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| A Dalhousie undergraduate student, Kevin Wilson had a research paper on psychopaths published in the Journal of Research in Personality. (Danny Abriel Photo) |
How do psychopaths find their victims? A new study by Dalhousie researchers suggests they are deeply attuned to vulnerable people.
“It’s like what you’d see on Animal Planet—the lion goes after the most vulnerable, the one they have the best chance of getting,” says Kevin Wilson, a fourth-year science student who was the lead researcher on the paper, “A pawn by any other name? Social information processing as a function of psychopathic traits,” published in the Journal of Research in Personality.
“This type of aggression is referred to as predatory… it’s a perceptual system geared to getting the easiest prey.”
To test the hypothesis, the researchers with Professor Stephen Porter’s Forensic Psychology Lab at Dalhousie showed slides of different faces to a sample of young men. The faces were either happy or sad, male or female, and described as being in either a high- or low-paying job.
Mr. Wilson found men who scored high on a psychopathic personality questionnaire (a series of 187 questions probing emotional reactions and impulsivity) possessed the unusual ability to recall sad females in low-paying jobs. At the same time, they also had an unusual inability to recall females who were happy or in high-paying jobs, nor were they good at putting names to faces.
“What we concluded is that psychopathy is associated with a kind of ‘predatory memory,’” says Mr. Wilson, 22, from Moncton, N.B. “They may use this to actively select their victims.”
He’s interested in doing further research with diagnosed offenders in the criminal population.
Mr. Wilson’s interest in psychopaths was piqued while taking Dr. Porter’s second-year class Abnormal Psychology. He distinctly recalls reading a paragraph on psychopathy in the class textbook that intrigued him.
“It’s not like anxiety or depression; we can relate to those conditions,” he says. “But to perceive your world without emotion is so foreign … it just makes it so interesting..”
LINK: "A pawn by any other name" in the Journal of Research in Personality