Wondering how you’d characterise someone with characteristics more like me.
I’ve been described as sociopath-like by my partner, a close friend and a psychiatrist. I have essentially no capacity for empathic concern or guilt (although this is confounded by being highly alexithymic and autistic) - even at times when I’ve intentionally done very obviously bad and harmful things that seriously distress loved ones. I don’t have the instinctive sense of taboo / repulsion that seems to come naturally to most people and have socially gotten in trouble for this (talking to people about the moral nature of bestiality for fun not realising people were becoming genuinly repulsed at the concept- not understanding when I’m supposed to ‘boo’ vs ‘yay’ if you know what I mean).
However I have a very strong drive to be liked and have always been hyper sensitive to peoples opinions and perceptions of me (maybe related to this: I score very above average on covert narcassism scales). I am also a woman which might have something to do with the patterns I’ve learned too, I don’t know.
Interesting! This is all super speculative, but speculation is fun. :) Note that I’m purely speculating on “what might be happening under the hood”, not what DSM-V diagnosis you should have, not what if anything you should do about it, etc.—I have no opinion about any of that.
Start with some background of hot-takes on relevant conditions (low confidence, mostly unpublished):
My brief hot-take on alexithymia: I think of alexithymia as generally coming from someone having a history of lots of highly aversive emotions. A funny thing about emotions is that introspecting on them can trigger them—if I think about whether I might be anxious right now, that can trigger actual anxiety (I call this “defer-to-predictor mode” for “thought assessors”, see my Intro Series 5 & 6). So someone prone to highly aversive emotions can get into a habit of simply never introspecting upon their emotions (and perhaps even losing the ability to do so, the way lots of people “can’t” wiggle their ears). Or maybe they can, but when they try, they get immediately distracted by involuntary attention to the aversiveness. Either way, at the end of the day, they wind up being simply unable to simply observe their incoming suite of interoceptive data, in the way that everyone can observe incoming visual data, sound data, etc.
My brief hot-take on sociopathy: I think there’s basically two groups of people who get ASPD diagnoses: one has basically an anger disorder, the other has constitutionally low physiological arousal. The latter are more often what people mean by “sociopaths” in pop culture, and what I was referring to when I referred to “sociopaths” in §4.1 of this OP.
My brief hot-take on NPD: I think it mainly comes from having an unusually strong (compared to other people) physiological arousal reaction upon receiving someone else’s attention (e.g. eye contact). That leads to all the “approval reward” phenomena in this post being unusually strong, and I think all the other major NPD symptoms flow from there. …Unless the person finds the reaction to someone else’s attention SO strong that it’s overwhelming and unpleasant, and then they’ll adopt coping mechanisms to avoid that reaction (e.g. avoiding eye contact), and then that path leads to autism instead of NPD.
Finally, your profile:
The low-physiological-arousal form of ASPD (what I think of as “stereotypical sociopathy”) seems thoroughly ruled out by the rest of your description: it seems very inconsistent with the alexithymia, the autism, and the hyper sensitivity to people’s opinions. E.g. I’m guessing that you would never use “the pity play” of §4.1.
After eliminating that possibility, my next most plausible explanation for “no capacity for…guilt” would be that the guilt is there but you’re not noticing it because of alexithymia.
As for “no capacity for empathic concern”, that would either be ditto (it’s there but you’re alexithymic), or that your innate“sympathy reward” reaction, when someone is suffering, is so painful that you long ago unconsciously learned to simply avoid triggering it. But I think the former is more likely.
The “hyper sensitive to peoples opinions and perceptions of me” sounds like the thing that I described as at the root of NPD. Maybe the NPD-typical root cause is manifesting as an NPD-atypical presentation, because of your unusually strong aversive emotions and autism? Not sure.
I think I’m probably wrong and confused about various things here but I’m hoping you can push back and maybe I’ll learn something in the process. :)
Oh wow thanks for the response! Also sorry I’m so late in replying as well, long story.
In terms of your NPD thing about having an unusually strong reaction to others attention- how might you explain the difference between overt and covert narcisissm through this? Its always seemed to me like narcasism is surely a reaction to or coping mechanism that arises from persistent insecurity early in development, or something like that. But is there not actually good evidence for this? I guess maybe the early-life insecurity in general and the narcisissm more specifically are both mutual effects of the ‘unusually strong reaction to others attention’… But then you would expect sensitivity to others opinion to correlate with narcissism far above and beyond insecurity specifically.. I will look into this (I guess it depends on whether you think the heightened reaction is the root cause, or if its just downstream of ‘early-life insecurity’ or something like that. by default the second feels more intuitive but i dont know) (EDIT: did research. you’re probably right. there seems good evidence narcissism and self-esteem are pretty strongly dissociable and its more just that people higher in narcissism simply fluctuate in self-esteem way more depending on the approval/disapproval of others, which matches your hypothesis)
I think your alexithymia comment makes a lot of sense and matches anecdotally very well. I was hyper emotional as a child, I even originally had a righteous sense of justice and could become very horribly distressed at watching my beloved heroes on TV lose battles and such (vivid memory of being a pre-adolescent watching a documentary on Hitler scream-crying fantasising about torturing him for eternity in my mind- a very very alien kind of reaction to the present-day me). Cue teenage years with a lot of dissociation and emotional-suppression, followed up by an adult me who has learned how to act kind pretty reliably but feels little for others and has little to no ‘moral feeling’.
