Is Norman Bates a Realistic Psychopath? How Movies Portray Psychopaths and Psychologist Define Them

Is Norman Bates a Realistic Psychopath?
How Movies Portray Psychopaths and How Psychologist Can Use Movies to Help with a diagnosis.
I have studied the movies and the creative career of Alfred Hitchcock with a fascination that help prepare me for my TV interviews on HLN analyzing suspected Murderers. I have written extensively about narcissism and find this research fascinating. If you like the article you may want to pick up the nonfiction book The Murder Room about a real life secret society of experts who solve cold case murders. But don't, absolutely don't read the book in bed and then try to go to sleep.

Is Norman Bates a realistic psychopath?

A new study examines 400 movies to see whether Hollywood gets psychopathy right

By Matt Soniak | January 30, 2014   

 

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Pycho's psycho leaves a lot to be desired.
At least that's the conclusion of a new study that tried to determine realistic portrayals of psychopathic behavior on the silver screen. According to forensic psychiatrists Samuel Leistedt and Paul Linkowski, who led a team that studied hundreds of films, Norman Bates was too delusional and disconnected from reality to qualify as being a psychopath. The world's most famous mama's boy, if they had to diagnosis him, was more psychotic than psychopathic.
Bates isn't alone. Psychopathy isn't what most movies make it out to be, Leistedt and Linkowski say, and most psychos in film, especially in the medium's early days, are either caricatures or based on a poor or incomplete understanding of the disorder. And because the definition of psychopathy has changed over the years, movie psychos from one era might be diagnosed differently today.
To gauge the realism of movie psychos and see how their portrayals have evolved, Leistedt and Linkowski put together a team of forensic psychiatrists and movie critics to watch 400 movies dating from 1915 to 2010. The majority of psychopathic characters were ignored because they had magical powers, were nonhuman, or were otherwise way too unrealistic. The 126 characters that were left got a closer look from the team to find the most accurate psychopaths.
Aside from giving screenwriters and actors an idea of what they're doing right or wrong, the researchers hope that their work can be a useful teaching tool for psychology and psychiatry students. Diagnosing and recognizing psychopathy isn't easy, and very few students will get to see the real deal during their training. A library of the best movie psychos could be the next best thing — and a lot safer.
Here are a few of the movie psychopaths that the study deemed realistic, and those that were the stuff of fantasy.

Realistic psychopaths

(Facebook.com/No Country for Old Men)

1. Anton Chigurh, No Country for Old Men. The bolt pistol-toting hit man was called out for a frighteningly realistic portrayal of a damaged mind. Leistedt and Linkowski call him a "well-designed prototypical idiopathic/primary psychopath," who displays an " incapacity for love, absence of shame or remorse, lack of psychological insight, inability to learn from past experience, cold-blooded attitude, ruthlessness, total determination, and lack of empathy." Chigurh reminded them of real-life contract killers they've studied, like Richard "The Iceman" Kuklinski.
2. Gordon Gekko, Wall Street. "One of the most interesting, manipulative, psychopathic fictional characters to date," say Leistedt and Linkowski. "Successful psychopaths" and "corporate psychopaths" like Gekko are getting more attention from filmmakers and clinicians alike in the wake of global economic crisis, and the researchers expect to see more figures like this pop up in both movies and newspaper headlines.
3. Henry, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. The title character, inspired by real-life serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, shows a "powerful lack of empathy, emotional poverty, and a well-illustrated failure to plan ahead" that faithfully reflects the lack of stability in a psychopath's life.
4. Hans Beckert, M. "One of the first, rarest, and more realistic" portrayals before the 1960s, the character is an "outwardly unremarkable man tormented by a compulsion to murder children ritualistically, which is a substantially more realistic depiction of what would eventually be known today as a sexually violent predator (SVP)."

A little too crazy

(Facebook.com/The Silence of the Lambs)

1. Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers and other "slashers." On the whole, slasher films stray pretty far from realistic psychopathy. Even if you ignore the supernatural elements in some of the movies, the killers' sadism and "ability to predict the plan that the future victims will use to escape" left most of them excluded from serious analysis.
2. Hannibal Lecter, Silence of the Lambs. "Lecter is an exceptionally intelligent sophisticated socialite, whose disarming charisma, erudition, civility, and wit disguise his true nature," Leistedt and Linkowski say — and that's not a combination you'll often find in the real world. Lecter is not only an unrealistic psychopath, but also a poor depiction of a psychiatrist. He's "an extraordinarily astute clinician who can diagnose Jodie Foster's psychological conflicts by identifying her perfume and assessing her shoes and clothing with Holmesian accuracy." These abilities, Leistedt and Linkowski dryly note, "are not generally found in everyday clinical practice."

