Similarities Between Autism And Psychopathy

Autism and psychopathy have historically had several similar constituents that make up the diagnosis or label respectively. Comparably, autistic and psychopathic people both have a lack of social understanding albeit for different reasons. In autism, social cues are purely misunderstood or not comprehended whereas in psychopaths, they simply choose to ignore social cues and normalities (Brook et al., 2013; Howland, Kosson, Patterson, & Newman, 1993; Viding et al., 2014). Accordingly, psychopaths are defined as having a deficiency or absence of empathy and/or remorse. In addition, they ignore prospective consequences of their actions simply because they desire the entertainment and/or attention that come from negative behaviour. Contrasting to autism where they have the inability to understand that they are supposed to experience empathy. Due to this misunderstanding between the two, both have been mischaracterized such that people with either are considered to have the potential for violent …show more content…
Although psychopathy has several controversial issues, overall increased resources dedicated to improving the standards at which we can assess psychopaths can improve their behaviour over time. Whether it is dealing with children and being able to monitor them without segregating them, assessing normal psychopaths to determine specific neurological basis for their behaviours or simply having a clear diagnostic tool to be able to clearly define what constitutes a psychopath. By clearly being able to determine and diagnose a psychopath (with the DSM-V) will increase the ability to be able to measure psychopathic tendencies and in turn significantly advance our ability to manage and treat psychopathy. Ultimately, implementing this would tackle most of the contentions that stem from psychopathy and therefore dramatically improve society for the