I do agree the alexithymia certainly matters a lot in my phenomenology- for example one of the worst things I ever did I did feel an unpleasant pressure in my head when thinking about it, which was definitely in retrospect a kind of guilt, functionally speaking at least. It didn’t have the default phenomenology of ‘I can’t believe I hurt this person, how horrible, I must apologise to make up for it!’ that the average person seems to describe guilt as having, but it played a similiar-ish role in my behaviour, and did seem to be ‘punishment at hurting someone you’re not supposed to hurt’, so…
I don’t think its just ‘its there but you don’t notice it’ though- given how intense the reactions were in early childhood I do think I could notice. Like I can notice very strong, straightforward emotions in myself but I have done / seen things that would trigger any typical persons guilt / empathy very very strongly but I feel no meaningful physiological symptoms at all. Because of this I think its also largely just that guilt/empathy got heavily inhibited/surpressed over time from being so exhausting and miserable for me to feel. Empathy was often awful for me to feel and I’m happy to feel much less of it (‘empathy’ here meaning emotional contagion, not empathic concern specifically).
The thing with empathic concern is that from what I understand, it requires a kind of additional component on top of emotional contagion empathy? Like ‘youre in pain and that hurts me’ + ‘so i will care for u’. Even when I was young and the first component was in full swing I’m not sure I ever really developed the second. So that might be less of a ‘alexithymia’ + ‘emotional suppression’ thing and more of a social stunting thing?? Because even when I absolutely did not know how to suppress those feelings the care still never naturally came, so that seems like something is lacking beyond the influence of those two components. I had friends in early childhood who never really showed sympathy ever and if anything tended to ignore or make fun of me for crying when hurt and stuff like that. Given these sorts of childhood learning experiences plus the intrinsic difficulties growing up with autism, it seems plausible to me I just never quite learned how to turn second-hand distress into concern reliably, so that social instinct just never really healthily developed. But I could be wrong.
Even nowadays very occassionally when I’m presented with extremely strong stimulus I will feel emotional contagion- such as feeling really awful because my girlfriend feels awful, but this will never really become any meaningful impulse towards helping or attempting to alleviate that suffering for her. (If anything it will often [although far from always] tend to become anger or irritation). Thanks to my narcissism issues i tend to have anger issues where if my loved ones aren’t behaving the way im supposed to, such as feeling distress when i dont want them to, i can develop regular bursts of anger. this ties into ur ‘anger issues’ thing i think. writing this out it seems to my ‘sociopathy-like symptomology’ are maybe just quite polycausal in origin >//<
I’m also very sadistic which is a final thing that I guess could be influencing me, I can get a very strong rush of pleasure from cruelty, even when its not totally fake / consensual. This probably hepls surpress any empathetic response further depending on context.
so then perhaps… alexithymia + emotional suppression + autism in general + childhood experiences + some kind of subclinical narcissistic anger thing? = the reason why.. ?
By writing this out I think I’ve developed a historical model of myself. Although I’m interested if you think I’m very likely mistaken about any of this. Thank you!!! Fun!!
That’s really interesting, and I really appreciate you sharing your thoughts and ideas and experiences, thanks so much.
I don’t have much to add (we’re beyond the limits of my understanding!), just a couple more random comments.
First, not sure how this fits in to what you wrote, but fun fact about NPD (as I understand it) (copied from something I wrote once):
Contrary to what you might think, NPD is not especially related to the everyday meaning of “narcissism”; indeed, there’s a “narcissistic personality inventory” survey, but it turns out that NPD patients get the same score on the survey as controls (!!). The issue seems to revolve around self-esteem. A “narcissist”, as the term is used in everyday language, is a person who thinks they’re really special and great—they have high self-esteem by definition. Whereas an NPD patient need not think they’re really special and great. But if they don’t think that, then boy do they feel lousy about it. (As discussed in that paper, DSM-V emphasizes that “individuals with this disorder have a grandiose sense of self-importance”, but also notes that “vulnerability in self-esteem makes individuals with narcissistic personality disorder very sensitive to ‘injury’ from criticism or defeat”.)
Separately, I hadn’t heard of covert vs overt narcissism until your comment and still don’t know what to make of that division.
