by DaddyOh really now. Well, don't you worry, Daddy. I guarantee that I will let
you know when I plan to visit the US and we'll see just how much fun we
can have.Be sure you do that...
Believe me, darlin', I absolutely intend to.
Living in town means nothing if you never leave your house...
Well, gosh, I would never have predicted you'd say that, lol.
Sympathy = You thinking about someone and assuming what they are feeling, then feeling bad for them.
Empathy = You don't have to think about it, you just know what they are feeling. You react to how they acting.
Sociopaths could feel sympathy in some cases as long as they have felt a certain pain.
E.G. If a sociopath has been abused in their life, they might see a young child that's been abused and think about what that child might be feeling then feeling bad for it.
If a sociopath just sees a person in pain, and it doesn't relate to them in any way, then I doubt the sociopath would really feel anything.
Another E.G. Jason Vorhees kills people at will, regardless of whether they are good or bad. If they are invading his territory, he'll kill them.
However, if he was to walk across a small, depressive looking child being abused and hurt, he might well think about the pain he received as a child, and assume that that child is feeling the same thing, and may probably feel bad and take pity on the child.
This is different to the empathy that most humans feel. Most humans wont be raped in their life time, but they don't need to think to feel empathy for a woman or child who looks in desperate pain and misery after being raped. They will automatically feel bad for the rape victim.
"Daddy": The basis of connecting with those emotions and resonating with them, stems from affective empathy. This is something you feel when you're in flow with someone... when everything feels like poetry in your exchange, when you're in "Sync" with another person. It is the deepest form of human connection. When you can literally feel what another person feels.
Thankfully this can be faked with enough time spent studying patterns and body language. If you know what signals to send, someone with no reason to question it is likely to respond to it like it's natural. I haven't really ever "sync'd" with someone, but they still responded as if we had.
Thrill: and you certainly don't need to self-manipulate.
It however helps a lot. I personally study how people react and learn the motivations behind them so that, if I need to, I can adopt aspects of it for myself when needed. Without self-manipulation, I'd only be able to appeal to someone's rational. Often times people need more than that.
Thankfully this can be faked with enough time spent studying patterns
and body language. If you know what signals to send, someone with no
reason to question it is likely to respond to it like it's natural. I
haven't really ever "sync'd" with someone, but they still responded as
if we had.
That's just it, affective empathy cannot be faked. That's the thing, it must actually be felt to be exploited. The kicker is in your ability to selectively feel, and suppress feelings when you need to do so to achieve your ends. The cognitive empathy can easily be faked and body language can be mirrored. But without the emotions being felt behind it. It falls flat and always seems off.
The connection itself can't be faked, but the other person can be lead to believe a connection happened. The display of feeling is all many need. It helps that many see it as nice that I'm not as "emotionally over-reactive" as others in their lives, which allows me to keep the chosen displays subtler. This sort of behavior also makes it become easier to make it about them, which is itself a smokescreen of sorts where small adjustments can be inserted into their future choices. Making them self-focus can with the right prodding make your own traits almost invisible, as well as give you the ability to relate to them by keeping your own stories themed around their own choices.
I believe you're the one that pushes "subjective perception is reality". If they believe the connection happened, isn't it just as good as if it did? My lack of connecting only makes things more difficult, not impossible. Lust can be amazingly blinding to those who want to see a connection, and "love" that is sated or selfish is less likely to ask questions. It's just a matter of creating the right environment.
I can't really say that I don't seem "off" to some particularly perceptive people once they've socialized with me for a long enough period of time, but impressions are always easy. By not hiding certain things about me, they are more likely to ignore other differences from already being accepted as quirky, as well as from assuming I've already "come clean". Many who have the capacity to notice things about me like my company for being different.
Affective empathy looks a lot easier than all the steps my methods take, but I was never really given that option. Their openness to feeling can be exploited without feeling it yourself as long as it's emulated in a believable way. Even genuine feelings can be doubted if they're given a reason to not trust what's going on, so it's really about having them believe what they see by having them figure a connection is there in advance. What is lacking in genuine connectivity can be made up for with understanding.
Exactly perception is reality and if a person has a weak bullshit-o-meter then you wouldn't need to use affective empathy at all, because those people are just naive and gullible. But if a person is self-aware and perceptive. Then they will be able to read the fact that you are not genuinely feeling an emotion.
I'm referencing people on the level of psychologists, trained interrogators, and very perceptive people. Maybe those are just outliers But if you can fool them you can fool anyone and the ability to fool them requires genuinely felt emotions and self manipulation.
To the average person who doesn't have a need to be suspicious, that is easily suggestable, that wants to believe you... Those people get conned every day. Because humans at their base are trusting individuals. I wasn't refering to manipulating those types... because those types can be manipulated by a 4 year old...
I acknowledge your points and they are good points. If someone is gullible enough fall for your imitations then it will work. But to manipulate the perceptive it requires another level a deeper one.
