Reddit reviews The Psychopath Whisperer: The Science of Those Without Conscience

I'm not sure if this is really what you're looking for, but I just recently read The Psychopath Whisperer by Kent Kiehl who is a big name scientist in the criminal psychopathy field. It's basically his journey to try to figure out why psychopaths are the way they are. An easy and interesting read if you've ever been curious about how studies with psychopaths are conducted.

>Their definition is the exact opposite of low emotional variance.

I love how smug you probably felt while writing that. Take the time to actually read up on psychopathy. The dictionary definition is not accurate.

Here's your source:

http://www.amazon.com/Psychopath-Inside-Neuroscientists-Personal-Journey-ebook/dp/B00C5R729S/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1418388115&sr=8-3&keywords=psychopath&pebp=1418388125403

http://www.amazon.com/Psychopath-Whisperer-Science-Without-Conscience-ebook/dp/B00G8ELS94/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1418388115&sr=8-6&keywords=psychopath

http://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Psychopaths-Kevin-Dutton-ebook/dp/B007NKN9U8/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&qid=1418388115&sr=8-8&keywords=psychopath

A defining characteristic of psychopathy is experiencing diminished, or no, emotional variance under stress. Your source on that would be Robert Hare, who conducted an incredible amount of testing on the subject and essentially invented the concept of psychopathy.

Psychopaths are, like all mental illness, best represented by a spectrum. There are those "with the dials all turned up" that are emotionally unstable and act out violently regularly, but there are a great many who operate with low emotional variance and are far more in control of themselves in a given situation than an ordinary person. Their testing involved subjecting test subjects to scenes/pictures of violence and were able to identify the lowest emotional reaction as psychopaths.