Scientists at Macquarie University in Sydney claim that psychopaths—highly egocentric people with reduced empathy, antisocial behavior, and rudeness—have an overall innocuous quality that can be recognized by them.
Australian neuropsychologists M. Mahmut and R. Stevenson conducted an experiment in which 79 young people with a diagnosis of psychopathy participated. During the experiment, participants were asked to identify simple smells (coffee, leather, tangerine, chocolate) presented in 16 identical containers. None of the subjects completed the task. Psychopaths did not identify smells and had difficulty distinguishing one smell from another. At the same time, a clear correlation was observed: the worst results were shown by subjects with the most severe form of personality disorder.
The authors of the study attribute this phenomenon to disorders in the work of a certain area of the brain - the orbito-frontal complex, which is responsible for both impulse control (that is, the ability to keep one's own behavior within the framework of social norms) and smell recognition. Of course, it is not entirely correct to suspect psychopathy in every person you know who has problems with recognizing aromas. Especially during colds and SARS. In addition, dysfunction of the sense of smell can be a companion of many other diseases, such as Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease or schizophrenia.
However, the discovery of Australian scientists is of great practical importance. First, you can rule out psychopathy in yourself or your spouse simply because you both know a lot about perfumes. And secondly, on the basis of the discovered phenomenon, a technique can be created in the near future that will allow diagnosing psychopathy with a high degree of accuracy.
Source estet-portal.com
Add a comment