Borderline Personality Disorde

To help the world understand why humans perform certain actions, we have to study the human mind. Specifically fields that will help progress mankind. Trying to understand why psychopaths and borderline personality disorder’s commit the crimes that they do is an important step in the direction of preventing it. The article, “Emotion in Criminal Offenders With Psychopathy and Borderline Personality Disorder” addresses this field accurately. Although it focuses on the physiological aspects of this field, it will help understand it.

This study was performed because the authors felt that criminal offenders that are diagnosed with psychopathy and/or borderline personality disorder share an unprompted nature that tends to differ from “normal” humans. They (the authors) aim to prove that criminals with Psychopathy and borderline personality disorder will have different responses to unpleasant and pleasant stimuli than the control group. This is my guess at the general hypothesis the authors were going for. The article states, “Compared with controls, psychopaths were chara

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They have trained themselves since they were children to be “too tuff” to be scared. This supports some parts of the hypothesis. However, spending hours with psychopaths and BPD’s doesn’t exactly sound thrilling. The authors found that although BPD subjects reacted similarly to the control group when testing autonomic arousal and startle response, they had very little facial expression.

Although this research was preformed flawlessly, they did not take into account that any criminal has the “macho” reaction.

In conclusion, the research done by the authors is a very important study to help us understand why criminals perform actions that they do. Additionally, they found that in psychopaths there were less facial expressions. Therefore, the results could have been biased because the psychopaths and BPD subjects tried not to react. Finally, they used electromyographic activity of the corrugator muscle to determine the emotional expression. If we can discover what drives psychopaths to do the terrible things that they do, we may be able to create a better society. And Finally, I was only able to find one small problem with their methods. This study took into consideration the startle reflex, their emotional arousal, and the index of emotional expression. I find that helping other people solve problems gives me a sense of self-satisfaction. Although the reactions of the psychopaths support the hypothesis, the reactions of BPD subjects differs in the sense that they have very comparable autonomic arousal and startle response of the control group.

Approximate Word count = 727
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)

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