξής μας.
Και σαν που λέει μια Κρητική μαντινάδα, "Ο άνθρωπος την μοναξιά μην την φοβάται, μονάχος σου γεννιέσαι, μονάχος σου πεθαίνεις"

 

Το ξεύρω, το ξεύρω...   Γι αυτό το έθεσα έτσι...

 

Να σου πω κάτι κάνε μου μια χάρη. Επειδή οι σαδιστές είναι οι πιο αδύναμοι άνθρωποι του πλανήτη, για αυτό και είναι σαδιστές-δοκιμάζουν κάτι σε κάποιον άλλον που δεν έχουν τα κότσια να αντέξουν οι ίδιοι- μην μου εκφράζεις τις λύσεις σου. Κανα αστειάκι να μου λες γουστάρω, αλλά για παραπάνω.... δεν....

 

....Αυτή η ερμηνεία είναι προσωπική, ή έχεις και βιβλιογραφία?

 

Θα σου κατεβάσω το Σ/Κ έρευνες να διαβάσεις....

 

...κάντο παρασκευή αν μπορεις, έχω σχέδια για το σκ.

 

Πάρε μία γεύση...


Abstract
While both psychopaths and sexual sadists engage in acts of predatory violence, little empirical work has examined the relationship between the two disorders. This paper outlines the constructs of psychopathy and sexual sadism and reviews the literature investigating the emotional lives of individuals with these disorders, paying particular attention to how emotional deficits might facilitate instrumental violence. Specifically, it is hypothesized that the emotion recognition and emotional experience deficits found among psychopaths, and perhaps present in sexual sadists, may lead to deficits in their ability to empathize with others, resulting in an increased likelihood for perpetrating instrumental violence. The relationship between empathy and aggression in psychopaths and sexual sadists is discussed, and distinctions are drawn between the two disorders with respect to their capacities to experience cognitive and affective empathy on a global level. Gaps in the literature are identified and additional areas of inquiry are suggested.


The psychopath is a charming, but callous and unempathic individual who engages in frequent and varied criminal behavior which often results in a “trail of broken hearts, shattered expectations, and emptied wallets” (Hare, 1993, p. xi). The sexual sadist is an individual who fantasizes about, and often engages in, the torture and humiliation of innocent victims for his own sexual pleasure. It is likely that individuals who are able to victimize large numbers of people without feeling remorse, guilt, or shame experience some type of emotional disturbance. While affective deficits play a central role in theories of psychopathy (e.g.,Cleckley, 1976, Lykken, 1995 and Patrick et al., 1993), there is little mention of emotion in the sexual sadism literature. Given the amount of damage that sexual sadists cause to their victims and society as a whole, it is imperative that we uncover the underlying causal factors contributing to their sexually violent behavior.

While much research attention has been paid to the causes and prevention of sexually aggressive behavior such as child molestation and rape, more extreme forms of sexual violence, including sadistic torture and homicide, have garnered considerably less empirical study. Over the past 20 years there has been a proliferation of psychopathy research, yet little work has specifically studied the relationship between psychopathy and sexual sadism, despite the many overlaps in the behavioral manifestations of these disorders. This paper seeks to examine the current literature with respect to sexually sadistic behavior and psychopathy, in an attempt to uncover the similarities and differences between them, with the goal of identifying the etiological underpinnings of psychopathic and sexually sadistic behavior. In particular, the major focus will be on the role that emotions and emotional processing play in both psychopathy and sexual sadism, since abnormal emotional processing is believed to be a hallmark of psychopathy (Patrick et al., 1993), and emotion (or lack thereof) is believed to be an integral factor in one's ability to devise and perpetrate instrumental violence (Porter & Woodworth, 2006), such as sadistic rape or sexual homicide.

1. Psychopathy
Psychopathy is characterized as a form of personality disorder with a distinctive pattern of affective, interpersonal, and behavioral symptoms that is related, but not identical to Antisocial Personality Disorder (APD; Hare, Cooke, & Hart, 1999). Affective features include shallow affect, lack of remorse, and lack of empathy; interpersonal features include glibness, superficial charm, grandiosity, and conning and manipulating others; and behavioral features include impulsivity, irresponsibility, and antisocial behaviors. These traits appear early in development and are relatively stable across the lifespan (e.g., Frick et al., 2003 and Rutherford et al., 1999). It is estimated that psychopaths comprise 20–30% of our prison population (Harpur & Hare, 1994), with an additional (unknown) number living in the community (Hare et al., 1999 and Lykken, 1995).

1.1. Assessment
Psychopathy is traditionally measured using the Psychopathy Checklist—Revised (PCL-R; Hare, 1991), which combines a semi-structured interview with a detailed record review to assess the personality traits and behaviors central to the construct. In North America, scores of 30 or greater are considered to be indicative of psychopathy (Hare, 1991). The PCL-R is comprised of two distinct, yet moderately correlated factors (Harpur, Hare, & Hakstian, 1989). Factor 1 describes the affective and interpersonal features of psychopathy, which are considered to be the core of the disorder (e.g., Cleckley, 1941/1976), while Factor 2 reflects an unstable and antisocial lifestyle, and includes features that are predominantly behavioral in nature. Factor scores have been associated with specific constellations of traits and behaviors. For example, Factor 1 has been found to positively correlate with narcissism, social dominance, and Machiavellianism (Hare, 1991 and Harpur et al., 1989) and negatively correlate with self-reported anxiety (Harpur et al., 1989). Factor 2 is positively correlated with APD, sensation-seeking, number of criminal charges (Hare, 1991 and Harpur et al., 1989), substance abuse (Smith & Newman, 1990), and suicide risk (Verona, Patrick, & Joiner, 2001).

Psychopathy has consistently been found to be a significant predictor of criminal recidivism (e.g., Hanson and Bussiere, 1998 and Walters, 2003), particularly violent recidivism (Hemphill et al., 1998 and Salekin et al., 1996), and the two factors have been associated with different types of criminal acts. Factor 2 scores are predictive of general recidivism (Hemphill et al., 1998 and Walters, 2003), violent recidivism (e.g.,Walters, 2003) and engaging in reactive violence (e.g., Hart and Hare, 1997 and Patrick and Zempolich, 1998), while Factor 1, though less correlated with violent recidivism (Walters, 2003), is associated with both instrumental (Woodworth & Porter, 2002) and sadistic violence (Porter, Woodworth, Earle, Drugge, & Boer, 2003) and committing homicide (Porter, Birt, & Boer, 2001).

1.2. Major theoretical contributions
Psychological theories of psychopathy have abounded since Cleckley's groundbreaking description of the psychopathic personality in his 1941 book The Mask of Sanity. Currently there are several competing theories of the disorder, each of which have garnered some degree of empirical support. While all of these theories share a common view of psychopathy as resulting from some core, over-arching deficit which impairs the individual's ability to become socialized, they differ with respect to the hypothesized nature of this deficit.

