What are the contributing factors to becoming a sociopath?

Answer 1

Sociopathy/Psychopathy would be defined as a syndrome with strong behavioral features of impulsivity and fearlessness and a strong interpersonal domain comprised of aggressive social relations, manipulation, rebelliousness, self-centeredness, and a tendency to externalize blame.

One twin study suggests that psychopathy has a strong genetic component. The study demonstrates that children with anti-social behavior can be classified into two groups: those who were also callous acquired their behavior by genetic influences, and those who were not callous acquired it from their environment "The amygdala is crucial for stimulus-reinforcement learning and responding to emotional expressions, particularly fearful expressions that, as reinforcers, are important initiators of stimulus-reinforcement learning. Moreover, the amygdala is involved in the formation of both stimulus-punishment and stimulus-reward associations. Individuals with psychopathy show impairment in stimulus-reinforcement learning (whether punishment or reward based)and responding to fearful and sad expressions. It is argued that this impairment drives much of the syndrome of psychopathy.
There is a strong genetic link and much evidence to support the idea that psychopathy is passed down and is biological.

• Psychopaths don't have the same physiological responses to fear that constrain the behaviour of normal people, such as rapid heartbeat, sweating, dry mouth, trembling and muscle tension.
• Psychopaths don't have physiological responses to emotionally charged words such as "love" and "death" the way regular people do, suggesting that they process emotional stimuli differently.
• When one identical twin is psychopathic, the other is more likely to be psychopathic than those in the general population.
• Adoption studies indicate that children can inherit psychopathic traits from a psychopathic parent even when they are raised by different parents.
• When compared to non-psychopaths, differences have been found in a number of brain chemicals among psychopaths.

They are often reported as having an evil stare, sometimes with eyes that appear black rather then colored

Answer 2

The newest breakthroughs yield enormous insight into this perplexing and devastating condition that plagues four percent of the population and causes those persons to plague everyone else!

Almost everyone in the world -- except psychopaths (sociopaths) and a few others, such as those with ADD -- has a neatly organized way of storing information in the brain. Your left hemisphere handles such things as speech, logic, and sequential thinking. It helps you keep things in order. Meanwhile, your right hemisphere handles such things as appreciation of (or creation of) art, symbols that evoke emotion, and the way one puts together in the present time all the pieces of the world around him or her as far as it is known.

But NOT if you're a sociopath.

Studies (see the masterful work "Without Conscience" by Robert D. Hare, PhD.) have now conclusively demonstrated that the way such information is stored in the brain of a sociopath is not at all like the way it is for others. Instead of things being organized into those specific regions in one or other of the brain's two hemispheres depending upon the type of information it is, the sociopath has a brain that operates a little bit like a computer hard drive: it breaks all data down into tiny fragments and stores it all over the place and in both hemispheres. Thus, to retrieve any given segment is formidable and leads to omissions and errors far more often than most people experience:

(Patient in an inpatient unit, to an NP who is organizing an outing.) "No, I'm not going out with you guys this time, and I'm going to buy some magazines when I'm there." HUH???? This kind of thing, as Hare demonstrates, happens all the time.

Clinicians give numerous (including some erroneous) reasons for not wanting to treat sociopaths, and one of the more surprising ones is that it's very difficult at times to make sense of what the patient is saying.

Unlike the jumbled mess of a schizophrenic's speech, the sociopath's speech makes sense within the fragments, but when these parts of speech are strung together, they are often jarringly incompatible. Did the sociopath in the inpatient hospital intend to go out and buy some magazines? Or did she decide to stay in? She seemed to think she could do both at the same time. If the NP who had asked her was astute enough, she might've said, "Miss Smith, if you don't want to go out, why don't you write down what you want us to pick up and give us the money to buy it?" Although that's a realistic way to do both things at the same time, one might wonder why the patient didn't just say so in the first place!

When you speak, your brain is going through a staggering feat of juggling and data-organization at a speed that makes broadband look like a snail trail. If your cerebral cortex is storing your vocabulary and the related ideas behind it, as well as all of the other numerous types of information it must handle, in the right places, this isn't so hard; if your brain has to fumble all over the place for tiny fragments of data and try to assemble it fast enough to keep up with your conversation, it is not going to be easy -- and trained professionals will know that something, at least, is awry.

