Quote Originally Posted by halfeye View Post
There's a difference? <ex psychology student here, back when I was studying, "psychopath" was the word that was dropped from the professional vocabulary because of the Hitchcock movie, "sociopath" was what replaced it>
Trying and failing to find a link for you, to a recent study suggesting that while they share most attributes, hence the dsmiv linkage, the approach to empathy/sympathy is completely different: the sociopath is to a great extent "nurture," and has a strong ability to bond with his in-group, and none to the out-group (as opposed to "normal othering," in which people have to work themselves into dehumanizing the "other" with nicknames, etc). Nale fits this pattern: he doesn't care if 100 people who aren't his crew dies, but he'll get pissed and try to physically pull a vampire off his buddy, because, well, Z's his buddy. Nale was a piece of ****, but he cared about Z.

The pyschopath, on the other hand, is strongly genetically dictated and simply does not sympathize/empathize with anybody, and in-group/out-group is completely irrelevant. His success tends to improve with increased symmetry of the hippocampus and his ability to restrain his actions, but social bonds as most of us understand them simply don't exist for him.