Cleckley (1941/1976) asserted that the core features of psychopathy result from an innate defect that renders the psychopath unable to experience any strong emotions, and thus, unable to be socialized. He likened this deficit to “semantic dementia” or a failure to process the emotional meaning of language, which is then “masked” by the psychopath's normal intellectual and expressive abilities. Cleckley maintained that although a psychopath can learn to use language and can even pantomime the emotion represented by the words, he himself does not appreciate the affective meaning.

Although several aspects of Cleckley's conceptualization are still alive today, many have argued that psychopaths do, in fact, have the ability to experience emotion. Lykken (1995) maintains that primary psychopaths' attenuated emotional experiences are specific to anxiety and fear, leaving other emotional states intact. Lykken's “low-fear hypothesis” contends that people who have innately low levels of fearfulness are harder to socialize, in that they fail to experience fear or anxiety in the face of punishment. This lack of fear translates into a motivational deficit in psychopaths; they are not motivated by fear or the tug of conscience as normal individuals are presumed to be.

Many have criticized this theory as too general, since low fear or anxiety account for only some of the features of psychopathy (Hare, 1998). Building upon Lykken's work, Patrick and Lang (1999) propose that the emotional detachment and the behavioral disinhibition components of psychopathy are actually two separate, but often co-occurring entities characterized by deficits in distinct brain regions and functions. The authors assert that while the emotional detachment component likely results from deficient fear responding, impulsive antisociality is better accounted for by a deficit in higher information processing systems that may then interact with motive systems, such as fear (Patrick & Lang, 1999).

Newman (1998) also characterizes psychopathy in terms of information processing deficits. He proposes that the disinhibited behavior of psychopaths is better accounted for by a cognitive processing deficiency that limits their ability to incorporate feedback from the environment when they are actively engaged in goal-directed behavior. This deficit in “response modulation” renders them less able to process negative feedback (Newman et al., 1987 and Newman et al., 1997), and thus, less able to suspend or alter a behavior once it has been initiated, leading to deficits in self-regulation.

Blair, 1995 and Blair et al., 2006 also attributes psychopathy to cognitive deficits. In particular, he views psychopathic behavior as due to a defective Violence Inhibition Mechanism (VIM), a physiological system that becomes activated in response to distress cues in others. He argues that amygdala dysfunction impairs the psychopath's ability to process sad and fearful expressions in others, inhibiting the activation of the VIM during harmful acts, resulting in a failure to associate harmful acts with personally aversive physiological sensations. This in turn leads to a failure to develop empathy, poor moral socialization, and a greater likelihood to engage in acts of instrumental aggression.


Psychopathic individuals have demonstrated affective language processing difficulties (e.g., Williamson, Harpur, & Hare, 1991), attenuated fear responding (e.g., Lykken, 1957 and Patrick et al., 1993), deficient response modulation (e.g., Newman et al., 1987), and specific emotion recognition deficits (e.g., Blair, Jones, Clark, & Smith, 1997), providing support for each of these theories. However, as Newman (1998)points out, these theories need not be mutually exclusive and empirical evidence can be used as support for a number of different conceptualizations of psychopathy. Research evidence documenting the affective deficits posited by a number of these theories will be discussed in greater detail later.

2. Sexual sadism
The term ‘sadism’ was coined by Krafft-Ebing (1886/1965) to depict the association between cruelty, violence, and lust. His description of the disorder was based upon the writings of the Marquis de Sade, as well as a number of famous and clinical case studies. Current theorists and classification systems provide similar conceptions of the disorder, and generally describe sadism as the pairing of sexual arousal with the infliction of physical or emotional pain and dominance and control over a victim (e.g., Brittain, 1970, Dietz et al., 1990, Gratzer and Bradford, 1995 and MacCulloch et al., 1983). The DSM-IV defines sexual sadism as a paraphilia that involves “recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors involving (real) acts…in which the psychological or physical suffering of the victim…is sexually exciting to the person” ( American Psychiatric Association, 2000, p. 574). Sexual sadism can vary considerably in its severity, ranging from sadistic acts with consenting partners to the torture and killing of non-consenting victims. Sadistic fantasies and behaviors can include dominance, humiliation, bondage, biting, burning, whipping, penetration with foreign objects, strangulation, and mutilation of the body (e.g., Dietz et al., 1990,Hucker, 1997, MacCulloch et al., 1983 and Warren and Hazelwood, 2002). Sexual sadists are most frequently found among rapists and murderers, although they comprise only a small percentage of these groups. Sexual sadism is primarily a male phenomenon and little, if any, work has addressed the prevalence or specific symptom manifestations in women.

2.1. Assessment
Although sexual sadism is quite rare in the general population, prevalence estimates range from 5%–11% (Groth and Birnbaum, 1979 and Kirsch et al., 2006) to 45% (Fedora et al., 1992) of sexual offenders, and 67% to 99% of serial sexual homicide perpetrators (e.g., Fox and Levin, 2005 and Stone, 1998). This variation in rates may be due to differences among study populations, disagreement as to the criteria for defining sexual sadism, and difficulty operationalizing the disorder (Marshall and Kennedy, 2003 and Marshall et al., 2002). The most severe cases, such as serial sexual murderers, may be easier to diagnose because there is clear physical evidence pointing to the presence of sexually sadistic symptoms (e.g., torture of the victim, mutilation of the corpse; Dietz et al., 1990). However, obvious behavioral evidence of sexually sadistic motives is frequently absent among less severe cases (MacCulloch et al., 1983 and Marshall and Kennedy, 2003), forcing diagnosticians to rely on self-reported fantasies or inferring sadistic motives from the nature of the crime. Given that offenders are unlikely to report experiencing such fantasies or motives, and researchers have failed to uncover clear indicators of sexual sadism or sadistic rape based on features of the offender or the criminal offense (e.g., Gratzer and Bradford, 1995, Knight et al., 1994 and Marshall et al., 2002), confirming sadistic fantasies and intentions is highly problematic, making clinical inferences unreliable (Marshall & Kennedy, 2003). In fact, Marshall and his colleagues have called the reliability of the diagnosis of sexual sadism into question for the above reasons.

Moreover, while the penile plethysmograph (PPG) has been found to reliably discriminate rapists from non-sexual offenders based on their arousal to rape stimuli (Lalumiere & Quinsey, 1991), particularly with respect to stimuli depicting victim suffering (Rice, Chaplin, Harris, & Coutts, 1994), PPG evidence of sexual arousal differences between sadistic and non-sadistic rapists is more equivocal. Barbaree, Seto, Serin, Amos and Preston (1994) found that sexually motivated rapists, including sadistic rapists, showed greater arousal to rape stimuli than rapists believed to be more motivated by nonsexual factors such as hostility and anger. Quinsey and Chaplin (1982) found a small but significant association between victim damage scores and rapists' sexual arousal to non-sexual violence, though there was no relationship between victim damage and arousal to rape stimuli. In a later study, Quinsey, Chaplin and Upfold (1984) replicated their findings of a relationship between rapists' arousal to non-sexual violence and extreme victim damage during their rapes. Seto and Kuban (1996) however, did not find differences between sadistic fantasizers, sadistic rapists, non-sadistic rapists, and courtship disordered men in their arousal to depictions of rape, violent rape, or non-sexual violence, though the sexually deviant men did exhibit arousal patterns that differed from those of community controls. Overall, the difficulties in defining and operationalizing sexual sadism, the unreliability of the diagnosis (Marshall, Kennedy, Yates, & Serran, 2002), and findings that normal males report occasional sadistic sexual fantasies (e.g., Crepault & Couture, 1980), have led some to argue for a dimensional approach to defining the disorder (Marshall & Kennedy, 2003). Given that little work has examined the appropriateness of this approach and the available research to date has used a categorical classification system, this paper will consider sexual sadists to be a discrete group, though the reader should be aware that the reliability of the diagnosis of sexual sadism is an issue that warrants greater empirical attention.

