re: Holley’s comment

You need to apologize to Holley as ‘unsympathetic’ is most definitely a word. It means not sympathetic, not showing approval of an idea or action or not likeable whereas ‘apathetic’ means not interested or enthusiastic. The OED agrees with me here.

You tell other people they’re wrong and to ‘look up…’ but you didn’t think to follow your own advice. The word can be found in any decent dictionary and probably in many crappy ones too :p

@ IanG: She seems to be more of a sociopath than a psychopath? How so? Asocipath is just someone who doesn’t care for social norms, etc. Most criminals in jail are sociopaths. Psychopaths are people who lack empathy, remorse and emotions, who have superficial charm (they manipulate and deceive to get their way). She is definitely a psychopath. House is a sociopath, he’s socially transgressive, but he can feel things.

@ Joe: I LUV UR VERSION!! Well, mostly I just like big dance numbers. But House using telling 13 to check ceruloplasmin levels intead of recurring to his now hackneyed sense of humor, is at once refreshing and priceless.

@ Mrs. Wilson IV: “Sociopathy and psychopathy are older terms for Antisocial Personality Disorder. They are used interchangeably because they mean the same thing.” That’s according to the American Psychiatric Association. The DSM-III changed the name of of both disorders to Antisocial Personality Disorder. But researchers have heavily criticized the ASPD DSM-IV criteria cuz not enough emphasis was placed on traditional psychopathic traits like lack of empathy, superficial charm, and inflated self appraisal.

Sociopathy has to do with social deviance, whereas psychopathy also includes affective and interpersonal personality factors. “Psychopaths are born with temperamental differences such as impulsivity, cortical underarousal, and fearlessness that lead them to risk-seeking behavior and an inability to internalize social norms. Sociopaths have relatively normal temperaments; their personality disorder being more an effect of negative sociological factors like parental neglect, delinquent peers, poverty, etc. Both personality disorders are the result of an interaction between genetic predispositions and environmental factors, but psychopathy leans towards the hereditary whereas sociopathy tends towards the environmental. But they are NOT the same.”

@ Mongo the Geek: awww. xoxo. But yes, low blood contents of ceruloplasmin can indicate Menkes disease, Overdose of Vitamin C, Aceruloplasminemia, and Wilson’s disease amongst other things. You rule the other ones out based on the other symptoms. Refer to Joe’s comment :D

@ Ledasmom: SAME HERE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

@ Mrs. Wilson IV, again: Uh… Weeeeeeeelllllllll… A general reduction of brain volume and anatomically specific differences in areas such as the prefrontal cortex and the globus pallidus are most commonly found in bipolar people. Other brain components which have been proposed to play a role are the mitochondria, and a sodium ATPase pump, causing cyclical periods of poor neuron firing (depression) and hyper sensitive neuron firing (mania). Circadian rhythms and melatonin activity also seem to be altered. These may be present in one subtype of bipolar disorder and not in other.

As for psycopathy, it is associated with both the amygdala, which is associated with emotional reactions and emotion learning, and the prefrontal cortex, associated with impulse control, decision-making, emotional learning and behavioral adaptation. Studies have shown there is less “gray matter” in these areas in psychopaths than in non-psychopaths.
Also, there is DT-MRI evidence of breakdowns in the white matter connections between these two important areas in a small British study of nine criminal psychopaths. This evidence suggests that the degree of abnormality was significantly related to the degree of psychopathy and may explain the offending behaviors.

My whole point here is, yes, you CAN point to a scan and say “That’s a bipolar brain, etc.” And I agree that MRI will not produce such a scan. And like Landman says, even if you are a psychopath, you don’t use just one area of your brain.
But really, 13 basically admits that it was mainly just a hunch and nobody is 100% convinced until Valerie confesses.

The following also goes for Rane, who also said psycopaths DO feel emotions:
Robert D. Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) lists emotional shallowness as one of the core personality traits of psycopathy.
Quoting Jane, a psychopath “does not feel normal human emotions (which has been substantiated by testing galvanic skin response, PET scans, etc while subjecting someone to emotional stressors)… There’s a great book on the subject and how blurred the diagnostic lines are… it’s called Psychopathy: Antisocial, Criminal and Violent Behavior.