I'm referencing people on the level of psychologists, trained interrogators, and very perceptive people. Maybe those are just outliers But if you can fool them you can fool anyone and the ability to fool them requires genuinely felt emotions and self manipulation.
That's very debatable. Most people including psychologists & cops (trained interrogator) expect a person to conform to behavioral pattern in a given situation. If you can 'emulate' that behavior then they won't suspect anything if something's amiss because you're not behaving any differently than an average person. There's no external queue of 'wrongness'.
Now for the 'emulation' part. You mentioned method acting and affective memory earlier in the thread but that's not the end-all,be-all of acting. Different actors use different methods and not every actor has to 'feel' or 'remember' an emotion to fake it.
There is such a thing as natural born actors, people who can act without formal training. On the other end not every actor plays a role in a realistic manner sometimes a script or a situation (like the theatre) call for overacting or underacting. And that concept evolved over the years, just watch a movie from the 30s' where performances tend to be very 'stagy' and stilted for a modern audience. It's a good bet that it wasn't perceived that way back when it was released.
I'm finally getting around to reading these articles. I think the articles are very interesting, perhaps enough to wonder whether I should re-evaluate my self-assessment.
Until now, I have identified as a person with several psychopathic and narcissistic traits, as opposed to someone with a full-blown "personality disorder." I can feel sympathy and compassion -but I can literally switch these off on a dime. However, I do not experience emotional "contagion" (affective empathy). But something else I read in the Psychology Today article struck me...
Some time ago, I mentioned in another context that something peculiar about me is that I have an underdeveloped startle reflex. I occasionally spar with someone close to me for fun. That person can throw a punch so close to my face that his fist misses it by a mere fraction of an inch, and I do not so much as flinch. It is a bit freaky, but I always chalked it up to my level of trust for him. However, I cannot do the same to him; he automatically dodges me. (Whereas I will purposefully allow it; it's just a game we play sometimes, don't ask. :p)
When someone creeps up on me, I rarely ever startle. To read that the lack of a normal startle reflex is a common finding amongst psychopaths proved a surprising and interesting correlation for me.
by Amanita bisporigera
Some time ago, I mentioned in another context that something peculiar about me is that I have an underdeveloped startle reflex. I occasionally spar with someone close to me for fun. That person can throw a punch so close to my face that his fist misses it by a mere fraction of an inch, and I do not so much as flinch. It is a bit freaky, but I always chalked it up to my level of trust for him. However, I cannot do the same to him; he automatically dodges me. (Whereas I will purposefully allow it; it's just a game we play sometimes, don't ask. :p)
When someone creeps up on me, I rarely ever startle. To read that the lack of a normal startle reflex is a common finding amongst psychopaths proved a surprising and interesting correlation for me.
Cool. I admit that I missed the part about the flinching in Daddy's article, so I'm glad you brought it up. This is something I've noticed first hand with some of my opponents, and I even wrote about it here. Really interesting to see it officially associated with psychopathy.
by Edvard
by TurncoatThe appearance of being unflinching can sometimes be stronger than a well planned counterattack.
You know, most people do have a flinching reaction before an attack, something which the attacker can count on and exploit. However, I've met some people who lacked this sort of reaction (or was very diminished), and I agree that it can be somewhat disorienting for the attacker at first. One of them was the psychopath that brought me here, the others were very likely psychopaths too. Just something interesting that I noticed...
However, flinching or unflinching, just sitting there and taking it doesn't earn you any points. :D
by Edvard
by Amanita bisporigera
Some time ago, I mentioned in another context that something peculiar about me is that I have an underdeveloped startle reflex. I occasionally spar with someone close to me for fun. That person can throw a punch so close to my face that his fist misses it by a mere fraction of an inch, and I do not so much as flinch. It is a bit freaky, but I always chalked it up to my level of trust for him. However, I cannot do the same to him; he automatically dodges me. (Whereas I will purposefully allow it; it's just a game we play sometimes, don't ask. :p)
When someone creeps up on me, I rarely ever startle. To read that the lack of a normal startle reflex is a common finding amongst psychopaths proved a surprising and interesting correlation for me.
Cool. I admit that I missed the part about the flinching in Daddy's article, so I'm glad you brought it up. This is something I've noticed first hand with some of my opponents, and I even wrote about it here. Really interesting to see it officially associated with psychopathy.
by Edvard
by TurncoatThe appearance of being unflinching can sometimes be stronger than a well planned counterattack.
You know, most people do have a flinching reaction before an attack, something which the attacker can count on and exploit. However, I've met some people who lacked this sort of reaction (or was very diminished), and I agree that it can be somewhat disorienting for the attacker at first. One of them was the psychopath that brought me here, the others were very likely psychopaths too. Just something interesting that I noticed...
However, flinching or unflinching, just sitting there and taking it doesn't earn you any points. :D
That's very interesting. Even though I can be startled by someone entering a room when for instance I'm deep in my thoughts I'm rarely if ever startled by loud noises in horror movies.