2.2. Characteristics of sexual sadists
Sexual sadism has been found to be comorbid with a number of past and present Axis II disorders, including narcissistic (Dietz et al., 1990 and Feister and Gay, 1995), schizoid (Stone, 2001), antisocial (Berner et al., 2003, Brittain, 1970 and Gratzer and Bradford, 1995), and sadistic personality disorders (Berger et al., 1999 and Berner et al., 2003), in addition to psychopathy (e.g., Holt, Meloy, & Strack, 1999). Furthermore, sexual sadists have been found to exhibit a large number of other paraphilias (Abel, Becker, Cunningham-Rathner, Mittelman, & Rouleau, 1988), including transvestic fetishism, masochism, voyeurism, and exhibitionism (e.g., Gratzer and Bradford, 1995 and Hucker, 1997).

Other features common to sexual sadists include drug and alcohol abuse (Dietz et al., 1990, Langevin, 2003 and Stone, 2001); obsessional traits (Brittain, 1970 and Meloy, 2000); collecting pornography (Brittain, 1970, Dietz et al., 1990 and Warren et al., 1996); a history of impaired social relationships (Grubin, 1994 and MacCulloch et al., 1983); inadequate parent–child relationships (Stone, 2001), including physical and sexual abuse in childhood (Dietz et al., 1990, Gratzer and Bradford, 1995, Kirsch et al., 2006 and Ressler et al., 1986); and extensive fantasy lives incorporating detailed sadistic fantasies (Brittain, 1970, Prentky et al., 1989 and Warren et al., 1996) with behavioral try-outs of fantasy elements (MacCulloch et al., 1983). More severe sadists have been found to be higher functioning than less severe sadists and other sexual offenders, leading some to theorize that their sophistication can actually help them to plan and execute more elaborate offenses, as well as evade detection by law enforcement (Gratzer and Bradford, 1995 and Prentky et al., 1989).

2.3. Major theoretical contributions
There is a lack of solid theoretical and empirical work in the area of sexual sadism, resulting in a dearth of well-defined etiological theories with supporting research. Moreover, a majority of the available literature is focused primarily on perpetrators of sexual homicide. As Grubin (1994) notes, there are a variety of reasons that a sexual assaulter may murder his victim, thus, sexual homicide perpetrators are not necessarily sadistic in their motivations. While this can be remedied by reviewing only those papers that focus on individuals who show clear sadistic motivations for their murders, it is unclear whether similar mechanisms lead to the development of less severe forms of sexual sadism. Below is a brief outline of the major theories in the area of sexually sadistic behavior, though they should be interpreted with caution given the significant methodological flaws in this literature. In particular, theories have been primarily developed based on case histories and clinical interviews of small, carefully selected samples of offenders utilizing primarily exploratory or descriptive methods of analysis.

Based on his clinical work with murderers, Brittain (1970) was among the first to outline a detailed description of the sexually sadistic murderer. He describes the sadistic killer as a man who is withdrawn, narcissistic, feels socially and sexually inferior, possesses deep, unexpressed aggression, has a rich, often violent, fantasy life, and commits his sadistic acts in order to achieve feelings of power that he is otherwise unable to attain. Brittain's work, while occasionally criticized for being anecdotal (e.g., Grubin, 1994) and unquantified, has provided a springboard for later research and theory in the area.

MacCulloch et al. (1983) were the first to sketch a theory of the genesis of sadistic behavior, based on amplified case histories of 16 patients who had committed rape or manslaughter. The authors note that a vast majority of these men described recurrent sadistic fantasies linked to sexual arousal, beginning primarily during the teen years, and typically resulting in behavioral try-outs. The authors also note that these men had difficulty forming social and sexual relationships, causing them to experience feelings of inadequacy. They theorize that sadistic fantasies may give a sense of power and control to these men who are lacking it in all other areas of their life. These fantasies are then maintained and reinforced through masturbation, via the processes of operant and classical conditioning. MacCulloch later supplemented this model by describing the initiation of sadistic fantasy as due to neurally based associative links between states of sexual arousal and feelings of aggression stemming from traumatic experiences in childhood (MacCulloch, Gray, & Watt, 2000).


Burgess, Hartman, Ressler, Douglas, and McCormack (1986) interviewed 36 sexual killers and formulated a motivational model based on characteristics of the offenders and their backgrounds. The authors theorize that unsuccessful resolution of an early traumatic event (physical or sexual abuse of the child), primarily due to neglectful primary caretakers, causes the child to retreat to an inner fantasy world characterized by aggressive and dominant themes. These fantasies then interact with negative personal characteristics in the child to impair their social relationships, leading to further isolation and the use of fantasy as a social substitute. The authors believe these fantasies lead to an association of aggression and sexual arousal which is reinforced and escalates over time, ultimately leading to sexual murder (Burgess et al., 1986). It should be noted however, that the men in this study are an extremely specialized sample of serial killers compiled by the FBI and are likely not representative of sexual sadists as a whole.

Prentky et al. (1989) found that serial sexual murderers showed significantly more violent sexual fantasies and paraphilias than single sexual murderers, causing the authors to posit that internal mechanisms, specifically fantasies, are driving their sadistic behavior. Kirsch et al. (2006) found that childhood sexual abuse by a female was a significant predictor of the development of sexual sadism in a group of sexually violent predators (SVPs), with 40% of their sample reporting experiencing sexual abuse by a female perpetrator during their childhood, suggesting that abuse by a female may lead to fusion of sexual arousal and aggression towards women.

All of the above theories speculate that sadistic sexual fantasizing has its roots in childhood trauma, most notably physical or sexual abuse, and these fantasies become more ingrained through conditioning processes. Theories also describe personal and environmental factors that interact with early childhood trauma to help create the sadistic fantasies and behaviors. However, most models are based on retrospective accounts by small, non-representative samples of sexual murderers and thus, require additional empirical support before they can be accepted and generalized to sexual sadists as a whole.

