Free Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work by Robert D. Hare, Paul Babiak Page B

that their behavior may have dire consequences for themselves and others. In part, this is because the past and future are less important to them than is the present. In addition, their own shallow emotions make it difficult for them to appreciate that others might have a much richer emotional life. It also makes it easy for psychopaths to view others as objects or pawns to be moved around at will. Put another way, psychopaths are better at understanding the intellectual or cognitive lives of others than they are 54
    S N A K E S I N S U I T S
    at understanding their emotional life. As a consequence, people have value only for what they can provide. Once used, they are discarded.
    To be able to abandon people in such a callous and harmful manner one must be immune to the feelings of those one hurts. Psychopaths can easily do this because their emotional and social attachments to others are poorly developed; weak at best.
    Although psychopaths do not feel the range and depth of emotions experienced by most people, they do understand that others have something called “emotions.” Some may even take the time to learn to mimic emotions so they can better manipulate their victims.
    But they do so at a superficial level, and trained observers can sometimes tell the difference; the real gut-feel behind their playacting is not there. Consider these words by Jack Abbott, a psychopathic killer who was championed by Norman Mailer and released from prison, only to kill again: “There are emotions—a whole spectrum of them—that I know only through words, through reading and in my immature imagination. I can imagine I feel these emotions (know, therefore, what they are), but I do not.”
    Practice Makes Perfect
    Hare consulted with Nicole Kidman on the movie Malice . She wanted to let the audience know, early in the film, that she was not the sweet, warm person she appeared to be. He gave her the following scene: “You’re walking down the street and come across an accident at the corner. A young child has been struck by a car and is lying in a pool of blood. You walk up to the accident site, look briefly at the child, and then focus on the grief-stricken mother. After a few minutes of careful scrutiny, you walk back to your apartment, go into the bathroom, stand in front of the mirror, and practice mimicking the facial expressions and body language of the mother.”
    What You See May Not Be What You See 55
    The emotional poverty of psychopaths and their inability to fully appreciate the emotional life of others have been the subject of considerable neurobiological research, some of it using brain-imaging technology. The results of this research are consistent with the clinical view that psychopaths do not respond to emotional situations and material in the way that the rest of us do. In several functional magnetic resonance imaging (f MRI) brain imaging studies, Hare and his associates found that emotional words and unpleasant pictures did not produce in psychopaths the increases in the activity of brain (limbic) regions normally associated with the processing of emotional material. Instead, activation occurred in regions of the brain involved in the understanding and production of language, as if the psychopaths analyzed the material in linguistic terms. Think of Spock in Star Trek. He responds to events that others find arousing, repulsive, or scary with the words interesting and fascinating. His response is a cognitive or intellectual appraisal of the situation, without the visceral reactions and emotional coloring that others normally experience. Fortunately for those around him, Spock has
    “built-in” ethical and moral standards, a conscience that functions without the strong emotional components that form a necessary part of our conscience.
    Some researchers have commented that psychopaths “know the words but not the music,” a statement that accurately captures their cold and empty core. This hollow core serves them