WASHINGTON D.C: Turns out, the predominant traits of psychopath differ between cultures.
It is not uncommon that when the term “psychopath” is mentioned, a number of famous fictional figures spring to minds such as Patrick Bateman, Freddy Krueger, and Dexter Morgan to name a few.
A new research has shed more light on the main attributes of a psychopath’s personality, claiming that they vary across different cultures as opposed to being universal as perceived up until now.
A team of researchers carried out a study on 7,450 individuals that exhibit psychopathic characteristics in America and the Netherlands. The whole monitoring process was supervised by Bruno Verschuere of the University of Amsterdam.
The team used the concept of Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) – first devised in the 1970s - to examine the participants.
Touted to be the most updated version of a psychological assessment tool, the PCL-R, has 20 marks to denote personality traits. It records behaviour accordingly and thus associates them with a psychopathic tendency.
Some of the markers were selfishness, callousness, and antisocial behaviour.
The researchers examined and analysed two samples – one from Wisconsin and another from the National Institute of Mental Health.
The most noted item from both the samples came out to be callousness or lack of sympathy. However, results from the Dutch samples came out to be different.
While callousness was still recorded, irresponsibility and parasitic lifestyle came out to be more dominant.
The findings demonstrated that the personality traits exhibited by the psychopaths differ across cultures and could be used as an indicator of where they belong from.
The Independent quoted the team, “The findings raise the important possibility of cross-cultural differences in the phenotypic structure psychopathy, PCL-R measurement variance, or both”.