2.4. Sexual sadism and psychopathy
Despite high symptom overlap and commonalities in the behavioral sequelae of the disorders, little research has specifically addressed the relationship between psychopathy and sexual sadism, though some have theorized about a link between psychopathy and the derivation of sexual pleasure from violent offenses (e.g., Porter & Woodworth, 2006). As a proxy, a number of researchers have examined differences between homicidal and non-homicidal sexual offenders and found evidence to suggest that psychopathy is associated with sexual murder. Rates of psychopathy are higher among sexual killers as compared to general sexual offenders (Langevin, 2003), with 58–96% of sexual homicide perpetrators meeting criteria for psychopathy (Firestone et al., 1998, Meloy, 2000 and Stone, 1998). While it should be noted that not all sexual murderers are sexual sadists (Grubin, 1994), high rates of psychopathy in a population that likely contains a subset of sexual sadists suggests that there is some degree of association between psychopathy and sexual sadism. This is supported by research showing that psychopathic sexual murderers committed significantly more gratuitous and sadistic violence than their non-psychopathic counterparts, with a particular relationship between Factor 1 scores and sadistic violence (Porter et al., 2003).

Work in the area of rape and more general sexual offending has also found evidence, albeit more tenuous, of a relationship between psychopathy and sexual sadism. Overall, rapists tend to be more psychopathic than other sexual offenders (e.g., Porter et al., 2000 and Serin et al., 1994). One study found that within sexually motivated rapists, the sadistic group had significantly higher Factor 2, but not Factor 1, scores than the non-sadistic group (Barbaree et al., 1994). Knight and Guay (2006) recently revised their rape classification scheme to incorporate findings of a relationship between overt sadistic rape, psychopathy, and interpersonal-affective deficits. Kirsch et al. (2006) found a high incidence of psychopathy in their sample of sexual sadists, with 90% obtaining PCL-R scores of 25 or greater. PCL-R scores have also been associated with scores on personality tests tapping sadistic traits (Holt et al., 1999) and researchers have found significant correlations between PCL-R total scores and PPG measures of sexual deviance (e.g.,Firestone et al., 2000 and Serin et al., 1994). The combination of psychopathy and PPG arousal to non-sexual violence appears to be quite predictive of sexual and violent recidivism (Rice, Harris, & Quinsey, 1990). However, Brown and Forth (1997) found that most of the sadistic rapists in their sample of incarcerated rapists did not meet criteria for psychopathy. These anomalous findings may be due to difficulties accurately classifying rapists as sadistic (Prentky & Knight, 1991), particularly with respect to the typology the authors utilized in their study (Massachusetts Treatment Center: Rapist Typology 3; Knight & Prentky, 1990b), in addition to the low prevalence of sadistic rapists in the Canadian prison system (Brown & Forth, 1997).

The above findings suggest that psychopathy likely contributes to the development of sexual sadism, both in terms of Factor 1 affective deficits and Factor 2 behavioral disinhibition. It is possible that sexual sadists represent a distinct subset of psychopaths (Murphy & Vess, 2003), though the literature is clearly lacking with respect to specific empirical examinations of the relationship between the disorders. One area that might discriminate sexual sadists from non-sadistic psychopaths is in their emotional lives. Comparisons between affective deficits found among psychopaths and sexual sadists may illustrate commonalities and differences between the two that can help us conceptualize the different roles that emotion might play in their aggressive behaviors.

3. Emotion
Although there is much debate among emotion researchers as to the precise definition of emotion, it is generally believed that emotions can be conceptualized as states of readiness for action, reflecting activity in two basic motivational systems: an appetitive system that mediates approach behavior and a defensive system that mediates withdrawal behavior (Lang, 1995). Emotion researchers have proposed two approaches for classifying emotion: 1) a dimensional framework, in which emotions are classified according to a combination of associated valence (pleasant versus unpleasant) and arousal (high versus low; Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 1990), and 2) a categorical approach that emphasizes the six basic, universally recognized facial expressions of emotion: happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear, and disgust (Ekman & Friesen, 1972). Psychophysiological research tends to adopt the dimensional approach, given the clear association between physiological responses and emotional arousal and valence (Bradley & Lang, 2000), while researchers in the emotion recognition and empathy fields tend to employ the categorical approach.

3.1. Assessment of emotional experience
Emotional expression involves activation of separate, but interrelated response systems (Nielsen & Kaszniak, in press), including expressive and evaluative language, physiological changes mediated by the somatic and autonomic nervous systems, and behavioral sequelae (Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 1998). Because both language and behaviors are more conscious representations of emotional states (Nielsen & Kaszniak, in press) and can be subject to bias or distortion by an individual, researchers have recently begun to place greater emphasis on the more objective physiological correlates of affective states.

Specific psychophysiological systems have been found to be consistently associated with aspects of emotional experience (Lang et al., 1998) and can be used to measure both emotional arousal and valence. Electrodermal activity and electrocortical activity are reliable indicators of arousal level (Bradley & Lang, 2000). Increased arousal is associated with increased skin conductance responses (SCR; e.g.,Greenwald, Cook, & Lang, 1989) and has also been found to prompt a positive slow-wave cortical response (e.g., Cuthbert, Schupp, Bradley, Birbaumer, & Lang, 2000). A greater number of psychophysiological responses is considered an indicator of emotional valence, including cardiac changes, facial muscle activity, and modulation of the startle and post-auricular reflexes. In particular, processing of unpleasant visual stimuli has been associated with heart rate (HR) deceleration (e.g., Lang et al., 1990), increased corrugator (frown) electromyographic (EMG) activity (e.g., Lang et al., 1993), potentiation of the affective startle response (e.g., Bradley, Cuthbert, & Lang, 1990), and inhibition of the post-auricular reflex response (Benning, Patrick, & Lang, 2004). Processing of pleasant visual stimuli has been associated with HR acceleration (e.g., Lang et al., 1990), increased zygomatic (smile) EMG activity (e.g., Lang et al., 1993), inhibition of the startle response (e.g., Bradley et al., 1990), and potentiation of the post-auricular reflex (Benning et al., 2004). Such findings give us information regarding the psychophysiological responses seen in normal individuals when presented with emotional stimuli, allowing us to test whether certain groups of individuals show different patterns of emotional responses when presented with similar stimuli.

3.2. Emotion and aggression
Theories of aggression generally attribute a large role to emotion and emotion regulation (e.g., Geen, 1990, Knight and Prentky, 1990a and Marshall and Barbaree, 1990). However, forms of aggression are typically differentiated based upon their antecedents and motivating factors (e.g., Berkowitz, 1993 and Geen, 1990), and emotion appears to play very different roles in each of the two main subtypes of aggressive behaviors. While strong negative emotional states, including anger, frustration, and dysphoria, have been found to contribute to reactive aggression (e.g., Berkowitz, 1993, Dollard et al., 1939 and Geen, 1990), it appears that a distinct lack of emotion plays a greater role in instrumental aggression (e.g.,Berkowitz, 1993).


Instrumental aggression is believed to be motivated by some desired goal, it is used simply as a means to some other end, such as material gain, status, or power (Geen, 1990). Instrumental or predatory violence, including murder, has been found to be significantly more likely to be perpetrated by psychopathic offenders (e.g., Cornell et al., 1996, Serin, 1991, Williamson et al., 1987 and Woodworth and Porter, 2002) and instrumental violence is associated with a self-reported lack of emotional arousal during the offense (Cornell et al., 1996 and Williamson et al., 1987). In particular, such capacity by psychopaths to inflict serious injury on another person for goal-directed purposes is believed to be mediated by empathy deficits (Cornell et al., 1996), leading to the ‘cold-blooded’ label often given to psychopathic offenders (e.g.,Williamson et al., 1987 and Woodworth and Porter, 2002).