 

Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at www.PattiWood.net. Check out Patti's website for her new book "SNAP, Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language and Charisma" at www.snapfirstimpressions.com. Also check out Patti's YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.

Improve Your Job Interviews on Skype,

How Do Your Prepare to Give and Interview via Skype


Many of my clients have asked me how to interview and give a good interview via Skype. It certainly isn't easy, but you can do it.  Prepare you room check to see what shows up on the screen. Simplify your background. Try different locations for the lighting to make you look your best. Even guys may want to use a little brush of translucent powder so you don't look sweaty on camera. Make sure you if you wear glasses that they don't have a glare bouncing off of them. Lens Crafters has nonglare lenses for an extra 40 dollars. Do a dry run of your interview with a friend. Preferably someone who isn't hyper critical. Check your connection, and sound.

during the interview notice the words that the interviewer is using and mirror them back. For example if they say, "We have a great TEAM here at EYZ company."  you can say somewhere in the interview. When I was working with the TEAM at...." or if they use a technical term a few times and you know what it means you can use it as well. This makes you sound and feel to them that you
are a good match.

Make sure you have examples of your successful contributions in previous jobs. For more tips including body language for good interviews go check out my other job interview posts.

Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional a body language expert and a interview coach.
 For more body language insights go to her website at www.PattiWood.net. Check out Patti's website for her book "SNAP, Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language and Charisma" at www.snapfirstimpressions.com. Also check out Patti's YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.

The Research Shows an Anti-redhead Prejudice in Attraction and Why I have a thing for Red Headed Men

The science behind anti-redhead prejudice and Why I have a thing for Red Headed Men

It started in Kindergarten. I saw his red hair from across the room and I was immediately smitten. I could not help myself. I wanted to be friends with Kenny Sharp. His smile and his freckles and that ginger hair did things to me. We were both four and he became my Crayola red crayon boyfriend through first and second grade and set the tone for my life long love of red headed men. Why? I think it is my Scottish heritage on my mothers side of the family we are Lochries. I think I long for my Scottish roots and few read headed children.  My proclivity for red headed men does not fall in line with the national average of what makes a man attractive. Most women spurn the advances of a read headed man. But not me. Here is the research.

The science behind anti-redhead prejudice

Studies show that people are less likely to make a move on a redheaded girl or accept the advances of a redheaded guy. Why?

By Greg Stevens, The Kernel | February 4, 2014

 

