A couple of preliminary studies have found a link between psychopaths and music preferences. Conversely, also those with the least amount of psychopathic traits. As pointed out in the article, many companies use psychological testing of employees and this could be one way of screening employees. https://www.theguardian.com/science...s-prefer-rap-over-classical-music-study-shows Contrary to the movie trope epitomised by Alex in A Clockwork Orange and Hannibal Lecter in the Silence of the Lambs, psychopaths are no fonder of classical music than anyone else, though they do appear to have other musical preferences, psychologists say. In a study of 200 people who listened to 260 songs, those with the highest psychopath scores were among the greatest fans of the Blackstreet number one hit No Diggity, with Eminem’s Lose Yourself rated highly too. The New York University team behind the work stress that the results are preliminary and unpublished, but the scientists are sufficiently intrigued to launch a major study in which thousands of people across the psychopathy spectrum will be quizzed on their musical tastes. Tests on a second group of volunteers suggest the songs could help to predict the disorder. Whatever their other personality traits might be, fans of The Knack’s My Sharona and Sia’s Titanium were among the least psychopathic, the study found. The researchers have a serious goal in mind: if psychopaths have distinct and robust preferences for songs, their playlists could be used to identify them. “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,” said Pascal Wallisch who led the research. About 1% of the general population meets the description of a psychopath, but the figure is far higher in prisons, where about one in five has the disorder. One estimate, from Kent Kiehl, a psychologist at the University of New Mexico, suggests that psychopaths cost the US government alone $460bn (£340bn) a year. “You don’t want to have these people in positions where they can cause a lot of harm,” said Wallisch. “We need a tool to identify them without their cooperation or consent.” Scientists have already found gene variants that are more common in psychopaths, but they are hardly predictive of the disorder. They appear to alter people’s tendencies for empathy and aggression, but they do not determine people’s actions. Brain scans highlight distinct signs too, as the neuroscientist James Fallon discovered when he spotted the patterns of a psychopath in his own brain’s anatomy, but again, these do not set a person’s behaviour. Even if they did, the police cannot search for dangerous individuals by hauling people into brain scanners. Wallisch recruited volunteers for a study on musical tastes, but realised that many of the participants had separately sat a battery of psychological tests, including one called the Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy Scale, which ranks people’s psychopathic traits. By combining the volunteers’ answers from the music study with their results from the psychopath test, Wallisch identified songs that seemed to be most popular among psychopaths, and others favoured by non-psychopaths. While No Diggity and Lose Yourself were strikingly popular with psychopaths, other songs had greater predictive power. Wallisch declined to name them out of concern that doing so might compromise any future screening test. The larger study will now investigate whether the link between musical tastes and psychopathy is real, and if it is, whether groups of songs can predict potential psychopaths. That could lead to some controversial applications, Wallisch said. If the team can identify a group of 30 songs, for example, that together prove good at predicting psychopaths, then playlists from online music providers could be used to identify them. “The beauty of this idea is you can use it as a screening test without consent, cooperation or maybe even the knowledge of the people involved,” Wallisch said. “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.” Fortunately for ethicists, the possibility is some way off yet. “This work is very preliminary,” Wallisch added. “This is not the end of an investigation, it is the very beginning.” Kevin Dutton, a psychologist at Oxford, and the author of The Wisdom of Psychopaths, has been gathering data on musical tastes and other preferences for a psychopath study with Channel 4. More than three million people have responded so far, and while online surveys have serious weaknesses, the results so far suggest psychopaths favour rap music over classical and jazz. They also seem more likely to read the Financial Times than other newspapers. Regardless of its accuracy, Dutton suspects movie directors like the idea of classical music-loving psychopaths because of the “irresistibly alluring” juxtaposition. “The coming together of the dark, visceral, primeval psychopathic mind and the higher aesthetic of classical composition is inherently incongruous, and there is a whole body of literature on the creative potential of incongruity,” he said. “It is the hypnotically captivating and age-old appeal of the ‘beauty and the beast’, only under the same cortical roof.”
I would love to see how congress would test. I always thought they had a higher rate of this psychopathy perhaps higher than prisons. How else could you sell out the working people in america? No conscience.
Good, that says to me I am not one of these people. I see nothing musical in rap. It's talking in cadence like marching. No tune, no melody. No music.
I youtubed the 'songs' from the article. Im comforted by how awful they are. If thats what psychopaths enjoy, they should be extremely easy to identify and avoid.
I actually liked Eminem's "Lose Yourself", but I also like classical, mostly 60s-80s rock and a lot of other genres. While I generally am not a fan of rap, there are some good ones out there. The first rap song I ever liked was Snap's "I've got the power" which I saw in the movie 1991 "The Fisher King" starring Robin Williams and Jeff Bridges. In the late 1990s, my step-dad, who was a lot more into modern music than I was, got me into splitting the cost of the annual Grammy nominees CD. Each had the best of each genre and, despite not being a big fan of rap, R&B and jazz, there was some really good stuff on most of them. That said, I can see why psychopaths would like rap or head-banger music.
I have a wide and varied taste in music, and used to play guitar and mandolin once upon a time. Rap though grates upon my senses. Being an old man now, I love much of the rock and roll from the 50s onward. I love blues and even some jazz and big band sounds. I have to be in a particular mood to enjoy classical, although I greatly appreciate it. I like some of the country music and love bluegrass. My dad played lots of bluegrass but it was not called blue grass when he played it. The first time I heard Rap, I wondered what had happened to the culture of music. I still ask that question, And to me, if there is a Hell, that is all of the music one would hear down there. For all of eternity.
LOL I can picture my grandparents saying the same thing about "the Devil's music"; rock'n'roll. As long as some idiot isn't blasting it in my ear where I'm forced to listen to it, each to their own.
Hey that is what my dad said. LOL He said what I listened to in the 60s was racket. Didn't care for the psychedelic sound. Oddly enough though, he appreciated some of the Beatles music. Later on, like Yesterday and other slow, sweet ones. Seriously, rap makes me almost sick to my stomach. It is that damned cadence and then all of the profanity in some of them. When I drive into the town here, as I live in a rural area, someone will inevitably pull up to me next to a stop light, and rap will be blasting on a system with a bass speaker and amp from hell, reverbrating throughout my body, with those hellish low frequencies, and it makes me literally sick. LOL No country for old men as Tommy Lee Jones said in that flick. I appreciate such a wide variety of music, being a musician, but rap? It literally is hell to endure it.
I wonder what their favorite music was before rap. And they did only list two songs. They didn't say all rap. I don't like rap in general but I've heard some stuff that is okay. And I like some of the hybrid stuff coming out, like this. I don't love all of it but I like the sound and the creativity. The idea of genres is breaking down. Musicians are mixing styles and genres all over the map.