For the record, most of what I (think I) know about NPD comes from a handful of blog posts, videos, and podcasts by Spencer Greenberg. Let me know if there’s other sources you like.
guilt/empathy got heavily inhibited/surpressed over time from being so exhausting and miserable for me to feel
That story makes sense to me! The only part that’s confusing me: if this is a thing that can happen, why does it happen in so few other people? (Why isn’t it in the literature / DSM / whatever? Or is it? Or you’re just unusual? Or the literature / DSM just sucks and I shouldn’t pay much attention to it?)
The thing with empathic concern is that from what I understand, it requires a kind of additional component on top of emotional contagion empathy? Like ‘youre in pain and that hurts me’ + ‘so i will care for u’. Even when I was young and the first component was in full swing I’m not sure I ever really developed the second. So that might be less of a ‘alexithymia’ + ‘emotional suppression’ thing and more of a social stunting thing??
Here’s an analogy, maybe. If some area in the park is unpleasant because of one little piece of unsightly litter on the ground, I might fix the problem by cleaning it up myself; but if there’s a giant smelly dumpster’s worth of trash spread out on the ground, then I’m not gonna try to fix that problem, instead I’m just gonna just leave for a different part of the park that’s more pleasant.
By the same token, if I feel bad that Person X is distressed, I might naturally try to alleviate that feeling by helping them, OR, I might naturally try to alleviate that feeling by shutting them out and not empathizing with them. (Or by getting angry at them—cf. the 2×2 table of §1.1 in the OP, where it feels OK or even good to know that other people are suffering as long as they’re an “enemy” on the bottom row.) Intuitively, I would think that, the more that my bad feeling feels awful and overwhelming to me, the more appealing is the latter option (shutting them out) compared to the former (trying to make them feel happy), other things equal.
(But there’s a horseshoe-theory thing where, way over on the opposite end of the population distribution, you have the people who simply aren’t bothered by Person X’s distress at all in the first place, and they also won’t feel motivated to help them.)
childhood learning experiences
When different adults (in the same general country / culture) have different personalities, I generally prefer explanations in terms of them having different strengths of their innate drives (and related things), rather than how their childhoods differed, mostly because of the heritability literature (but with a bunch of caveats discussed in my post Heritability: Five Battles).
Oh yes I’ve seen that paragraph of yours about NPD vs folk-narcissism before. This actually relates to the cover / overt distinction think? With overt narcissism referring to the more folk-y grandiose narcissism, while covert manifests as hyper-insecurity. The study you posted about NPD patients getting the same as controls was using the Narcissistic Personality Inventory. I took a look at the items and they’re all very stereotypically grandiose. I actually score only around average on grandiose measures like the NPI myself, while scoring very above average on ‘covert’ measures like ‘The Maladaptive Covert Narcissism Scale’. My guess would be if you got NPD patients to do these more ‘covert’ scales then you’d start getting the expected results (covert narcissism also gets called ‘vulnerable narcissism’ or ‘hyper-sensitive narcissism’). Anecdotally from looking at people talk about their experiences with narcissistic ex-partners or parents or such, as well as seemingly falling close to that cluster of symptoms myself, their behaviour seems much more vulnerable / sensitive than grandiose / boasting. This might be a case of the folk concept of narcissism impeding scientific research into the real phenomenon?
The only part that’s confusing me: if this is a thing that can happen, why does it happen in so few other people? (Why isn’t it in the literature / DSM / whatever? Or is it? Or you’re just unusual? Or the literature / DSM just sucks and I shouldn’t pay much attention to it?
I feel like autism research has been stunted by seeing autism as fundamentally about ‘social deficit’ in some sense rather than some underlying shift in sensory priors à la the Intense World concept. I guess the correlation you’d be looking for here is ‘early life emotional hypersensitivity’ with ‘later life emotional empathy deficits’ (or something like that) which from my brief Googling has simply never been studied. So it may be just that no one’s looked yet. But it links into the general Intense World concept pretty well I think? Like if ‘eye contact is ultra arousing’ seemingly can cause ‘I avoid eye contact’, then I see no reason why it wouldn’t generalise to ‘expressing sympathy and care is ultra arousing and difficult while ignoring/self-blunting is calming’ causing ‘its extremely difficult to feel care for others and I tend to ignore others feelings’. There is pretty good evidence implying above average empathic distress (1) (2: meta analysis) in autism that supports the idea. If the Intense World Model is even approximately true-ish you’d expect a ton of heterogeneity, which you could look for, but would also make results look inconsistent and maybe make practitioners miss the pattern. Perhaps I just found empathic concern particularly distressing and/or was particularly capable of suppressing it relative to the typical autistic person. I don’t know :)
With the horseshoe theory thing: I guess this is how you end up with people diagnosed with / who have strong clear clinical-level traits of both ASPD and autism (I have met such people).
