Psychopaths have empathy
in so far as empathy is something we can have. Rather it is something we exercise, and we are all able to do that, but I will come back on that below. Most people might be surprised by the claim in the title alone, because a "lack of empathy" has long been considered the essential characteristic of psychopathy.
However, there is increasing evidence that psychopaths do actually have empathy and that it was never a disorder about an absense of empathy or other emotions.
Lacking emotions was never replicable among any clinical psychopath but only limited to self-reports found online. Overall, the division of a brain into clearly separate areas responsible for clearly assigned tasks is long outdated. A complete lack of emotions would - against the implications of many laypeople - not result in an overly rational and reasonable individual, but be simply dead.
Rather than being humanoid monsters with an alien emotional repertoire, it is the display of certain emotional impulses causing troubles. This is referred to as the Attention-Bottleneck-Theory of the psychopathic mind.
Accordingly, psychopaths are human beings - surprising isn't it? - whose attention is overly goal-oriented and missing out peripheral information, which renders them oblivious for the implications and consequences of their actions. This manifests in appearant disregard for the well-being of themselves and others, resulting in perceived lack of empathy.
We can learn that empathy is more of a process motivating to action, which is impaired among autistics and psychopaths for different reasons. It is meanwhile well-established that autistics are generally motivated to care for others. As such their empath deficits have been excused so far, but the accusation still stands for psychopathic people.
With Attention-Bottle-Neck theory, we can throw empathy as a feeling or something essential out of the window, and attribute non-empathetic behavior to a distrubance in the process of care itself.
Furthermore, it disproves the idea that psychopaths are lacking some essential emotions. Rather they come to an abnormal display. This can help to differentiate between psychopathy and other conditions such as alexithymia. Not that it has evern been an issue in a clinical setting, but it is certainly helpful for online therapeutic self-assessments.
Although not a psychopath myself but someone with ASPD + early onset CD and likely CU traits, this is so much of a better explanation and actually helped me to navigate everyday life than trying to understand emotions from some sort of "rationalized perspective".
The latter makes you feel infantile or deranged, as someone who is well-versed in detecting and noticing emotions. The struggle to keep track of surrounding information, such as "what are the consequences of my actions?", "is this too much?", "are there people around you actually care about?, are far more worthy of consideration and training to lose focus while also preparing to unable yourself to inflict too much chaos, is so much more promising.
This also removes this non-sense about an inability to love or care for others, just because you may slip here and when. Rather than being accused of deception and performing, it opens the possibility for forming real bonds. Building something together from the grounds on is a much better perspective than denying the ground and always wnodering if it is shaky or not. Rather than asking" are they a psychopath" we can ask "how to we navigate their flaws and integrate them into society in a healthy way?"
Sources:
Arielle Baskin-Sommers, Inti A. Brazil, The importance of an exaggerated attention bottleneck for understanding psychopathy, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Volume 26, Issue 4, 2022, Pages 325-336
Tillem, S., Weinstein, H., & Baskin-Sommers, A. (2021). Psychopathy is associated with an exaggerated attention bottleneck: EEG and behavioral evidence from a dual-task paradigm. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 21(4), 881-893
Wolf RC, Carpenter RW, Warren CM, Zeier JD, Baskin-Sommers AR, Newman JP. Reduced susceptibility to the attentional blink in psychopathic offenders: implications for the attention bottleneck hypothesis. Neuropsychology. 2012 Jan;26(1):102-9.
People with psychopathy can empathize with others, but this process is less automatic | News articles | University of Groningen
