The dark side of Aspergers: serial killers, sociopathy
There is a distinct difference between someone who possesses a sociopathic personality and someone who has AS. A sociopath has no regard for the feelings of others and only feels their own pain. By saying "infiltrate", do you mean there are sociopaths who assume the role of having Asperger's? Or are you stating that simply doctors are giving the wrong diagnosis to clients? Usually it is very easy to tell if an individual has a sociopathic personality where as it can be more challenging for doctors to arrive at the conclusion that someone has AS because there are many other psychiatric disorders which mimic the characteristics of AS. People with AS have difficulty in terms of having empathy for others. It is true that people with AS aren't typically manipulative but that doesn't necessarily mean it is beyond their capacity.
I spent a couple of years thinking about this because my corrupt perverted professor, Dennis Healy of the University of Maryland, College Park Math Department, was having an affair with a narcissistic sociopath who had multiple personality traits, a woman named Sabera Kazi. This woman was sleeping with at least 3 men in the building and had secret, compartmented affairs with them all. She was jealous of me, and singled me out and harassed and psychologically mistreated me for months while I complained to Dennis Healy about what his girlfriend was doing. Anyways, as part of her harassment (or should I say abusive codependent fixation), she would corner me and subject me to hours of pseudo-therapy sessions in which she unloaded self-obsessed monologues about her mental state and psychosexual history. After several months of this bizarre abuse, when no one else would believe me about what was going on, I had a meltdown (during the entire time I couldn't work and developed a stress disorder). It has taken me years to try to sort out the distressing horror show in my head that she filled me with, and I had to spend a lot of time studying sociopathy, etc.
Sociopaths who are Machiavellians are often also charismatics. They are able to craft personality traits and affect charm, using a toolkit of personality tools they carry around. They are quite glib and adaptable and many are slippery like chameleons, able to craft and project psychological abuses or leverage to use against others' vulnerabilities. They also have their own agendas, like private abuse drives and compulsions. Sociopathic bullies, for example, have been shown recently in MRI's to have areas of their brains light up when they observe someone suffering. So those bullies' brains are wired to take pleasure from the suffering of others. These traits are separate and apart from any anti-social traits.
Sociopaths and autistics share some traits. Those are described as a lack of empathy. In the area of social psychological development, sociopaths have an ability to interpret, understand and manipulate others via social interaction without identifying emotionally with others. In my opinion, it is the opposite with autistics. It is my experience that Asperger people are quite loving, sensitive and identify emotionally with others, but that they lack the ability to interpret, understand and manipuate others via social interaction. So the nature of the abnormal social empathy/emotional identification dysfunction, in sociopaths and Asperger people, is reversed, so to speak. In my opinion.
The above are just my own theories, which I am still working out, in an effort to troubleshoot and repair my own mind after being mistreated by a sociopathic narcissist bully and having her unload her mental problems into me. Unfortunately for me, my mind fixed on the mental problems and psychopathy she vented on me, as a "special interest" and I have been systemizing her social psychological disorders and social cognitive behaviors, which is kind of like a walk through a house of horrors.
Still trying to recover.
Wow. Your story is very awful! I hope you are feeling better now!!
I don't know why, but I ALWAYS attract people with mild sociopathic traits - they're often nice enough not to hurt others too much, but they usually lack empathy and I can see through their fakeness (as an aspie, it is easy to see when people are not being truthful for some reason, have you experienced that too?) ... One of them even thought that I was like him - I think that AS traits may seem like sociopathy and perhaps these people think that I am like them too?
I do have empathy but I am often unable to show it - these people don't have empathy.
It's actually like sociopaths are the REVERSE of aspergers. They can interpret, manipulate, and pick up social cues very easily, but they do not identify with others on an empathic level. However an AS person cannot interpret social cues or manipulate people easily - but they actually DO identify with others - contrary to belief I think many AS have empathy - I know I do! But I do not have the full capacity to show it in an appropriate way, I certainly feel it and identify with others' pain though because it feels like MY pain - we pick up the moods of other people, whereas sociopaths are actually immune to it.
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He has some aspieish traits...
but somehow I don't think so. The reason why I don't think so is because while the joker clearly had no qualms about harming people(lack of compassion), he seemed uncommonly good at manipulating other people--and did so intuitively (empathy/social savy)Somehow seeing the Joker as an aspie doesn't add up--but then, that's just me.
Oh my God now I get it!! So for NTs "empathy" is merely being able to respond to other people's emotional reactions/cues?? All my life I thought empathy was identifying with others' moods (because I always pick up other people's moods around me, like they're my own - this is why I need alone time more than NTs...)