3.2.1. Empathy
While conceptualizations of empathy vary across disciplines, a generally agreed-upon definition is the understanding and sharing of another's emotional state or condition (Eisenberg & Strayer, 1987). In the psychological literature, empathy is considered to be comprised of two separate but linked components: a cognitive or perspective-taking component and an affective component. Concordant emotion in empathy requires the ability to both recognize affective cues in another and take their perspective (the cognitive component), plus the capacity to respond affectively (the affective component; Cohen and Strayer, 1996 and Feshbach and Feshbach, 1982). Overall, it is generally believed that empathy acts as a motivator of prosocial behavior (Eisenberg, 2000 and Moore, 1990), as well as an inhibitor of aggressive behavior (Feshbach and Feshbach, 1982 and Miller and Eisenberg, 1988). Emotion recognition and perspective-taking are considered important prerequisites to an empathic response (e.g., Marshall, Hudson, Jones, & Fernandez, 1995), and deficits in both cognitive and affective components can lead to deficits in empathic responding. Insight into the emotional deficits specific to psychopaths and sexual sadists may allow us to establish how they translate into the empathy deficits that are believed to facilitate instrumental violence.

4. Emotional deficits
4.1. Psychopathy
As discussed above, a majority of theories attributes psychopathic traits and behaviors to affective deficits. As a result, a vast body of research has been conducted to measure emotion in psychopathic individuals. Subjective assessments of emotion appear to be particularly problematic for psychopathic individuals given their tendency towards response bias and intentional distortion, and their general lack of emotional insight (e.g., Cleckley, 1976, Hart and Hare, 1997 and Kroner and Forth, 1995). Therefore, this paper will provide a general overview of more objective measures of emotion that have been employed with this population.

4.1.1. Affective processing
Several studies have attempted to validate Cleckley's theory of semantic dementia by measuring psychopaths' responses to affectively valenced words. Results generally support Cleckley's contentions. In normal individuals, emotional versus neutral language stimuli lead to faster reaction times ( Bradley & Lang, 1999), faster and more accurate lexical decisions ( Graves et al., 1981 and Strauss, 1983), right hemisphere advantages in processing ( Graves et al., 1981), and larger, more prolonged event-related brain potential (ERP) components ( Bradley, Cuthbert, & Lang, 1996). Psychopaths, on the other hand, demonstrate slower reaction times ( Kroner et al., 2005 and Williamson et al., 1991) and fail to show right hemisphere advantages ( Day & Wong, 1996) or enhanced ERP amplitudes ( Williamson et al., 1991) when presented with emotional words. On a word-grouping task, psychopaths were found to rely on more literal meanings of the words, while non-psychopaths tended to use connotative or emotional meanings (Hare, Williamson, & Harpur, 1988). Psychopaths also show less HR and skin conductance differentiation between neutral and emotional sentence processing ( Patrick, Cuthbert, & Lang, 1994), but not to neutral versus emotional pictures ( Patrick et al., 1993). Taken together, these results suggest that psychopaths have a specific deficit in affective language processing, in that emotional words may be perceived as similar to neutral words. Moreover, although psychophysiological measures suggest otherwise, psychopaths tend to report normal emotional experiences on self-report measures of emotion (e.g., Patrick et al., 1993, Patrick et al., 1994 and Williamson et al., 1991), providing support for Cleckley's hypothesized “mask of sanity.”

4.1.2. Affective experience
Lykken's “low-fear hypothesis” has generated an extensive amount of research investigating psychopaths' anomalous physiological reactivity to fearful situations. Lykken (1957) was among the first to discover this phenomenon by finding less electrodermal reactivity to conditioned electric shocks among primary psychopaths. A number of other studies have found similar deficits in fear conditioning as measured by autonomic arousal (see Hare, 1978 for a review), while Patrick et al. (1994) found reduced autonomic and corrugator EMG differentiation to fearful as compared to neutral image processing among psychopaths. Autonomic measures, though, have been criticized as unreliable indexes of the fear response (Patrick, 1994). This has led Patrick and his colleagues (e.g., Levenston et al., 2000, Patrick, 1994 and Patrick et al., 1993) to use the startle reflex to measure negative emotional states in the psychopath, given that it is believed to be a more reliable indicator of experienced emotional valence, particularly fear (Bradley, Cuthbert, & Lang, 1999).

In normal subjects, there is a linear relationship between startle magnitude and affective valence, with larger startle responses occurring during the presentation of unpleasant visual stimuli and smaller startle responses occurring during the presentation of pleasant visual, compared to neutral stimuli (e.g., Lang et al., 1990). Psychopaths and offenders with high Factor 1 PCL-R scores, however, fail to show this startle reflex potentiation when viewing unpleasant slides (Patrick et al., 1993). Psychopaths also show significant startle inhibition when viewing victim scenes, such as pictures of mutilations and attacks on others, and less startle potentiation than non-psychopaths when viewing personal threat scenes (Levenston et al., 2000). Patrick (1994) also used the startle reflex to replicate findings of deficient fear conditioning, by showing that psychopaths and high Factor 1 offenders exhibit diminished startle potentiation in anticipation of noxious noise blasts relative to non-psychopaths and high Factor 2 subjects. Flor and colleagues also found evidence of psychopath's decreased physiological arousal on an aversive conditioning paradigm, evidenced by decreased startle potentiation, corrugator EMG, and SCR, though event-related potentials indexing attentional processing of the conditioned stimuli were equal or superior in psychopaths (Flor, Birbaumer, Hermann, Ziegler, & Patrick, 2002). This suggests that processing of aversive stimuli is not deficient in psychopaths; it is the emotional association with the stimuli that is attenuated.

Overall, these results suggest that the emotional experience of psychopaths is deficient with respect to experiencing unpleasant emotions, specifically in those individuals who show high levels of emotional detachment. These studies also lend support to the low-fear hypothesis, in that the startle response is believed to be directly related to the fear system (Lang et al., 1990 and Patrick et al., 1993). Based on these findings, it has been suggested that psychopathy may be a consequence of a deficit in the neurophysiological systems modulating fear, particularly the amygdala (Patrick, Berthot, & Moore, 1996). EEG studies also provide preliminary support for a neurally based deficit in forming emotional associations to aversive experiences (Flor et al., 2002), perhaps mediated by the anterior cingulate cortex (Dikman & Allen, 2000).

Other research has addressed whether psychopaths suffer from a more general affective deficit by examining psychophysiological responses to pleasant stimuli. Psychopathic and high Factor 1 offenders show attenuated SCR to both pleasant and unpleasant acoustic stimuli compared to neutral sounds, and fail to show SCR differentiation between pleasant and unpleasant sounds (Verona, Patrick, Curtin, Bradley, & Lang, 2004). To index positive emotion more explicitly, researchers have recently begun to use the post-auricular (PA) reflex, given its theorized association with the appetitive emotional system (Benning et al., 2004). In the only study conducted to date, psychopathic offenders failed to show PA potentiation to pleasant slides, in contrast with non-psychopathic offenders and community members (Bernat, Hall, Steffen, Patrick, & Benning, unpublished manuscript), suggesting that psychopaths' emotional non-responsiveness is not necessarily specific to unpleasant emotions.