So, now scientists know that the seemingly meaningless and frequent lies that the sociopath tells may not all be actual lies. Some are lies, particularly in sociopaths who have broken the law and are trying to charm or bully their way out of trouble. But some -- especially impulsive-sounding bragging or announcements of lofty intent ("I'm gonna get out of this bugbox and write a best-selling novel, climb Mount Everest, and go work for NASA!") -- are not intended to deceive others so much as to tell them "I want to do something with my life!" But, sadly, lacking the means and wherewithal to do this, the sociopath will undoubtedly end up in trouble all over again.

Think about it: you know something isn't right, but you can't tell other people, because you have not the slightest idea how to phrase what's wrong. Plus, for some odd reason, everyone keeps getting rubbed the wrong way by you. You try to get ahead in life, but everybody keeps telling you about these strange rules you're supposed to obey, that they all seem to know by heart, but you don't. So you study them and try to memorize them and use them by rote, but keep messing up because you have no mechanism to tell you (from within) that you're stumbling over the line again, and inevitably, you do. Then everyone gets mad at you and among other things tells you that you know perfectly well what the rules are, so why don't you obey them? You start to secretly suspect they're adding new ones or changing the old rules around just to get you to screw up, but actually that isn't true -- however, you have no real way of knowing that, either.

As if all this isn't enough, you feel at the very least uncomfortable, and at the worst like a human bomb, most of the time you're awake, which at times can be several days in a row. You notice that the very things that make other people happy have a very opposite effect on you: your head fills with jarring "static," like a radio playing with the tuner caught between two or more stations. Reacting instinctively to this, you try to push people away because their closeness causes the static to get worse, but then you discover a new problem: you seem to need them anyway.

You seem to need something from other people, but you don't know why. That hug each other and smile, not a phony smile but a real one, and their eyes light up. They get close and they talk to each other without having to closely study the other's eyes to try to figure out what to do in response. This seems to be a delicious pleasure to them, much better than anything you've ever experienced. But if you try it, and if you are actually lucky enough to persuade one of them to attempt such a relationship and interaction with you, it immediately starts to turn sour on you. Their touch does not warm you; you feel colder and deader than ever. You don't know how to give back, so you end up grasping for words you've heard used by other people and trying to fake your way through it so they won't figure out how you are; you've experienced enough to know by this time that when others figure out your difference, they hate you for it; in fact, you've been told you're "not a real person" and that you "have no soul" (you're not too sure what a soul is, anyway) and that people like you "ought to be lined up and shot"!

After trying several times in this new relationship to get the pleasure other people are always basking in, and failing, you start to get angry at all of this -- and the anger builds into a terrible, towering rage that begins to make you feel like a human bomb. "I will actually, physically explode if I don't..." you're thinking, and yet under the rage there is a weird, disconsolate feeling that even your burgeoning hatred is as hollow and empty and starved as you are. You consider taking your life, and certainly you think about taking lives of some of these lucky, smugly superior others. You settle for embezzling money, or something of the sort; you're clever and manipulative and you don't get caught. Triumph!

Or not. The things you buy please you for five minutes; a day, tops. Then...flat, meaningless, like everything else in your life.

Of course, you don't HAVE a life -- and you never will. That's starting to become increasingly clear.

But WHY???? You see "The Others," as you're starting to think of them, studying diligently to help and even to cure other kinds of weird things wrong with people's minds, most of which seem to have to do with the brain. But no one seems to know what's going on in you. It occurs to you that to get some kind of attention from them, you might pretend you have one of those other problems they study, and then once they're paying attention to you, maybe somehow it'll lead somewhere. What have you got to lose?

You're about to find out you can still lose more.

You go into a clinical situation presenting with carefully-memorized symptoms of the mental illness you have decided would get you the attention you want. But faking whatever it is turns out very quickly to be a lot more complex than you'd thought. In fact, it turns out to be impossible. And, branded a malingerer, you are rejected yet again, told that all that's really wrong with you is that you don't want to try to better yourself.

That, and you're "evil," and it's not paranoia on your part to realize that EVERYONE HATES YOU. Once they figure you out. Yes: to know you is to hate you.

And you will go to your grave (as gloats Martha Stout of "The Sociopath Next Door" book fame) never knowing the wonders of real human interaction, meaning, and warmth.

It might just make you decide to go off the rails and kill everyone you can before turning the weapon on yourself.

Except for one thing: the mere fact that some scientists know that much about the brain of a sociopath means that solving the problem is no longer an impossible and obscure wish -- it's moving within the realm of concrete possibility.

