Remorse
Remorse is a distressing emotion experienced by an individual who regrets actions which they have done in the past[1] that they deem to be shameful, hurtful, or wrong.
In general, a person needs to be unable to feel fear, as well as remorse, in order to develop psychopathic traits.
Legal and business professions such as insurance have done research on the expression of remorse via apologies, primarily because of the potential litigation and financial implications.
John Kleefeld has encapsulated this into "four Rs" that typically make for a fully effective apology: remorse, responsibility, resolution and reparation.
[5] When an apology is delayed, for instance if a friend has been wronged and the offending party does not apologise, the perception of the offense can compound over time.
[11] Psychopaths refuse to adopt social and moral norms because they are not swayed by the emotions, such as guilt, remorse, or fear of retribution, that influence other human beings.
[12] Research has shown that the facial expressions of offenders on trial affect the jury's attitude and, in turn, the sentencing decision.
[13] Through simulations in studies by John Edens, who is a psychology professor at Texas A&M University, data suggests that attributing psychopathic traits to adult and juvenile offenders can have a noticeable negative effect on how these individuals are viewed by others.
This study found that remorselessness has the largest effect on the mock jurors' opinions of the "disorder" offenders and it explains support for the death sentence.
[13] The results of this study suggest that free of mental health testimonies, perceptions of a defendant's personality traits may have serious implications in the sentencing decisions of a capital case.
Others suggested that it remains unclear whether psychopaths' experience of empathy was the same as that of controls, and also questioned the possibility of devising therapeutic interventions that would make the empathic reactions more automatic.
Psychopathy may be an artefact of psychiatry's standardization along imaginary sharp lines between cultures, as opposed to an actual difference in the brain.
[16] Work conducted by Professor Jean Decety with large samples of incarcerated psychopaths offers additional insights.
[17] In a second study, individuals with psychopathy exhibited a strong response in pain-affective brain regions when taking an imagine-self perspective, but failed to recruit the neural circuits that were activated in controls during an imagine-other perspective—in particular the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and amygdala—which may contribute to their lack of empathic concern.
The DANVA-2[clarification needed] found those who scored highly on the psychopathy scale do not lack in recognising emotion in facial expressions.
[19] In fact, in an experiment published in March 2007 at the University of Southern California neuroscientist Antonio R. Damasio and his colleagues showed that subjects with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex lack the ability to empathically feel their way to moral answers, and that when confronted with moral dilemmas, these brain-damaged patients coldly came up with "end-justifies-the-means" answers, leading Damasio to conclude that the point was not that they reached immoral conclusions, but that when they were confronted by a difficult issue – in this case as whether to shoot down a passenger plane hijacked by terrorists before it hits a major city – these patients appear to reach decisions without the anguish that afflicts those with normally functioning brains.
According to Adrian Raine, a clinical neuroscientist also at the University of Southern California, one of this study's implications is that society may have to rethink how it judges immoral people: "Psychopaths often feel no empathy or remorse.
[22] In a study by James Davis and Greg Gold, 170 university students filled out questionnaires about forgiveness within interpersonal relationships.
Remorse may convey a sense of sorrow, while self-condemnation suggests the kind of loathing and desire for punishment that characterizes interpersonal grudges.
A material good provides the buyer with a more enduring pleasure compared with an experiential, as these two purchases also result in different types of regret.