Results of the above studies suggest several interesting features of the emotional experiences of psychopathic individuals. First, language cues that trigger emotional reactions in normal individuals fail to produce emotional reactions in psychopaths. Second, psychopathy seems to be marked by a deficit in fear reactivity, given that the emotional cues that normally prime activation of the defensive response system fail to exert an effect on psychopaths and highly emotionally detached offenders (Bernat et al., unpublished manuscript). Third, psychopathy may also be characterized by a deficit in appetitive reactivity, though evidence for this deficit is more sparse. Finally, the two factors of psychopathy appear to be differentiated with respect to emotional experience; Factor 1 is associated with greater affective deficits and hence, may be more relevant to the perpetration of instrumental aggression.

4.1.3. Emotion recognition
The robust findings of psychopaths' diminished experience of psychophysiological arousal in response to emotionally valenced stimuli have fueled investigations to uncover additional emotional deficits in psychopaths. Emotion recognition deficits have been a primary area of focus given their theorized connection to impaired empathic responding and inadequate socialization (e.g., Blair, 1995 and Marshall et al., 1995) and their possible link to instrumental aggression (Porter & Woodworth, 2006). Investigations of emotion recognition ability suggest that psychopaths have general deficits in recognizing facial affect in others (Habel et al., 2002 and Kosson et al., 2002). More importantly, psychopaths show specific impairments in their ability to discriminate sad (Blair et al., 2001 and Stevens et al., 2001) and fearful (Blair et al., 2001, Blair et al., 2004 and Stevens et al., 2001) facial expressions, while recognition of happy, angry and surprised faces remains intact. Psychopaths' ability to recognize disgust faces is more equivocal. While one study found evidence of impairment (Kosson et al., 2002), several others did not (Blair et al., 2001, Blair et al., 2004 and Stevens et al., 2001). Evidence suggests that these emotion recognition deficits are not specific to visual stimuli, psychopaths also show deficits recognizing sad (Blair et al., 2002 and Stevens et al., 2001) and fearful (Blair et al., 2002) vocal affect.


These emotion recognition deficits may play a role in the low empathy found in psychopaths (Marshall et al., 1995), perhaps facilitating their offending behaviors. Psychopaths seem to have particular difficulty recognizing the emotions that victims are most likely to express: fear, sadness, and to a lesser extent, disgust. At this time the extent to which these deficits facilitate instrumental violence is unknown, but it is plausible to theorize that the inability to recognize the emotional impact of their offenses on others is a significant contributor to their antisocial and aggressive behaviors.

Given that processing of fearful facial expressions and vocal tone are thought to be mediated by the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex respectively (e.g., Adolphs, 2002), the above studies provide support for theories positing limbic-mediated deficits in emotional processing and experience, leading to “cold emotion” (Birbaumer et al., 2005), as well as providing support for the hypothesis that psychopathy is grounded in biological abnormalities (e.g., Blair, 2003, Muller et al., 2003 and Patrick, 1994). While research examining the presence of functional and structural deficits in the brains of psychopathic individuals has blossomed in recent years (see Raine & Yang, 2006, for a review), more work in this area is needed.

4.2. Sadism
4.2.1. Affective processing and experience
Little work has been conducted to investigate the presence of affective deficits in sexual sadists. This is surprising, given that a majority of etiological theories of sexual sadism and sexual homicide incorporate emotional experience, albeit implicitly. In particular, emotions such as anger and shame are believed to fuel aggressive and retributive fantasies (Brittain, 1970, Burgess et al., 1986 and MacCulloch et al., 1983), and these fantasies are maintained and enhanced through the processes of positive and negative emotional reinforcement (Burgess et al., 1986 and MacCulloch et al., 1983). Specifically, feelings of inferiority are believed to be reduced during fantasy, while feelings of control, power and dominance are enhanced. This would suggest that sexual sadists have emotional capacities similar to that of normal individuals, given that their experiences of intense negative emotion in childhood and adolescence are thought to lead to creation of a fantasy life that alleviates this emotional pain. However, the prevalence of psychopathy (Kirsch et al., 2006, Meloy, 2000 and Stone, 1998) and high Factor 1 scores (Firestone et al., 1998 and Porter et al., 2003) seen among sexual sadists, the depravity of the crimes they commit, and reports of their emotional detachment during sadistic acts (e.g., Dietz et al., 1990) all would indicate the presence of affective deficits, particularly with respect to negative emotion.

There have, however, been several investigations of the emotional experiences of rapists. Given that rapists may be the closest comparison group to sexual sadists, the major findings with respect to affective deficits in this population will be reviewed here. It should be noted however, that the emotional lives of rapists as a whole should not be considered to reflect the emotional lives of sexual sadists, as it is estimated that only 5–10% of rapists meet DSM criteria for sexual sadism ( Abel et al., 1988) and rapists are an extremely heterogeneous group ( Polaschek, Ward, & Hudson, 1997), who likely vary considerably in their emotional experiences.

There are two competing sets of findings concerning the emotional experiences of rapists. On the one hand, rapists have consistently been found to report experiencing negative affective states immediately prior to their offenses. Anger in particular appears to be a common emotional precursor to rape (e.g., Groth and Birnbaum, 1979, Hanson and Harris, 2000 and Pithers, 1999), even among sadistic rapists (Barbaree et al., 1994). On the other hand, rapists are significantly more psychopathic than other sexual offenders (Firestone et al., 2000, Porter et al., 2000 and Serin et al., 1994), suggesting presence of affective deficits in this group, particularly with respect to the experience of negative affect. There are several interpretations of these conflicting perspectives. First, psychopaths tend to report experiencing emotion in similar ways to non-psychopaths, while at the same time exhibiting deficits in the psychophysiological correlates of the affective states. All of the research conducted with rapists to date has used subjective measures of emotion, including retrospective self-reports and analysis of crime scene variables. Research using more objective measures of emotion in rapists, in addition to a lesser reliance on retrospective evaluations of emotional experience, may uncover a discrepancy between self-reported or inferred anger and authentic emotional experiences.

Second, psychopathic and non-psychopathic rapists may differ in their experience of dysphoric emotions such as anger, depression, and frustration as precursors to sexually aggressive behavior (Brown & Forth, 1997). Research with criminal offenders suggests that non-psychopaths are more likely to be motivated by strong emotional arousal while psychopaths' crimes show a significant absence of strong emotional components (e.g., Williamson et al., 1987). Perpetrators of instrumental violence tend to have significantly higher PCL-R scores than offenders who engage in reactive violence, and instrumental violence is also associated with a self-reported lack of anger during the offense (Cornell et al., 1996). In addition, psychopathic homicide perpetrators show extremely high levels of instrumental violence, while non-psychopathic murderers exhibit higher levels of impulsivity and emotionality (Woodworth & Porter, 2002). Psychopathic rapists have been found to report positive emotions in the 24 h preceding the commission of a sexual offense, while non-psychopathic rapists are more likely to report feeling alienated and stressed, with the intensity of negative emotionality significantly negatively correlated with Factor 1 PCL-R scores (Brown & Forth, 1997).