As soon as large numbers of sociopaths begin to be treated in a way that actually helps them, that corrects as much as possible the chaos of misdirected signals in their confused and disorganized brains, and then a form of therapy that in addition to that, by necessity, teaches them to cope with the resulting maelstrom of emotion and impression that was formerly impossible, so that they can put it in order and start to develop the heretofore dormant and silent segments of their brains and better use those formerly mixed-up areas where no recognizable order ruled, THEN THE OTHERS MAY BEGIN TO NOTICE WHAT IS GOING ON...and they will know at least this much: instead of "the kiss of death," a diagnosis of ASPD (the DSM-IV way of saying sociopathy or psychopathy) will lead someplace; that there will be things done that actually make a difference.

Crippled as they are neurologically, sociopaths are yet shrewd, and they're always looking out for themselves in a way similar to that of a loner predator. Seeing others like them actually benefitting from treatment will have to start persuading them that there's something to gain in going for help after all. Not being rejected or met with "We can't help you; you're evil incarnate," or the equivalent thinly disguised in euphemistic psychology jargon; NOT being met with a situation where they'd have to substitute symptoms of an "acceptable" illness in place of those they bear in secret -- that would almost certainly, if gradually, have an effect: if a sociopath can clearly see a benefit coming from admitting his or her real situation, there's nothing to stop him or her from doing just that.

It's already started to happen, if in a tiny, barely perceptible trickle.

Right now, all science has at the ready for them is to use various types of preexisting medication given in attempts to counteract the chaotic patterns of brain impulses they suffer. Talk therapy added to this must be specially geared to the sociopath or it'll make the problem worse. And some people believe that sociopaths who are not at the most severe end of the spectrum of their illness can respond to some degree to sensitivity training. This might not, however, work as well with sociopaths who are abuse survivors.

In any case, once the type of neurosurgery that could help correct this has become possible, intervention of a sort that may fix some of what is broken in their brains someplace, this science will take a gigantic leap ahead!

Answer 3

This is still under debate by professionals. Some say that it is developed in childhood, due to neglect and abuse leading to a power complex. Others say that this is the way some people are born. The American Psychiatric Association does not call sociopathy a mental illness, because instead it is merely a problem with morality. A true sociopath has no conscience, despite their knowledge of society's view of right and wrong. Right and wrong only exist when they are the topic.

For example, to undermine their authority and control would be 'wrong' and to attack another for their personal gain may be 'right'.

Theoretically, a sociopath (by the definition of a person with no conscience) would be created by a parental lack of discipline and positive reinforcement. Consciences are made in children when they are disciplined for doing wrong, and encouraged and rewarded when they do the right thing.

Unfortunately, sociopaths are very intelligent, manipulative people. The best way to define them, due to no psychological health condition; is evil. If a person has no conscience then you cannot teach them to mingle with society.

Answer 4

Protracted misinformation of our interrelatedness and interdependence can lead to alienation, a sense of not belonging, which can lead to existentialism where a supposed separate self finds no universal collective purpose or reason that can further develop over time into sociopathy. The acronym of the progression of concepts is MAES, Misinformation - Alienation - Existentialism - Sociopathy. That may be a psycho-cybernetic description of what causes sociopathy. Physiological or biochemical dysfunction aggravated by poor ecological conditions and/or hereditary predisposition can alter or hasten the process. The social blindness of being raised to accept the existence of illusory phenomena based on second-order cybernetic distractions, namely geological, cultural and linguistic bias derived concepts; has caused varying degrees of sociopathy to be endemic on a global scale. For example, nation-states are not systems according to the tenets of general systems theory yet we are led to believe they truly exist and that we should live and die for the sake of their welfare. As Lewis Thomas stated in the book "Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher" "We have yet to learn how to retain our humaneness when assembled in masses."

Answer 5

All sociopaths share three common characteristics. They are all very egocentric individuals with no empathy for others, and they are incapable of feeling remorse or guilt.

I've had much experience with sociopaths, men and women, although more men are diagnosed. Sociopaths lack empathy. They are literally unable to put themselves into someone else's shoes and this is why they can do "messed up" things to people without feeling remorse about it. Some are charming and may compliment you a lot, being manipulative. They see people as objects to be used for sex, money or anything they fancy. They have a "grandiose" sense of self, aka thinking the world revolves around them. many normal people have told me that they seem somewhat scary, that they are not sure what the sociopath will do next or to them. In a sense, they dont think people are "real" with real emotions and feelings and they do not understand why "normal" people display emotions, such as crying. They see crying as a weakness. To normal people they may seem like the biggest "a**holes or b*tches" they've ever met.

