Model of Love, Hate, and Anxiety Scripts in Psychopathic Individuals

The narrative studies provides considerable information related to the affective sphere in individuals with antisocial and/or psychopathic personality. Narrative studies on emotions of psychopaths revisits past efforts to establish a " linguistic typology " for antisocial personality (Rieber and Vetter, 1994). The studies on emotional narratives have showed ambivalence of the scripts of love, hate, and anxiety in psychopathic individuals. In the script of love the actor is shown as both positive and negative, experiencing joy and happiness as well as sadness, anger, and aversion. The description of a partner also lacks clarity in terms of the positive/negative emotions. The valence of the script of hate is also unclear. The character traits of the actor are extremely positive while those of the partner are negative, just like their emotions. The picture of hatred contains numerous inadequate " toward-type " actions as well as positively perceived endings of the scene. Similarly to love and hate, the script of anxiety is also of ambivalent nature. The findings suggest the ambivalent nature of the scripts of complex emotions in psychopaths. This means their emotional sensations are vague and unclear; these individuals cannot accurately identify the correct meaning of various affective situations (Gawda, 2010). The ambivalence may lead to inaccurate identification of goals, aspirations, and intentions. The findings correspond with a relatively new approach to the affective functioning of psychopaths according to which those individuals experience emotions without clearly recognizing their valence, i.e., in ambivalent manner. This is consistent with reports explaining the mechanism of ambivalence taking into account the analysis of ineffectiveness of mutual suppression of BAS and BIS systems (Newman et al., 2005). In accordance with the concept of script structure, the representation of a given emotion should contain information related to conditions preceding a given affective scenario (explanation of causes), assessment of people (oneself and others) involved in an affective scenario, actions typical for a given emotional scene and ways of ending it. In the case of the scripts of love, individuals with psychopathic personality were able to identify the causes by pointing to positive events preceding the emotion of love. While depicting themselves as the main actor of the scene, they pointed to positive emotions, yet there were also negative descriptions. The comparison of the number of positive descriptions of oneself and the partner shows that individuals with psychopathy far more often use positive terms to describe themselves than the …