Taken together, these studies suggest that psychopathic rapists may be differentiated from non-psychopathic rapists with respect to the role that emotion plays in their offending behaviors, and provides some support for hypothesized deficits in the emotional experience of psychopathic rapists and perhaps by extension, sexual sadists. In particular, instrumental, sadistic sexual violence may be more likely to be perpetrated by individuals who lack the ability to experience strong emotions but who are sexually aroused by such a crime, conceivably a psychopathic sexual sadist may fit these criteria. Empirical work examining the nature of sexual sadists' emotional experiences is necessary before such a theory can be put forth.

4.2.2. Emotion recognition
One mechanism that may mediate the relationship between affective experience and sexually sadistic behavior is an inability to recognize the emotional states of others. Perhaps sadists are capable of feeling negative emotion in response to their own suffering, but fail to experience negative emotion to others' suffering because they lack the ability to recognize or empathize with another's distress. Burgess et al. (1986) posit that the high degree of egocentricity found among sexual murderers may limit their awareness of the impact of their actions on others. However, others argue that sexually sadistic offenders may actually possess a greater degree of insight into the ways in which others can be influenced and controlled (Warren et al., 1996), implying that they do not suffer from emotion recognition deficits. It has also been suggested that presence of empathy, and by extension, emotion recognition abilities, is essential for sexual sadists to truly be able to enjoy their victim's suffering (Fox & Levin, 2005).

Unfortunately, no empirical work has been conducted to examine the emotion recognition abilities of sexual sadists. Research with rapists suggests some impairment in emotion recognition, though these deficits are more generally associated with heterosocial skills (e.g., Abel et al., 1976 and Dreznick, 2003). In particular, rapists show deficits interpreting female cues, specifically with respect to negative cues and bad mood states, when exposed to simulated first date interactions (Lipton, McDonel, & McFall, 1987) and sexual homicide perpetrators show lifelong deficits with heterosexual relationships (Gratzer and Bradford, 1995 and MacCulloch et al., 1983). Researchers using a community sample of men found that men who reported higher rates of sexual coercion and sexual arousal to rape depictions were less able to discriminate female hostility and rejection in heterosocial interactions (Murphy, Coleman, & Haynes, 1986).

More specific studies of emotion recognition abilities in rapists and sexual offenders also tend to uncover some degree of impairment, though deficits may be specific to certain subtypes of offenders. A study of sexual and non-sexual offenders found that sexual offenders (both rapists and child molesters) demonstrated the greatest deficits in the recognition of facial affect, though all groups had difficulty recognizing facial expressions of fear and frequently mistook them for surprise (Hudson et al., 1993). College males who reported engaging in sexually aggressive behavior made more errors identifying facial affect in pictures and showed lower levels of empathy than non-aggressive males (Lisak & Ivan, 1995).Hanson and Scott (1995) found that rapists made significantly more errors on a measure of female perspective-taking skills compared to non-offender males. However, there was a negative association between errors on the perspective-taking task and the use of overt force during a sexual offense, suggesting that forceful offenders may accurately perceive victim suffering, but may either be indifferent or attracted to their victim's fear and pain (Hanson & Scott, 1995). Results of this area of research suggest that for some rapists, perspective-taking deficits appear to be irrelevant to their offending, in that the offender may accurately perceive the emotional state of their victim and get enjoyment from their suffering (i.e., sadistic rapists), while others may truly fail to recognize victim harm (Hanson & Scott, 1995). More research examining differences between sadistic and non-sadistic rapists with respect to their emotion recognition and victim empathy capacities is clearly warranted in order to advance a theory of the emotional mechanisms contributing to sexually sadistic violence.

5. Emotion in psychopathy and sexual sadism
All of the above findings demonstrate that psychopaths and likely sexual sadists experience significant deficits in their emotional processing and experience. Given the hypothesized role that a lack of emotion plays in the perpetration of instrumental violence (e.g., Berkowitz, 1993), it is not surprising that psychopathic and sexually sadistic individuals engage in high rates of instrumental violence (e.g., Cornell et al., 1996, Dietz et al., 1990 and Porter and Woodworth, 2006). One way these affective deficits may mediate such violence is via a lack of victim empathy. However, this may also be the discriminating factor between sexual sadists and psychopaths, as the capacity to engage in both cognitive and affective empathy may differ between the two, leading to disparate motivations for committing sexually violent offenses.


5.1. Empathy
Criminologists have long theorized that deficits in empathy facilitate offending behavior, suggesting that offenders' lack of awareness or sensitivity to other people's feelings may impair their ability to appreciate the effects of their behavior on others (Farrington, 1998). Not surprisingly, a number of theories include low empathy in their explanations of antisocial behavior. However, as both Jolliffe and Farrington (2004) andMarshall et al. (1995) note, clear evidence of empathy deficits in offenders and sexual offenders does not exist. To ameliorate the equivocal findings in the literature, Jolliffe and Farrington (2004) conducted a meta-analysis of 35 studies using questionnaire measures of empathy in offender samples. The results suggest that empathy and offending are negatively related, particularly with respect to cognitive empathy, but the strength of this relationship is influenced by a number of factors, including intelligence, socioeconomic status (SES), age, and type of index offense. In fact, the differences in empathy between offenders and non-offenders disappear when SES is controlled for and differences between sexual offenders and non-offenders are eliminated when intelligence is controlled for. Overall, the authors conclude that in addition to the significant limitations in the measurement of empathy in offenders, the relationship between empathy and offending is not as clear-cut as it is generally believed to be.

Marshall et al. (1995) have argued that the equivocal research findings with respect to empathy deficits in sexual offenders are due to flaws in the conceptualization and measurement of empathy. In particular, the authors discriminate between global empathy and situation-specific empathy, and hypothesize that sexual offenders are more likely to have specific empathy deficits, rather than the global lack of empathy that most researchers have attempted to demonstrate. Recent research shows that rapists have significantly lower empathy when in moods precursive to their offending as opposed to typical moods (Pithers, 1999) and rapists have significantly lower empathy scores for their own victims as compared to female accident victims and other sexual assault victims (Fernandez & Marshall, 2003).