When different adults (in the same general country / culture) have different personalities, I generally prefer explanations in terms of them having different strengths of their innate drives (and related things), rather than how their childhoods differed, mostly because of the heritability literature
Ah you believe like most personality differences between same-cultural individuals are mostly due to genes and not early-life experiences? I’ve seen that this applies to ‘big’ traits like the Big 5, but do you think this’d carry over to individual facets / smaller traits too? (like ‘dominance’ or ‘empathic concern’) Question: do you feel like this kinda invalidates narratives of personality that centre childhood experiences? Or might they still be useful as like- ways of predicting / understanding the specifics of how one’s dispositions might have been reinforced / triggered during development, and the day-to-day specifics of the ways they manifest in adulthood?
Ah you believe like most personality differences between same-cultural individuals are mostly due to genes and not early-life experiences? I’ve seen that this applies to ‘big’ traits like the Big 5, but do you think this’d carry over to individual facets / smaller traits too? (like ‘dominance’ or ‘empathic concern’) Question: do you feel like this kinda invalidates narratives of personality that centre childhood experiences? Or might they still be useful as like- ways of predicting / understanding the specifics of how one’s dispositions might have been reinforced / triggered during development, and the day-to-day specifics of the ways they manifest in adulthood?
I assume it carries over to “smaller traits”, but I think I’ll know more when I (hopefully someday) analyze a heritability-related dataset that goes down to the individual questions on personality tests, which I swear someone sent me but I filed it away until I find time to properly study the personality literature.
At least in principle, heritability data can be compatible with a mechanism whereby childhood experiences are the path by which how innate drives and dispositions unfold into adult behavior. It would just have to be “innate disposition → childhood experience → adult behavior”.
For example, I think some people are innately prone to having socially traumatic experiences, and then something will happen to them at some point in their childhood that they experience as social trauma, and then they’ll carry that memory forwards. And this memory can be a legit proximal cause of adult feelings, and legitimately relevant for adult therapy. But I think that if they had grown up in a different family, they would have just been traumatized by something else.
The theory here is: By and large, I think people try different ways of acting and thinking throughout life, well into adulthood. Introverted adults will still go out sometimes, happy people will still brood sometimes, nice people will still act mean sometimes, etc. And if they try it and it feels innately appealing, then they’ll do it more often in the future. So over time, adults will gravitate towards ways of being that are a good fit to their disposition, by and large. I have a (mercifully much shorter) earlier post on heritability making that point: Heritability, Behaviorism, and Within-Lifetime RL.
Ah your explanation of this makes a lot of sense yeah! Thank you!
Just checking but its not like the proximal cause explanation applies always? Like it’s not as if personality is >85% genetic, things like spontaneous trauma unrelated to innate dispositions presumably can often still play a major role. (?)
What on earth this is wild. I was actually going to particulate in a TMS study to enhance social cognition a while back but didn’t go through. Kind of scary although its not like this is typical obviously. I wonder how this happened.
Identical twins are still definitely different in some ways (whether raised in the same family or not), and I think the source of those differences is not well understood. See “§1.4: What is E, really?” here.
Random example on my mind: My spouse is noticeably more happy and well-adjusted this year than last year, in a way that I figure would probably have a small but measurable effect on a personality survey, because she left a job she hated for a job she liked. But she obviously has the same genes now as she did last year.
But she obviously has the same genes now as she did last year.
Leaving the job is not an example because it could have increased the heritability of her personality survey. Pretty much all traits change in heritability over a lifetime (eg. Wilson effect for IQ or think about, say, psychiatric disorders) and other variance components as well, so you can’t point to a single change and say it is an example of E because ‘A didn’t change’ - well, neither did C (if an adult) or D, they could all be increasing due to that single change (you can view it as regression to a mean as she finally leaves an outlier job, as most people do not ‘hate’ their job), so in fact, it may be any of ACD!
I think you’re misunderstanding what I was trying to say, sorry I left out the details. Here’s what I had in mind:
In the methodology of a classic twin study, . So the question “why is E more than zero?” is the same as asking “why do identical twins reared together not get exactly the same scores on personality questionnaires and health questionnaires and vocabulary tests etc.?”
Now, my spouse (call her S) had a job she hated at age 39 and a job she liked at age 40. If she had an identical twin (call her S’), and the two of them happened to participate in a heritability study when they were both age 40, would S’ have also had a job she liked? Or if they had participated in a heritability study when they were both age 39, would S’ have also had a job she hated? Probably at least one of those questions has an answer “no”, right? Unless there’s an extraordinary coincidence where S & S’ find their ways out of bad job situations in the same year, well into adulthood.
And if one of those questions has an answer “no”, then that’s a kind of thing that would have pulled r down from 1.0, a.k.a. contributed to E, at least for a certain fraction of adulthood.
I’m not saying this one thing is a BIG effect, but I think there are a lot of things like that, and if you add them up, I do think it explains some noticeable fraction of E. I’d put it in the “luck of the draw” category in my breakdown of §1.4 here.
(That’s assuming I’m right that the bad job was dragging her down enough to show up on a personality survey, but I really think it was, not hugely but nonzero.)