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Are people with red hair — gingers, redheads, individuals of unusual rufosity, whatever you want to call them — less attractive than people with other hair colors? That is certainly what received wisdom tells us. Alongside the impression that they have fiery tempers, unquenchable libidos, and cold, clammy hands (OK, I made that last one up), one of the most common bits of folk wisdom about redheads is that they are just not that cute.
Color of my love
In 2012, the journal Psychological Studies published a study that created quite a stir on this topic, and was widely reported as "bad news for redheads."
Researcher Nicolas Guéguen examined how hair color alone could influence a person's chances of scoring at a nightclub. He had women dress up in differently-colored wigs, and measured how often they were approached by men. Similarly, they had men wearing differently-colored wigs approach various women over the course of the evening, and measured how often their advances were accepted or rebuffed.
By using the same set of men and women, and changing only the apparent color of their hair, this experiment was able to separate the influence of hair color itself from other features of physical attractiveness, such as facial features, skin tone, height, and body proportions.
Just as you might expect, based on common folk-wisdom and stereotypes, women were approached most often when wearing a blonde wig and men were rejected the most often when wearing a ginger wig. The news looks pretty bad for ginger men.
Or does it? Studies have shown time and again that facial symmetry, height, and body proportions matter the most to people's immediate assessments of physical attractiveness. These are also features that are more intrinsic and harder to change or hide than hair color. If the only thing that people are responding to is the hair color itself, this may actually be good news for redheads. It means that the only thing that "turns people off" is something that's fairly easy to change.
Unfortunately, this also helps to perpetuate the stereotype that redheads are intrinsically less attractive. When so many ginger celebrities actively cover it up by coloring their hair, it only makes it more difficult for people to think of "hot gingers."
This reassures people in their belief that redheads are "usually not hot," simply because they don't know how many hot people out there really are redheads.
What about the freckles?
At this time, there isn't any evidence to suggest that gingers are less likely to have those traits that are considered "generically attractive" by the majority of the population, such as high cheekbones, symmetrical faces, and well-proportioned bodies. However, they are much more prone to having freckled skin.
Skin tone is another one of those well-studied features that has been shown to consistently have an impact on people's assessment of physical beauty: Those with clear, evenly-colored skin are widely regarded as being more attractive than people with patchy, blotchy, or freckled skin.
Nowhere is this more obvious than when looking at professional photos of redheaded models and celebrities. Even those "hot redheads" that flaunt the redness of their hair usually are made-up on magazine covers to have almost unnaturally even skin tones.
Moreover, there is a reasonable theory to explain why the bias against freckles might be more than just a cultural prejudice. Not to be too blunt about it, but freckles are cancer factories.
Let's be clear, before the hate mail starts pouring in. Some people find freckles very attractive, and that is fantastic. Not all freckles automatically lead to cancer, either. But the type of melanin that causes freckles can increase the skin's sensitivity to ultraviolet radiation and make skin more prone to getting cancer.
They therefore can serve as a quite real biological "warning sign."
In the northern latitudes, this isn't as much of a problem as when you get closer to the equator. In fact, although the gene patterns that are associated with having red hair are present in both northern and southern areas of Europe, there are many more actual redheads in the north.
Part of the reason for this is that in the south, the "redhead genes" are mixed in with more dominant genes for darker skin, so the genes that produce ginger hair do not have an opportunity to express themselves and be visible.
So there may be an evolved, adaptive response to be less attracted to people with freckles, on the grounds that they are more likely to develop skin cancer. This could also explain why celebrity redheads tend to have their freckles airbrushed away to make them look more appealing.
However, it does not explain why there still remains such a strong bias against gingers — freckled or not — especially in the northern latitudes where sun exposure is less of a problem.
Attractiveness and gene-mixing
It is also possible that both red hair and freckled skin are viewed as less attractive because they are both recessive traits. This means that the traits are easily covered up by the effects of other genes. For example, if you get genes for red hair from one parent but brown hair from another, you are likely to not have red hair yourself.
The same is true for the trademark pale, freckled skin of redheads: When mixed with the genetic codes for darker skin, the fact that the "freckles gene" is present in a person may never actually become visible.
This could be related to attractiveness because there is an evolutionary benefit to mixing genes from different groups. When a person's heritage is very mixed, there is less of a chance that a harmful recessive gene will have an opportunity to express itself.
Charles Darwin proposed this idea, calling it "heterosis:" The theory that cross-breeding across populations would lead to children that are genetically stronger than their parents.
Consistent with this theory, Dr. Michael Lewis discovered in a study that was published in 2010 that people will rate photos of individuals with mixed-ethnicity backgrounds as "very attractive" 55 percent more often than people from a single ethnic background.
What does this mean for gingers? It could be that having red hair serves as a biological cue for a lack of genetic mixing, which we have evolved to be biased against. But once again this biological theory must be interpreted with caution.
This doesn't mean that all redheads are inherently unlucky genetically and must be unattractive. But it does mean that attractive redheads are likely to have had a little more genetic mixing in their past than others.
Gingerism
All of these discussions of hair color, genetics, and attractiveness really don't address the bigger issue of prejudice, however. No matter how many good, sound theories there may be pertaining to the biology of attraction, and how or why it may be biased against people with red hair, it does not change the fact that biology cannot explain the insults, the taunts, and the hate crimes that gingers have to put up with their entire lives.
It also doesn't explain that gigantic influence that culture has, both positively and negatively, in the perception of redheads. Anti-redhead bias is dramatically more prominent in the United Kingdom, for example, than in the United States — with no really solid explanation apart from ingrained cultural prejudice.
Moreover, it is fairly trendy for actresses — usually those who are already considered popular and beautiful — to take on a redheaded look in order to be daring, edgy and fashionable. Julia Roberts, Rose McGowan, Cynthia Nixon, and Debra Messing are some memorable examples of celebrities that made red hair look exceptionally good.
So the scientific answer to the question "is there a basis for the stereotype that redheads are unattractive" is what someone might expect, if he is familiar with science. That answer is: Eh, kind of, but not really.
Studies show that on average, people may be less likely to make a move on a redheaded girl or accept the advances of a redheaded guy. On the other hand, as long as you don't have prominent freckles, many gingers can pass as blondes or brunettes, showing that the difference is purely superficial.
Moreover, if you are already hot, you can get away with dying your hair red and it's seen as "trendy" rather than unattractive.
And while there may be a plausible evolutionary explanation for a minor anti-ginger bias, especially in southern latitudes, true "ginger haters" will have to look somewhere else for an excuse for their bad attitudes.

Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at www.PattiWood.net. Check out Patti's website for her new book "SNAP, Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language and Charisma" at www.snapfirstimpressions.com. Also check out Patti's YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.

The HUG - What does it Reveal?

Blake Shelton, 37, gave Miranda Lambert, 30, a bear hug backstage at the MusiCares Person of the Year event in LA on Jan. 24.  Patti observes that they show such a beautiful merging in the above photo.  They look like one person!  Patti noted that she does not think it would be possible for them to hug each other any tighter.  Miranda's smile is so content and sincere, and Blake's smile shows such security according to Patti.  Patti gives this couple a 5 on the Life & Style True Love Rating scale.


Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at www.PattiWood.net. Check out Patti's website for her new book "SNAP, Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language and Charisma" at www.snapfirstimpressions.com. Also check out Patti's YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.

Video Games Effect our Mood and Can Make Us Nice or Turn Us Into Jerks.

Video Games Effect our Mood and Can Make Us Nice or Turn Us Into Jerks.

I have a friend that said years ago he was addicted to an online Video game. He said that he played nonstop when he was not working,  and that the war game made him feel strong powerful and he eventually realized, very very angry.  In my book SNAP I have a chapter on Tech impressions and discuss how technology effects the way people perceive you here is research from my favorite magazine, THE WEEK on how gaming effects are mood.

Media-driven panics about what video games are "doing to our children" are scoffed at by gamers and most technology journalists. But are these haughty dismissals justified? Because studies are now coming thick and fast that find the minds of young people playing video games are affected by what they play. And not always for the best.
In a study titled Remain Calm, Be Kind, a quote from US general Colin Powell, researchers Whitaker and Bushman made the point that, of all media, video games are the most perfectly architected to change our state of mind. They're active: Gamers are indirectly doing things that they'd otherwise imagine or witness in books or film respectively.
They call this "managing our mood states," implying that aggressive actions make us feel short-tempered, while slower-paced games will cause us to feel relaxed.
They set out to demonstrate this. There is a wealth of information that ties aggressive video games to anti-social behaviour. But they wanted to complete the circle: To show that "nice" games make for nicer people too. If we had this information, it would suggest that the link between game and gamer is a strong one and can be both positive and negative.
They gave participants a selection of games to play — violent, neutral and relaxing — and then asked them to compete against each other in competitive games. Those who played high-stakes gaming like Resident Evil were more competitive than those that played less intense games like fishing.

(Facebook.com/ResidentEvil)

Nice games make you nicer
The second part was asking the participants to help sharpen pencils. They didn't know that the experiment wasn't over, so they'd be acting entirely genuinely. They found that significantly more "relaxing" gamers helped out with this trivial task than violent ones, and summarized by saying that this was the first study to ever establish that nice video games make you a nicer person.
So far, so good. We already know that violent video games make violent people. They also apparently tend to push people into more "dangerous lifestyles": Drugs, wild sex. Not the typical image of your average gamer, granted. But the question is why and how these things happen. A relationship between video games and real-life violence is not damning evidence in itself.
In another study, a group of researchers looked at reactions to faces in pain for gamers, while they lay in fMRI machines. An fMRI machine works by detecting the movement of blood around the brain, and thus what areas are being used at what times (it stands for "functional" Magnetic Resonance Imaging).
What the researchers wanted to know was how the processing of emotions was affected by a lot of video gaming, so they watched the action happening in the frontal lobes of the brains as their subjects looked at the pictures.
They found that the gamers — who all play Counter-Strike, a Call of Duty-type war game — responded less to images of real violence than non-gamers. Images of accidents and disfigured faces did not trigger the same neuro-chemical reactions as for other people.
The researchers concluded by saying players of violent games have better top-down control of their emotions. Put more plainly: They lack empathy.