Another possible explanation for the limited association between empathy and offending is a failure to differentiate between reactive and instrumental aggression. Perhaps a lack of empathy is a facilitator of instrumental violence, allowing an offender to deliberately harm someone to obtain a selfish goal with little or no thought to the consequences to the victim. Reactive violence, on the other hand, is more likely the result of situational and emotional precursors overwhelming an individual's inhibitions towards acting aggressively, one of which may be empathy. Therefore, in reactively aggressive offenders we may not see evidence of global empathy deficits, though we may see situation-specific empathy deficits, while we would expect to find greater evidence of low global empathy among instrumentally aggressive offenders. Study designs that allow us to tease apart the role of empathy in instrumental versus reactive aggression may shed more light on this topic. In addition, attempts to discriminate between psychopathic and non-psychopathic offenders with respect to empathy deficits may also prove informative, given psychopaths' greater likelihood to commit acts of instrumental violence. Unfortunately, with the exception of Fernandez and Marshall's (2003) work, studies of offender empathy have not assessed the type of aggression perpetrated or the presence of psychopathy in their samples, preventing us from examining the mediational role of empathy in different types of aggression and different types of offenders. While this research has yet to be conducted, one can hypothesize about the presence and nature of empathy deficits in psychopaths and sexual sadists based on the emotional deficits that have been documented in these populations.

5.1.1. In psychopaths
Given psychopaths' deficits in emotion recognition, particularly with respect to signals of distress, combined with their impaired ability to experience negative emotions, it is not surprising that a lack of empathy is considered to be one of the hallmark features of the disorder (e.g., Hare, 1993). In particular, it has been argued that psychopaths likely show generalized empathy deficits (Blair et al., 1997), which may mediate their offending behaviors (e.g., Hare, 2003, Porter and Woodworth, 2006 and Silver et al., 1999). However, a search of the literature has revealed remarkably few studies specifically examining the relationship between psychopathy and empathy. The literature that exists to date has relied largely on self-report measures of global empathy deficits, as opposed to more objective measures of both empathy and its constituent components, making it impossible to determine if (a) psychopaths truly exhibit significantly lower levels of empathy than non-psychopaths, (b) empathy deficits are global or situation-specific, and (c) their lack of empathy is due to impairments in cognitive empathy, affective empathy, or both. It would also be interesting to examine the relationship between PCL-R total and factor scores with respect to empathy and its components to determine the precise nature of the deficit. Given the dispositional nature of psychopaths' affective deficits, one would expect them to show trait-based deficits in both cognitive and affective empathy, and it is likely that this effect would be driven by Factor 1 scores in particular. Objective measures of empathy need to be developed and applied to this population in order to validate these claims.

5.1.2. In sexual sadists
The relationship between sexual sadism and empathy is also unclear at present. Because there has been no research to address their emotion recognition or affective capabilities, it is difficult to theorize about the nature of their empathic experiences. Data from sadists' crime scenes, self-report measures, and victim interviews suggest extreme emotional detachment from the suffering of their victims (e.g., Dietz et al., 1990). In an investigation of convicted rapists, PPG indexes of sexual arousal to rape and non-sexual violence that particularly emphasized female victim distress were found to be significantly negatively related to self-report measures of global empathy (Rice et al., 1994), signifying the presence of empathy deficits among sexual sadists, both in terms of general empathy and empathy specific to female suffering. However, research on emotion recognition in rapists implies a relationship between intact perspective-taking and particularly violent sexual assaults (Hudson et al., 1993).

Taken together, these results suggest that sexual sadists may not suffer from impairments in their cognitive empathy (or perspective-taking abilities), but may lack the affective response to their victim's distress that is necessary for an empathic experience. Heilbrun (1982) contends that empathic skills (likely cognitive empathy) may actually promote arousal and sadistic reinforcement by enhancing awareness of the victim's pain and distress. The next logical step would be to determine if sexual sadists lack the capacity for an emotional response to victim distress, or have adequate affective empathy abilities, but for some reason show anomalous affective responses. That is, they may be able to identify another's distress but instead of feeling sympathy or personal distress in response as normal individuals do (Batson, Fultz, & Schoenrade, 1987), they may actually experience a pleasurable response instead.

Perhaps, then, the main difference between sexual sadists and non-sadistic psychopaths lies in their emotional responses to victim distress. In particular, specific deficits in processing and experiencing emotion may lead to differences in their capability for empathizing with victims. While psychopaths are generally impaired in their ability to recognize others' emotions and likely fail to experience any type of emotional response once distress is recognized, sadists appear to have intact cognitive empathy and perhaps even affective empathy, though the emotions experienced in response to another's distress are not concordant with the individual's emotional experience, but are instead positive in valence. This may have strong implications for the reasons psychopaths and sexual sadists engage in acts of instrumental violence. Psychopaths may commit such acts due to their inability both to recognize harm caused and to commiserate with the emotional experience of their victim, while sexual sadists may seek out circumstances where they can induce victim distress so that they can experience pleasure and sexual arousal as a result. Research specifically examining the empathic abilities of sexual sadists is required to validate such a claim as well as to determine why sadists might show such anomalous emotional experiences in the face of victim distress.

One promising area of research may be examining sexual sadists' ability to dehumanize and objectify their victims (Fox & Levin, 2005). Research has consistently shown that empathic responding is more likely when the witnessed individual is perceived as more similar to the responder (e.g., Davis, 1996). If sexual sadists have an enhanced ability to perceive their victims as distinctly dissimilar to themselves, perhaps as simply an object, it may decrease their experience of affective empathy, making concordant emotional responses to their victim's distress much less likely to occur. Such objectification may come about through sexual sadists' frequent engagement in fantasies that portray women to exist solely for their own sadistic pleasure, which may then produce a view of female victims as simply objects of their desire. More research is needed to examine the role that empathy (or the lack thereof) might play in sexually sadistic behavior, in addition to investigating the origins of such empathy deficits if they are found to exist.

6. Conclusions and future directions
The emotional lives of psychopaths and sexual sadists are quite different from those of the rest of the population. As such, it is difficult for society to understand the motivations for the particularly violent and often depraved crimes that such individuals have been found to perpetrate. Research examining the emotional deficits in these populations has given us some insight into their behavior, yet further work is clearly warranted. While psychopathy research is burgeoning, investigation of sexual sadism remains stagnant. In order to prevent sexually sadistic crimes from occurring, valid theories of the development of sexual sadism as well as a better understanding of the mechanisms contributing to such behaviors are required. Though theories of the etiology and characteristics of sexual sadism have existed for the past 30 years, little attempt has been made to validate them.

Throughout this review, we have pointed out a number of areas for further work. Specifically, the concept of sexual sadism needs to be put to stronger empirical tests for accurate diagnosis, etiological theory, and to determine the characteristics associated with the disorder, including dysfunctional emotional experiences. In addition, given the similarity between behavioral and affective features of the disorders, the relationship between sexual sadism and psychopathy merits empirical examination, perhaps in the context of their emotional reactions to violent stimuli and victim suffering. Such investigations could be conducted using psychophysiological measures including the startle reflex response, post-auricular reflex response, event-related potentials, and fMRI investigations of hypothesized neural substrates of emotion. Finally, more attention needs to be paid to the role of empathy in instrumental aggression, particularly with respect to the affective deficits demonstrated by psychopaths and sexual sadists. Given the dearth of research in the area, any investigations will likely be beneficial for both theory and practice.

 

...Κάτι σε youtube με μουσικούλα από πίσω δεν έχεις?

 

Ε, μα ναι, κι εσύ @seduced mind, το τερμάτισες....   

 

@brenda Aφου δεν με πιστεύει και θέλει έρευνα τι να του κάνω ας πρόσεχε....