My point is that in your scenario, it is entirely possible that S’ had managed to obtain a job she liked because she was genetically predisposed (eg. having a nice personality), but that S had not for exogenous random bad luck, and that if they were measured at age 39, they would seem unusually discordant twins—except it was just bad luck, and S would regress to her mean at age 40 and now they would be concordant. You can’t just handwave it and say, ‘S just got a new better job! Heritability must be going down!’ The new job could well be heritability going up. Your ‘random example’ is just poorly chosen and irrelevant to the discussion since it’s not at all obvious that it is an example of E going up and ACD going done just because “she obviously has the same genes now as she did last year.” There could be a time reversal: the bad job could have been the E, not the good one!
I agree with what you wrote. I never said anything about E going up or heritability going down. I’m not sure how I gave you that impression.
It seems that we’re on the same page that bad luck exists (and good luck also exists), and that bad and good luck can affect one’s life circumstances in a way that may impact questionnaire results, and can thus contribute to identical twins being discordant, at any given time. That’s all I was saying. It’s meant to be a simple and obvious point.
Wondering how you’d characterise someone with characteristics more like me.
I’ve been described as sociopath-like by my partner, a close friend and a psychiatrist. I have essentially no capacity for empathic concern or guilt (although this is confounded by being highly alexithymic and autistic) - even at times when I’ve intentionally done very obviously bad and harmful things that seriously distress loved ones. I don’t have the instinctive sense of taboo / repulsion that seems to come naturally to most people and have socially gotten in trouble for this (talking to people about the moral nature of bestiality for fun not realising people were becoming genuinly repulsed at the concept- not understanding when I’m supposed to ‘boo’ vs ‘yay’ if you know what I mean).
However I have a very strong drive to be liked and have always been hyper sensitive to peoples opinions and perceptions of me (maybe related to this: I score very above average on covert narcassism scales). I am also a woman which might have something to do with the patterns I’ve learned too, I don’t know.
Interesting! This is all super speculative, but speculation is fun. :) Note that I’m purely speculating on “what might be happening under the hood”, not what DSM-V diagnosis you should have, not what if anything you should do about it, etc.—I have no opinion about any of that.
Start with some background of hot-takes on relevant conditions (low confidence, mostly unpublished):
My brief hot-take on alexithymia: I think of alexithymia as generally coming from someone having a history of lots of highly aversive emotions. A funny thing about emotions is that introspecting on them can trigger them—if I think about whether I might be anxious right now, that can trigger actual anxiety (I call this “defer-to-predictor mode” for “thought assessors”, see my Intro Series 5 & 6). So someone prone to highly aversive emotions can get into a habit of simply never introspecting upon their emotions (and perhaps even losing the ability to do so, the way lots of people “can’t” wiggle their ears). Or maybe they can, but when they try, they get immediately distracted by involuntary attention to the aversiveness. Either way, at the end of the day, they wind up being simply unable to simply observe their incoming suite of interoceptive data, in the way that everyone can observe incoming visual data, sound data, etc.
My brief hot-take on sociopathy: I think there’s basically two groups of people who get ASPD diagnoses: one has basically an anger disorder, the other has constitutionally low physiological arousal. The latter are more often what people mean by “sociopaths” in pop culture, and what I was referring to when I referred to “sociopaths” in §4.1 of this OP.
My brief hot-take on autism: See here.
My brief hot-take on NPD: I think it mainly comes from having an unusually strong (compared to other people) physiological arousal reaction upon receiving someone else’s attention (e.g. eye contact). That leads to all the “approval reward” phenomena in this post being unusually strong, and I think all the other major NPD symptoms flow from there. …Unless the person finds the reaction to someone else’s attention SO strong that it’s overwhelming and unpleasant, and then they’ll adopt coping mechanisms to avoid that reaction (e.g. avoiding eye contact), and then that path leads to autism instead of NPD.
Finally, your profile:
The low-physiological-arousal form of ASPD (what I think of as “stereotypical sociopathy”) seems thoroughly ruled out by the rest of your description: it seems very inconsistent with the alexithymia, the autism, and the hyper sensitivity to people’s opinions. E.g. I’m guessing that you would never use “the pity play” of §4.1.
After eliminating that possibility, my next most plausible explanation for “no capacity for…guilt” would be that the guilt is there but you’re not noticing it because of alexithymia.
As for “no capacity for empathic concern”, that would either be ditto (it’s there but you’re alexithymic), or that your innate “sympathy reward” reaction, when someone is suffering, is so painful that you long ago unconsciously learned to simply avoid triggering it. But I think the former is more likely.
The “hyper sensitive to peoples opinions and perceptions of me” sounds like the thing that I described as at the root of NPD. Maybe the NPD-typical root cause is manifesting as an NPD-atypical presentation, because of your unusually strong aversive emotions and autism? Not sure.
I think I’m probably wrong and confused about various things here but I’m hoping you can push back and maybe I’ll learn something in the process. :)
Oh wow thanks for the response! Also sorry I’m so late in replying as well, long story.
In terms of your NPD thing about having an unusually strong reaction to others attention- how might you explain the difference between overt and covert narcisissm through this? Its always seemed to me like narcasism is surely a reaction to or coping mechanism that arises from persistent insecurity early in development, or something like that. But is there not actually good evidence for this? I guess maybe the early-life insecurity in general and the narcisissm more specifically are both mutual effects of the ‘unusually strong reaction to others attention’… But then you would expect sensitivity to others opinion to correlate with narcissism far above and beyond insecurity specifically.. I will look into this (I guess it depends on whether you think the heightened reaction is the root cause, or if its just downstream of ‘early-life insecurity’ or something like that. by default the second feels more intuitive but i dont know) (EDIT: did research. you’re probably right. there seems good evidence narcissism and self-esteem are pretty strongly dissociable and its more just that people higher in narcissism simply fluctuate in self-esteem way more depending on the approval/disapproval of others, which matches your hypothesis)
I think your alexithymia comment makes a lot of sense and matches anecdotally very well. I was hyper emotional as a child, I even originally had a righteous sense of justice and could become very horribly distressed at watching my beloved heroes on TV lose battles and such (vivid memory of being a pre-adolescent watching a documentary on Hitler scream-crying fantasising about torturing him for eternity in my mind- a very very alien kind of reaction to the present-day me). Cue teenage years with a lot of dissociation and emotional-suppression, followed up by an adult me who has learned how to act kind pretty reliably but feels little for others and has little to no ‘moral feeling’.
I do agree the alexithymia certainly matters a lot in my phenomenology- for example one of the worst things I ever did I did feel an unpleasant pressure in my head when thinking about it, which was definitely in retrospect a kind of guilt, functionally speaking at least. It didn’t have the default phenomenology of ‘I can’t believe I hurt this person, how horrible, I must apologise to make up for it!’ that the average person seems to describe guilt as having, but it played a similiar-ish role in my behaviour, and did seem to be ‘punishment at hurting someone you’re not supposed to hurt’, so…
I don’t think its just ‘its there but you don’t notice it’ though- given how intense the reactions were in early childhood I do think I could notice. Like I can notice very strong, straightforward emotions in myself but I have done / seen things that would trigger any typical persons guilt / empathy very very strongly but I feel no meaningful physiological symptoms at all. Because of this I think its also largely just that guilt/empathy got heavily inhibited/surpressed over time from being so exhausting and miserable for me to feel. Empathy was often awful for me to feel and I’m happy to feel much less of it (‘empathy’ here meaning emotional contagion, not empathic concern specifically).
The thing with empathic concern is that from what I understand, it requires a kind of additional component on top of emotional contagion empathy? Like ‘youre in pain and that hurts me’ + ‘so i will care for u’. Even when I was young and the first component was in full swing I’m not sure I ever really developed the second. So that might be less of a ‘alexithymia’ + ‘emotional suppression’ thing and more of a social stunting thing?? Because even when I absolutely did not know how to suppress those feelings the care still never naturally came, so that seems like something is lacking beyond the influence of those two components. I had friends in early childhood who never really showed sympathy ever and if anything tended to ignore or make fun of me for crying when hurt and stuff like that. Given these sorts of childhood learning experiences plus the intrinsic difficulties growing up with autism, it seems plausible to me I just never quite learned how to turn second-hand distress into concern reliably, so that social instinct just never really healthily developed. But I could be wrong.
Even nowadays very occassionally when I’m presented with extremely strong stimulus I will feel emotional contagion- such as feeling really awful because my girlfriend feels awful, but this will never really become any meaningful impulse towards helping or attempting to alleviate that suffering for her. (If anything it will often [although far from always] tend to become anger or irritation). Thanks to my narcissism issues i tend to have anger issues where if my loved ones aren’t behaving the way im supposed to, such as feeling distress when i dont want them to, i can develop regular bursts of anger. this ties into ur ‘anger issues’ thing i think. writing this out it seems to my ‘sociopathy-like symptomology’ are maybe just quite polycausal in origin >//<
I’m also very sadistic which is a final thing that I guess could be influencing me, I can get a very strong rush of pleasure from cruelty, even when its not totally fake / consensual. This probably hepls surpress any empathetic response further depending on context.
so then perhaps… alexithymia + emotional suppression + autism in general + childhood experiences + some kind of subclinical narcissistic anger thing? = the reason why.. ?
By writing this out I think I’ve developed a historical model of myself. Although I’m interested if you think I’m very likely mistaken about any of this. Thank you!!! Fun!!
That’s really interesting, and I really appreciate you sharing your thoughts and ideas and experiences, thanks so much.
I don’t have much to add (we’re beyond the limits of my understanding!), just a couple more random comments.