Some causes:

1) Abuse is a big cause. They were most likely hurt badly and left alone to deal with it BY THEMSELVES at a young age and no one comforted them. This is why they are sort of like a predator who must keep themselves alive, using people for the things they need. They are extremely exploitative. They are used to taking care of themselves. They are extremely self centered and somewhat narcissistic (although Narcissistic Personality Disorder is VERY different from a sociopath) This may be another reason they seem like very strong people but in reality they are just lacking many normal human emotions. They use others because they don't care about people.

2) In my studies in psych wards of these types of people, Female sociopaths' fathers are sociopaths as well. The father does not care therefore divorcing the mother, abandoning the family, abusing and so forth. Mostly all female sociopaths learn from and take after their fathers. Especially if the mother is "soft" or very caring, the female sociopath daughter will take advantage of the mother or see her as weak and want to be just like her sociopath father. This disorder can be genetic but is made permanent through environmental factors.

Another thing to keep in mind. I have read that female sociopaths "are not as violent as males," This could not be more false. Female sociopaths can be extremely violent and aggressive. Ive witnessed a female sociopath threatening terrible things to another girl in a psych ward i worked in and almost beating her to death with the things around her. All sociopaths are dangerous, male or female. Men are seen as masculine and tougher in our society and this is why people mistake them to be more violent when it reality this is not the case. If you know someone who is a diagnosed "sociopath" just stay away. It is not a disorder, It is WHO THEY ARE. They do not feel guilty for the terrible things they do to people. They will say sorry but they dont mean it. I heard this saying "they know the words but not the song." They know exactly what to say but deep down they do not mean it.

A study found a strong genetic component for extreme antisocial behavior: fighting, bullying, lying, cheating and stealing among children with high callous/unemotional traits (psychopaths). Extreme antisocial behavior among children without callous/unemotional traits appeared to have a stronger environmental influence(sociopaths).

The majority of criminals would meet the criteria for antisocial personality disorder but only 10 to 15 percent meet the criteria for psychopathy. Gang members, for instance, who kill or steal for their group might be viewed as people with antisocial personality disorder, or sociopaths. But unlike psychopaths, they may truly love - and would never hurt - their own families, and they also may feel guilt or remorse about their crimes.

Though investigators are searching for psychopathy genes, Hare believes there will never be just one gene but more likely a cluster of genes that somehow influence such traits as impulsivity, fear and empathy. Even if such genes are found, experts say, it doesn't mean there is such a thing as a natural-born killer. At the same time, most experts agree that genetic factors likely come into play because most people who have deprived, abusive or otherwise rotten childhoods don't grow up to become cold-blooded murderers.

"You're not born a psychopath but the foundation is there," Hare says. "We're all born with temperaments that can be shaped by the environment."

Furthermore, most psychopaths aren't violent offenders. Those raised in deprived environments may grow up to be street criminals, for instance, whereas those raised in privileged homes may become corporate criminals, says Hare. Others won't be criminals at all

Psychopaths may be influenced by a bad home environment but they also can come from seemingly happy, loving homes, where "no matter how much love mommy gives, the child just doesn't connect," says Hare.

Answer 6

The actual thing that causes sociopaths to be sociopaths, Psychopaths to be psychopaths and people with psychosis have psychosis is different in many human beings who are diagnosed or self-diagnosed with it.

The first reason is that you are born with it. or rather born without an important part. There is a very important part of your brain that triggers certain common sense and certain emotions. When this part just doesn't work properly, it causes you to not be able to understand or sense these emotions, such as a mental hurt, and sadness. Anger is usually present however.

Another way is that they're hormones may be messed up beyond repair to where they are so unstable that they cause them to pretty much be on the edge all the time, causing a dangerous sociopath, psychopathy, or someone who has psychosis.

The last reason that I could think of at the time is that someone may of suffered from a traumatic event, causing them to never look at the world the same again, causing trust issues, violent behavior and slight depression. A bad outlook on the world to sum it up totally.

So there are many different factors and reasons, and also theories. it would take a very long time to actually figure out what makes them, them. :)

Answer 7

sociopathy is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain.