Your favourite song could reveal if you’re a psychopath… and if you’re an Eminem fan it’s NOT good news
KNOWING all the lyrics to Eminem’s Lose Yourself could say more about you than you may think.
A new study compared volunteers’ tastes in music with their scores on a personality test to see if there was any correlation between music preference and psychopathic traits.
There was – but it’s less about genre and more about the song. And, unlike Hannibal Lecter, they’re not listening to classical.
Researchers at New York University played 260 songs for 200 people and found that those with the highest psychopathic scores were big fans of Blackstreet’s No Diggity and Eminem’s Lose Yourself.
Volunteers who were fans of The Knack’s My Sharona and Sia’s Titanium had the lowest psychopathic scores.
The study is attempting to find a way to easily identify psychopaths without them knowing – which researchers say could help make sure they don’t get to a position where they can abuse others, whether physically or emotionally.
Pascal Wallisch, who headed the research, told : “The media portrays psychopaths as axe murderers and serial killers, but the reality is they are not obvious; they are not like The Joker in ‘Batman,’”
They might be working right next to you and they blend in. They are like psychological dark matter.”
Approximately one percent of the general population fits the description of a psychopath and about one in five prisoners are identified as having the psychological disorder.
The volunteers were all young and educated but came from different ethnic and economic groups. Researchers had them take the Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy Scale, a widely accepted personality test developed in 1995 designed to identify psychopathy.
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Pascal stressed that the study was preliminary and unpublished – but hopes the initial findings will serve as a launch pad for a much larger study, where they can interview thousands of diagnosed psychopaths about their taste in music.
He added that they actually found other songs that were more predictive of a psychopath, but won’t reveal them in order not to compromise future research.
Pascal said: “You don’t want to have these people in positions where they can cause a lot of harm. We need a tool to identify them without their cooperation or consent.
What's the difference between a psychopath and a sociopath?
According to studies sociopaths and psychopaths do share some traits but psychopaths are said to be more likely to get into trouble with the law which sociopaths are more likely to blend in with society.
A sociopath is a person with antisocial personality disorder.
Psychopathy can be thought of as a more severe form of sociopathy, with more symptoms.
Therefore all psychopaths are sociopaths but sociopaths are not necessarily psychopaths.
“The ethics of this are very hairy, but so is having a psychopath as a boss and so is having a psychopath in any position of power.”
Canadian psychologist Robert D. Hare, the author of the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, a 20‑part test administered to detect psychopathy.
These include having a superficial charm, an inflated sense of self worth, becoming bored easily, lying pathologically, manipulating people and failing to feel guilty or showing remorse.
Psychopaths can also include being callous, having poor behavioural controls, behaving promiscuously, a history of poor behavioural controls, having no realistic goals, being very impulsive, being irresponsible and being unable to commit to relationships.
Earlier this year Dr Dutton revealed the jobs with the most psychopaths working in them after conducting an extensive survey.
This story originally appeared on the and was republished with permission.