The quality and depth of a person’s body awareness is related to the health of their personality or to its disorder. Not much research has been done in this area, but the scant evidence points in a certain direction. One example is found in the Dark Triad Syndrome. Personality theorists single out three traits that make a person malevolent. When all are present in a person then he or she is diagnosed with the Dark Triad Syndrome. This syndrome is common to all antisocial individuals.
First, there is narcissism. This brings vain, hyper-inflated view of the self along with the tendency to manipulate others for personal benefit.
Then there is the characteristic is known as Machiavellianism (1) which is an extreme cynicism and distrust of others. It is related to extraversion, negative emotionality, paranoia, hysteria and the personality disorders of borderline, paranoid, passive-aggressive, and antisocial. It is also highly correlated to the third and last trait of psychopathy (McHoskey, Worzel, & Szyarto, 1998).
Psychopathy means a person is without a conscience, engages in criminal behaviors, and is incapable of having empathy for others.
While narcissism is actually a positive factor for identifying bodily feelings, the other two traits overwhelm its influence. Machiavellianism makes a person distrustful of his or her own internal sensory experiences and is related to shame—but not guilt—and, most significantly, to alexithymia. Alexithymia is the inability to identify and verbally express one’s feelings. The term literally means “no words for feelings” and originated in psychoanalysis. Alexithymia is a deficit in body awareness and is strongly related to various psychosomatic conditions (De Gucht & Heiser, 2003; Lesser, 1981, 1985; Luminet, Bagby, & Taylor, 2018). Being blind to one’s own emotions necessarily results in being unable to emotionally connect to others. The result is that other people are treated as objects to be controlled to meet personal goals (Wastell & Booth, 2005). Persons high in psychopathy have trouble focusing on their internal bodily sensations and, when they do attend to bodily sensory signals, they are unable to sustain their attention on them for very long (Furnham, Richards, & Paulhus, 2013; Holtzman, 2011; Holtman & Strube, 2013; Lyons & Hughes, 2015).
Classic and modern emotion theories suggest that the perception of bodily sensations, or interoception, is foundational to emotion processing (Schlinkert et al., 2020). All of the above factors combined paint a picture of the sociopath as being experientially empty inside. They are literally out of touch with themselves and others because there is nothing inside of them to touch.
Paul Shane, Ph.D., LMT
Director, Academic Content
Footnotes
1 Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) was a political advisor to the ruling house of Medici in Florence, Italy. He wrote a treatise entitled The Prince for the Medici royalty. It debated as to whether or not a ruler should be loved or feared by the citizenry. Machiavelli concludes that it is better to be feared. The book remains influential to this day. Contemporary psychologists saw that Machiavelli’s advice paralleled the everyday social behaviors of some people. The combination of these traits was then identified as a syndrome of dysfunction.
References
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Furnham, A., Richards, S., & Paulhus, D., (2013). The dark triad of personality: A 10 year review. Social and Personality Psychology Compass 7, p. 199-216.
Holtzman, N. (2011). Facing a psychopath: Detecting the dark triad from emotionally-neutral faces using prototypes from the Personality Faceaurus. Journal of Research in Personality 45, p. 648-654.
Holtzman, N. & Strube, M. (2013). People with dark personalities tend to create a physically attractive veneer. Social Psychological and Personality Science 4, p. 461-467.
Jones, D. & Paulhus, D. (2009). Machiavellianism. In M. Leary & R. Hoyle (Eds.), Handbook of Individual Differences in Social Behavior, New York, NY: The Guilford Press, pp. 93–108.
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Luminet, O., Bagby, R., & Taylor, G. (Eds.) (2018). Alexithymia: Advances in Research, Theory, and Clinical Practice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Lyons, M. & Hughes, S. (2015). Feeling me, feeling you? Links between the dark triad and internal body awareness. Personality and Individual Differences 86, p. 308-311.
McHoskey, J., Worzel, W., & Szyarto, C. (1998). Machiavellianism and psychopathy. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74(1), P. 192-210.
Schlinkert, C., Herbert, B., Baumann, N., & Koole, S. (2020). Preoccupied with the body: mild stress amplifies the relation between rumination and interoception. Cognition & Emotion 34(7), p.1382-1394.
Wastell, C. & Booth, A. (2005). Machiavellianism: An alexithymic perspective. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 22(6), https://doi.org/10.1521/jscp.22.6.730.22931.