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asperquarian
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Need to catch up with this thread, as it overlaps with my area of research right now. But meantime, here's this, with apologies if I am repeating what's already been linked to:
some parallels
this ones a bit obscure, but interesting: http://webmaster.bwdp.org.uk/sociopathy
http://www.sociopathworld.com/2009/04/v ... utism.html
the following brief thesis, highly academic:
XXIV Autism and Sociopathy
The sociopaths and those with autism are the same on their understanding of morality, the difference is in their motivation.
Why do they differ in their motivation? Perhaps: they have internalized various Kantian rules.
Sociopaths and those with autism are the same on their empathetic responses, but they differ in their understanding of morality, because the former lack, and the latter have, an understanding of the difference between conventional and non-conventional obligation. (Blair, Nichols?)
There is some empirical reason to suppose that the sociopaths lack of understanding stems from their lack of emotional response to the distress of others.
FURTHER CONSIDERATION, THAT SEEMS IN TENSION WITH THIS
Sociopaths seem to lack self-control in general. So maybe their moral attitudes are just a manifestation of this. But isn’t self-control the ability to restrain one’s emotional responses in the light of one’s judgments about what is best. So doesn’t this suggest that the failure is rational and not emotional?
SOME FURTHER (HIGHLY) TENTATIVE HYPOTHESES THAT MIGHT HELP
If acquired sociopathy is the same as congenital sociopathy; and if Damasio is right that acquired sociopathy results from a particular lack of emotional input (i.e. into frontal processing) then maybe we can see the sociopath’s failing as, at bottom, emotionally based.
CONCILIATORY CONCLUSION
Perhaps the right thing to say is that both morality and self-control require both an emotional input and some rational processing. And maybe there are deficiencies on both sides for both sociopaths and those with autism.
Sociopaths lack one ability to empathetically engage (to respond to distress), a deficiency that is both emotional and rational; and (presumably as a result) they lack the ability to understand morality properly (to make the conventional/moral distinction), and they lack the motivation to be moral.
Those with autism lack an ability to empathetically engage in a rather different way (they cannot put themselves into the place of others); this gives rise to both an emotional and a rational deficiency. As a result they cannot understand much of morality (social rules etc); and their motivation is eccentric (strongly rule governed).
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CockneyRebel
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I agree with you CockneyRebel, as well my history whom I had in high school once said, all people in civilization have the capability of doing malevolent things unto another yet, it's a matter of personal choice/decisions, genenetic potentlal, and circumstance or scenarios in general.
Last edited by ProfessorX on 31 Jan 2011, 5:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Apart from the fact that not all sociopaths/psychopaths are violent (quite a few are white-collar criminals, conmen, etc.), they do not experience emotions the same as others do. They experience two-dimensional emotions that are so shallow that they cannot be compared with either neurotypical people or people with Asperger's Syndrome in terms of degree. This is generally where the media gets the idea of cold-blooded, callous killers. It is emotional poverty. And it isn't specific to psychopathy/sociopathy; other, possibly mentally normal, people are that way too. But individuals with Asperger's Syndrome do feel a full range of emotions, the same as neurotypical people. Being one myself, I know that I experience love and anger and sadness the same as any other person. I just express it differently, don't show it openly and outwardly as prominently.
Sociopaths/psychopaths in no have social deficit; they're usually so glib, manipulative, and fast-talking that most people don't realize what they're dealing with, that they're being conned and exploited. If anything, they're good socially. Social predators. Sociopaths/psychopaths are uncaring or indifferent to the pain of others, but people with Asperder's Syndrome, I am fairly certain, do. I know I do. I just have a hard time figuring out how to approach the matter, and I end up being too honest or assertive, or I just make things worse trying to help. I do feel, and I do see pain, but it's considerably more difficult, and it has to be so obvious that it's practically screaming at you.
One is a personality disorder; the other is not. The two are not the same, but a sociopath/psychopath could probably, with enough knowledge, make a convincing show of Asperger's. That's what they do.
Check Ted Bundy's story. He was so NT he was scary.
He wasn't NT at all. If you read about his mentality upon society and human relations, it simply blows your mind. He was a sick bastard but also very introverted (most NT are extroverted)
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AS: 165, NT: 44
Check Ted Bundy's story. He was so NT he was scary.
He wasn't NT at all. If you read about his mentality upon society and human relations, it simply blows your mind. He was a sick bastard but also very introverted (most NT are extroverted)
I hate when people use extroverted and introverted poorly.
Introverted does not mean socially anxious, which is more akin to what many on the spectrum actually are.
Extroverted does not mean typical hanging around making mindless chit-chat. It means doing it more and enjoying it more than the average person.
Ted Bundy was more likely a psychopath than an autistic person based on the way that he manipulated his victims before killing them.
Also, this is a fair bit of necromancy.
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since so many contributors to this thread are long gone from WrongPlanet, there is no sense in quoting them or resurrecting the thread. let's allow this thread to fade.
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