There is a way which is used to scientifically measure feelings in an individual, and there will be an upcoming article about how this is done. Here in this article the word ‘measure’ relates to how we, as individuals, evaluates and communicate, put into words how we experience our feelings.
We hear again and again that psychopaths do not feel, or they don’t feel the whole range of emotions that normal people feel.
I’ve had a hard time with getting to terms with this. How can some people ‘not’ feel f.ex. Wonder, or find something funny?
I know these two feelings are not the feelings we hear psychopaths do not feel, but they are feelings I have observed being absent both in some psychopaths and in some neurotic people. When seeing things from this point of view I can understand statements like “Life is boring”, and strange as it may seem, I feel that way myself much of the time.
But I guess I should go on to the absence of the feelings that we always hear are absent specifically in psychopaths: Love and Remorse. I’ve touched on Remorse elsewhere and will take it up again in coming articles, so let’s touch a little on Love and associated feelings here.
What is Love?
When we hear that psychopaths can’t feel Love I believe we’re generally thinking about the feeling as it pertains to other human beings … though there are people who feel no attachment or warmth toward anything, be it things, animals or members of their own species. Again, it’s a spectrum.
Does it sound as if I’m beating around the bush?…
A fellow blog owner, Notable Path, has written an article about emotions where he lists a scoring system measuring feelings from 0 – 20. The article can be read here, and this Wiki is it’s origin.
It consists of two groups of each 10 kinds of feelings, and you give yourself 1 score for each of the feelings that you recognize and 0 for those that you don’t.
NotaPath himself seems to have had some issues with the system and added asterisks to his scores to emphasize how little or how much he feels each emotion.
My thoughts on the suggested feeling score system is that I would need way more than 1 score for each feeling, and it would have been easier to apply a system with a range of scores rather than leaving it up to the individual to attach a personally invented system (f.ex. asterisks) to the procedure.
At the end of the day for me the meaning of Love is something I’m still pondering. It’s an emotion that is so hard to ‘nail’.
In connection with NotaPath’s article I wrote this:
Haven’t you ever impulsively proclaimed when you saw or experienced something of a certain nature “I love this!!”?
I know I have, and lately – because I’ve been thinking more about feelings in the context of psychopathy/sociopathy – I’ve made a note to self when doing so, so that I might think it over later and find out if perhaps that was really love I felt at the time. And I think it actually was!
The point where I too may be lacking to some extent is in that my love, when it is directed at people, usually doesn’t last very long….except for a very few exceptions. But isn’t that the very nature of deeper love, that it is reserved for a very few?
Then again, where does the line go between fascination and admiration and love?
I haven’t met anybody who could explain this, and this is despite the heavy body of poetry and art that deals with exactly this feeling: Love.
How do you describe Love?
Maybe some of my readers can help me out with this one? Thoughts from psychopaths/sociopaths and normal folk/empaths alike are all welcome!..
