Studying the mind of a psychopath

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Paul Bernardo and Ted Bundy are two of the most notorious criminals in North America. Just hearing their names makes most people shudder. Both are considered psychopaths, and now a Brock University psychologist has studied the minds of psychopaths and what Angela Book found will likely send chills down your spine.

He’s washington’s most cut- throat politician. As a fictional character in “House of Cards”, it’s clear to the audience Frank Underwood is a psychopath. But in the real world, identifying a psychopath isn’t easy.

“You can see it whenever something happens in the news – people will say ‘he was such a nice guy’, right? So they’re hiding in plain sight” says Brock University psychologist Angela Book. She recently published a paper “the Mask of Sanity re-visited”. It shows criminal psychopaths fool people because their acting skills are just as polished as Kevin Spacey’s character in House of Cards.

Professor Book interviewed psychopathic inmates at Millhaven to see if they could fake emotions they don’t have. She says the inmates could fake fear and remorse as if they genuinely felt it – and they could mimic emotions much more convincingly than people in the community who aren’t psychopaths.

“If they’re going to be taking advantage of people, they need to seem normal or people are not going to be taken in by them.”

Ted Bundy, even Paul Bernardo had the appearance of being normal.

The experts say research indicates about one percent of the population meet the criteria for being labelled a psychopath. In a city the size of Toronto, that’s about 30 thousand people.

The experts have always thought psychopaths couldn’t show emotions like empathy and remorse because they didn’t feel it, but now this study opens up the eyes of the public and hopefully the parole board that psychopaths are better actors than anyone has given them credit for.