Emotional Sensitivity in Psychopaths

Although psychopaths demonstrate emotional abnormalities such as shallow affect, lack of empathy, incapacity for love, lack of guilt or remorse, lack of fear, and emotional processing and response deficiencies they may show normal emotional responses or emotional hypersensitive in other areas. The correlates of emotional incapacities, emotional hypersensitivity, and normal emotional activities in psychopaths are studied and discussed in this paper. Emotional hypersensitivity might be linked with: a history of neglect, rejection and abuse; insult; changes which are forced or not under control of the psychopath; obstacles that prevent the psychopath to do what he or she wants to do; narcissistic injury; broken friendships or relationship. Normal emotional functioning might be associate with grief, warm relationship, adequate attention, disease, academic and/or occupational success, impressive events, confrontations, contemplation and maturation, hidden suffering (also as a result of neurobiological determination).