(Facebook.com/CallOfDuty)

A lack of empathy?
That certainly echoes the worries of parent and teacher groups. Although, two caveats spring to mind: Gamers might well not react to disfigured faces as much, but that might not mean they lack empathy. A lot of people began to lose touch with the image of starving children in NSPCCC adverts — which doesn't make them monsters, they've just seen the image a few times before.
And the second thing to bear in mind is that fMRI has "worked" on a dead fish. That's not to discredit the study, but it does put the results in slight perspective.
There is a hook in the study, though: The idea of BIS, our Behavioural Inhibition System. This system allows us to react better in uncertain — often violent — situations. In a war zone, when bullets are flying over your head and have been for several weeks, the last thing you want is the constant recognition of the brutality of warfare.
Similarly, in war games, to be surprised by every act of violence will get you killed. We inhibit these typically empathetic behaviors because, frankly, we have to.
The study goes on to suggest that maybe that's how we can classify those who play first-person shooters: By a "habituated" BIS circuit, or a lack of empathy to the point it isn't mandatory. They found that the part of the brain associated with empathy, the lateral prefrontal cortex, are used less in experienced gamers.
This might be active inhibition of empathy for the sake of winning the game. In-game situations are often made more intense by pleas for mercy or kindness which frequently have to be ignored.

World of Warcraft (Facebook.com/Warcraft)

Immersive vs non-immersive
What does this mean outside of the game? It's not like fictional violence is the invention of video games. Why, German folk tales have been preaching the virtue of a messy punishment for centuries. And then there's the bible — which has been mandatory reading for billions of people.
But video games differ from these media crucially because we're not just being asked to listen and take part passively. Even as storytellers, we are playing the part of a narrator, not a performer. In video games we — everyone — is an actor. And we have to follow the script we're given.
There's another study, Virtually Numbed, published this year, which tasked video gamers with an endurance test. They had to pick up paperclips out of a bucket of ice cold water either after reporting that they were acid gamers or actually playing a video game. Instead of looking at good vs bad, though, the researchers were interested in immersive vs non-immersive.
The researchers wanted to see what the effect was of putting yourself in the place of an automaton — i.e., a video game character that did not display emotions. They found that those people who did this were more tolerant to pain than those that didn't. They tested the hypothesis with other experiments and the conclusion was that players act similar in real life to the robotic avatars they play.
It's not just searching for good vs evil, or picking up the traits of characters you enjoy playing as. The mere act of pretending to be a virtual character can change self-perception — even down to the way we perceive physical sensation. Video games can, rather quickly, change you.
There's another paper, from 2009, with the ominous title More Than Just a Game that does literally think about "the children." Because childhood and the teenage years are such important parts of growing up, it's important to see what they're interacting with during that time.

Knights of the Old Republic (Facebook.com: StarWarsTheOldRepublic)

Video games mean trouble
The researchers took a dim view of video games. In fact, they found video games correlated with everything from drug use to poor romantic relationships. And while some of this is unsubstantiated, plenty of it is backed by their evidence, in the form of university questionnaires, and the decade of research that's come before them.
"Video games mean trouble" is the message that seems to come through in all of this. It's jumping the gun, sure, given what we know now about the benefits of relaxing video games. But while some video games have a positive effect on mood, the ones that do, such as Endless Ocean, make up a negligible market share compared to big sellers such as World of Warcraft and Call of Duty, both of which are stacked with blood and death.
The psychology of all this isn't uplifting: Violent video games are linked to real-world violence, and we should stop pretending otherwise. That link is blurred, but in terms of neurochemistry there is now research that confirms that the brains of gamers change depending on what they do in-game.
In the game Knights of the Old Republic, a classic Star Wars spin-off, gamers can select whether to act like the "good" Jedi or the "evil" Sith. Sitting at your console, it might be hard to believe that what you do next might actually impact who you become in the real world. But it turns out the Dark Side is very real.




Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at www.PattiWood.net. Check out Patti's website for her new book "SNAP, Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language and Charisma" at www.snapfirstimpressions.com. Also check out Patti's YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.