Legal, criminological and forensic, Personality and self

State of the art: Psychopathy

Derek Mitchell and James Blair argue that psychopaths lack the ‘music of emotion’.

18 July 2000

One of the first things to strike you when you begin to work with psychopathic individuals is the clear discordance between the way that they verbalise emotion and the way that they appear to experience it. As Johns and Quay (1962) once put it, psychopathic individuals 'know the words but not the music' (p.217). In this article we argue that although these individuals commit a hugely disproportionate amount of crime, criminality is not the essence of the disorder. The essence lies in their difficulties with emotion.

BPS members can download the issue PDF

'Patients with the disorder deserve to be helped'
16 March 2012
Jon Sutton talks to James Blair about his work in the US on the underlying basis of psychopathy and callous-unemotional traits
Children, young people and families
Personality and self
Workplace psychopathy: the knowns and unknowns
22 April 2013
New review.
Work and occupational
Not persuasive on psychopathy?
04 September 2017
Professor David Pilgrim on a recent Horizon offering, 'What makes a psychopath?'
Legal, criminological and forensic
Personality and self