First, not sure how this fits in to what you wrote, but fun fact about NPD (as I understand it) (copied from something I wrote once):
Separately, I hadn’t heard of covert vs overt narcissism until your comment and still don’t know what to make of that division.
For the record, most of what I (think I) know about NPD comes from a handful of blog posts, videos, and podcasts by Spencer Greenberg. Let me know if there’s other sources you like.
That story makes sense to me! The only part that’s confusing me: if this is a thing that can happen, why does it happen in so few other people? (Why isn’t it in the literature / DSM / whatever? Or is it? Or you’re just unusual? Or the literature / DSM just sucks and I shouldn’t pay much attention to it?)
Here’s an analogy, maybe. If some area in the park is unpleasant because of one little piece of unsightly litter on the ground, I might fix the problem by cleaning it up myself; but if there’s a giant smelly dumpster’s worth of trash spread out on the ground, then I’m not gonna try to fix that problem, instead I’m just gonna just leave for a different part of the park that’s more pleasant.
By the same token, if I feel bad that Person X is distressed, I might naturally try to alleviate that feeling by helping them, OR, I might naturally try to alleviate that feeling by shutting them out and not empathizing with them. (Or by getting angry at them—cf. the 2×2 table of §1.1 in the OP, where it feels OK or even good to know that other people are suffering as long as they’re an “enemy” on the bottom row.) Intuitively, I would think that, the more that my bad feeling feels awful and overwhelming to me, the more appealing is the latter option (shutting them out) compared to the former (trying to make them feel happy), other things equal.
(But there’s a horseshoe-theory thing where, way over on the opposite end of the population distribution, you have the people who simply aren’t bothered by Person X’s distress at all in the first place, and they also won’t feel motivated to help them.)
When different adults (in the same general country / culture) have different personalities, I generally prefer explanations in terms of them having different strengths of their innate drives (and related things), rather than how their childhoods differed, mostly because of the heritability literature (but with a bunch of caveats discussed in my post Heritability: Five Battles).
Oh yes I’ve seen that paragraph of yours about NPD vs folk-narcissism before. This actually relates to the cover / overt distinction think? With overt narcissism referring to the more folk-y grandiose narcissism, while covert manifests as hyper-insecurity. The study you posted about NPD patients getting the same as controls was using the Narcissistic Personality Inventory. I took a look at the items and they’re all very stereotypically grandiose. I actually score only around average on grandiose measures like the NPI myself, while scoring very above average on ‘covert’ measures like ‘The Maladaptive Covert Narcissism Scale’. My guess would be if you got NPD patients to do these more ‘covert’ scales then you’d start getting the expected results (covert narcissism also gets called ‘vulnerable narcissism’ or ‘hyper-sensitive narcissism’). Anecdotally from looking at people talk about their experiences with narcissistic ex-partners or parents or such, as well as seemingly falling close to that cluster of symptoms myself, their behaviour seems much more vulnerable / sensitive than grandiose / boasting. This might be a case of the folk concept of narcissism impeding scientific research into the real phenomenon?
I feel like autism research has been stunted by seeing autism as fundamentally about ‘social deficit’ in some sense rather than some underlying shift in sensory priors à la the Intense World concept. I guess the correlation you’d be looking for here is ‘early life emotional hypersensitivity’ with ‘later life emotional empathy deficits’ (or something like that) which from my brief Googling has simply never been studied. So it may be just that no one’s looked yet. But it links into the general Intense World concept pretty well I think? Like if ‘eye contact is ultra arousing’ seemingly can cause ‘I avoid eye contact’, then I see no reason why it wouldn’t generalise to ‘expressing sympathy and care is ultra arousing and difficult while ignoring/self-blunting is calming’ causing ‘its extremely difficult to feel care for others and I tend to ignore others feelings’. There is pretty good evidence implying above average empathic distress (1) (2: meta analysis) in autism that supports the idea. If the Intense World Model is even approximately true-ish you’d expect a ton of heterogeneity, which you could look for, but would also make results look inconsistent and maybe make practitioners miss the pattern. Perhaps I just found empathic concern particularly distressing and/or was particularly capable of suppressing it relative to the typical autistic person. I don’t know :)
With the horseshoe theory thing: I guess this is how you end up with people diagnosed with / who have strong clear clinical-level traits of both ASPD and autism (I have met such people).
Ah you believe like most personality differences between same-cultural individuals are mostly due to genes and not early-life experiences? I’ve seen that this applies to ‘big’ traits like the Big 5, but do you think this’d carry over to individual facets / smaller traits too? (like ‘dominance’ or ‘empathic concern’) Question: do you feel like this kinda invalidates narratives of personality that centre childhood experiences? Or might they still be useful as like- ways of predicting / understanding the specifics of how one’s dispositions might have been reinforced / triggered during development, and the day-to-day specifics of the ways they manifest in adulthood?
Thanks for all that, very interesting!
