Some kids with conduct disorder also display what psychologists call "callous-unemotional traits," which means they lack guilt and empathy.
"Don't you think you two have a lot in common?" He'd shoot us a look so lacking in guilt that it was hard to continue.
Hadley is expert at catching her characters in the act of self-justification, and yet collectively they seem preternaturally lacking in guilt or remorse -- the emotions that generally go hand in hand with violent family upheavals.
Affectively, they are short-tempered, unable to form strong emotional bonds with others, and lacking in guilt or anxiety.
Frick and colleagues [ 34] classified CD subgroups in terms of the presence of callous-unemotional (CU) traits (e.g. lack of guilt, lack of empathy), an approach which is analogous to adult conceptualizations of psychopathy.
"The core bit of psychopathy seems to be the emotional dysfunction — the lack of guilt, the lack of empathy," says Dr. James Blair, a neuroscientist at the National Institutes of Mental Health, who has spent fifteen years studying the moral judgment of psychopaths.
As a result, English speakers don't think twice about using the same adjective for lack of guilt and lack of guile; clean hands and wide eyes.
These traits reflect an affective and interpersonal style of the individual (e.g., lack of empathy, lack of guilt, shallow emotions, egocentricity, callous use of others for own gain) and seem to be associated with a more severe, violent and chronic pattern of antisocial behavior [ 6] as well as different affective, cognitive and neurological characteristics [ 7].
Some of the defining characteristics of psychopathy include shallow emotions, egocentricity, deceitfulness, impulsivity, a lack of empathy, and a lack of guilt and remorse.
Mr. Moran relates it with supple fluidity, but Mr. Guare's allegory of survivor's guilt lacks the vivid specificity of Czyzewska's life story; tales of trauma and dislocation resulting from the horrors of World War II are not, after all, scarce in literature, and Mr. Guare's is little more than an amplified anecdote.
They lack empathy and guilt feeling, and they seem usually indifferent to punishment.