I assume it carries over to “smaller traits”, but I think I’ll know more when I (hopefully someday) analyze a heritability-related dataset that goes down to the individual questions on personality tests, which I swear someone sent me but I filed it away until I find time to properly study the personality literature.
At least in principle, heritability data can be compatible with a mechanism whereby childhood experiences are the path by which how innate drives and dispositions unfold into adult behavior. It would just have to be “innate disposition → childhood experience → adult behavior”.
For example, I think some people are innately prone to having socially traumatic experiences, and then something will happen to them at some point in their childhood that they experience as social trauma, and then they’ll carry that memory forwards. And this memory can be a legit proximal cause of adult feelings, and legitimately relevant for adult therapy. But I think that if they had grown up in a different family, they would have just been traumatized by something else.
The theory here is: By and large, I think people try different ways of acting and thinking throughout life, well into adulthood. Introverted adults will still go out sometimes, happy people will still brood sometimes, nice people will still act mean sometimes, etc. And if they try it and it feels innately appealing, then they’ll do it more often in the future. So over time, adults will gravitate towards ways of being that are a good fit to their disposition, by and large. I have a (mercifully much shorter) earlier post on heritability making that point: Heritability, Behaviorism, and Within-Lifetime RL.
(…But that’s not to deny that adults can durably change via therapy, drugs, crazy story of an autistic person getting long-dormant ‘feelings’ back via Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, etc.)
Ah your explanation of this makes a lot of sense yeah! Thank you!
Just checking but its not like the proximal cause explanation applies always? Like it’s not as if personality is >85% genetic, things like spontaneous trauma unrelated to innate dispositions presumably can often still play a major role. (?)
What on earth this is wild. I was actually going to particulate in a TMS study to enhance social cognition a while back but didn’t go through. Kind of scary although its not like this is typical obviously. I wonder how this happened.
Identical twins are still definitely different in some ways (whether raised in the same family or not), and I think the source of those differences is not well understood. See “§1.4: What is E, really?” here.
Random example on my mind: My spouse is noticeably more happy and well-adjusted this year than last year, in a way that I figure would probably have a small but measurable effect on a personality survey, because she left a job she hated for a job she liked. But she obviously has the same genes now as she did last year.
Leaving the job is not an example because it could have increased the heritability of her personality survey. Pretty much all traits change in heritability over a lifetime (eg. Wilson effect for IQ or think about, say, psychiatric disorders) and other variance components as well, so you can’t point to a single change and say it is an example of E because ‘A didn’t change’ - well, neither did C (if an adult) or D, they could all be increasing due to that single change (you can view it as regression to a mean as she finally leaves an outlier job, as most people do not ‘hate’ their job), so in fact, it may be any of ACD!
I think you’re misunderstanding what I was trying to say, sorry I left out the details. Here’s what I had in mind:
In the methodology of a classic twin study,
Now, my spouse (call her S) had a job she hated at age 39 and a job she liked at age 40. If she had an identical twin (call her S’), and the two of them happened to participate in a heritability study when they were both age 40, would S’ have also had a job she liked? Or if they had participated in a heritability study when they were both age 39, would S’ have also had a job she hated? Probably at least one of those questions has an answer “no”, right? Unless there’s an extraordinary coincidence where S & S’ find their ways out of bad job situations in the same year, well into adulthood.
And if one of those questions has an answer “no”, then that’s a kind of thing that would have pulled r down from 1.0, a.k.a. contributed to E, at least for a certain fraction of adulthood.
I’m not saying this one thing is a BIG effect, but I think there are a lot of things like that, and if you add them up, I do think it explains some noticeable fraction of E. I’d put it in the “luck of the draw” category in my breakdown of §1.4 here.
(That’s assuming I’m right that the bad job was dragging her down enough to show up on a personality survey, but I really think it was, not hugely but nonzero.)
My point is that in your scenario, it is entirely possible that S’ had managed to obtain a job she liked because she was genetically predisposed (eg. having a nice personality), but that S had not for exogenous random bad luck, and that if they were measured at age 39, they would seem unusually discordant twins—except it was just bad luck, and S would regress to her mean at age 40 and now they would be concordant. You can’t just handwave it and say, ‘S just got a new better job! Heritability must be going down!’ The new job could well be heritability going up. Your ‘random example’ is just poorly chosen and irrelevant to the discussion since it’s not at all obvious that it is an example of E going up and ACD going done just because “she obviously has the same genes now as she did last year.” There could be a time reversal: the bad job could have been the E, not the good one!
I agree with what you wrote. I never said anything about E going up or heritability going down. I’m not sure how I gave you that impression.
It seems that we’re on the same page that bad luck exists (and good luck also exists), and that bad and good luck can affect one’s life circumstances in a way that may impact questionnaire results, and can thus contribute to identical twins being discordant, at any given time. That’s all I was saying. It’s meant to be a simple and obvious point.