@ Holley: “unsympathetic” is not a word! :P Maybe you meant “apathetic”?

@ Indiana Dave: YES!! I thought maybe there were more scenes that got cut, showing why 13 gets so upset and why House acts so out of character, but now I can see the writers just weren’t focusing on realism at all.

@ Arthur: WRONG. Look up Robert D. Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R). And look at Psudo’s quote of Popular Science. As for the writing, that the villain gets defeated, changes for the better at her own cost and poetic justice is attained HARDLY constitutes good writing. Definitely neither ironic nor brilliant. At all.

@ KW: Somehow I feel like D-r Bulgaria answered that. Answered everything, really. Incredible comment, Bulgaria. I haven’t seen the first season, but it does make sense. After a while, one runs out of insanely rare conditions to present in a realistic yet not obvious way, so it’s only natural to stop trying, I guess.

And I was about to ask about the whole ear thing!! But I thought it was probably something evident and I would just look like an idiot. Which I did anyways. Oh well.

@ Corvus: I hadn’t thought of it that way!! Wow, this show gets worse with every comment, ha ha

@ Robi: There was an episode (the eighteenth of the third season, “Airborne”), where Cuddy and House are on a plane and she, along with many other passangers, start developing a collective ailment. In the end, only one guy was really sick; some guy who went scuba diving, surfaced too quickly and then took the flight, which made things worse (He had decompression sickness, I believe) and everyone else was just experiencing mass hysteria. House solves this by making a dry announcement and offering another round of drinks, basically. But in the meantime, Cuddy vomited and experienced FEVER, headache, abdominal pain and petechial rashes on her lower back.
My point: She HAS been sick. And of all the characters, she’s the one portrayed as vulnerable the most often. Even more so than Cameron, who is mostly just depicted as naive.

@ Judy: When I watched the episode the first time, I actually thought that maybe some people had reacted negatively to 13’s character because she was to unaffected and psychopath-like, and so the writers wanted to confront HER against a real psychopath to sort of humanize her through comparison, which would account for her unusually, inexplicably emotional responses in the episode. But now I’m convinced they were just like “Let’s make an episode that has a hot psychopath in it. And she cries in the end cuz she be cured.”

@ keith: LMFAO!! YEAH, YOU ARE TOTALLY RIGHT!!!

@ throatybeard: olvia is beautiful in ANYTHING she does. But yeah, that sounds strangely plausible.

@ leggy: THREE VOTES SO FAR FOR THE BIG DANCE NUMBER! YAY!!!

@ Jmo: empathy is not a learned thing. And no, one doesn’t decide to be more selfish. You may decide to behave more selfishly, but you don’t choose to have a certain personality. And we ARE born with empathy, that’s how children learn to interact socially and that’s how they learn to respect certain rules. I suck at explaining things, but it’s true. It’s an instinctive thing, like when you see somebody yawn and you yawn too. You can consciously try to stop it, but it’s a reflex you’re born with. Same with empathy in the normal person. There’s also the mirror neuron hypothesis cited by Andreas.

ANDREAS, MOST ELOQUENT COMMENT EVER!!!!!!!!!! You sound even wiser than Dr Scott :P

Then, there are some common comorbidities, e.g. sociopathy or its childhood cousin oppositional disorder get mentioned quite often in the literature on ADHD, which also has some overlap with autism, another syndrome where mirror neurons are implicated; that may explain the “fast-talking” part of one early researcher, if the patients he saw were mainly from this sub-group.

Concerning the part about some people able to sense sociopaths, that somehow gets my neck hairs bristling, I think humans can sense certain nuances in behaviour etc. quite well, and we react antagonistic to outsiders; with deficits in empathy in sociopaths, there could be some problems with the response to the response to the response to my response, something akin to the ‘praecox feeling’ mentioned with psychotics high on disorganization and emotional distortions; problem is, in many cases this will not be sociopaths, but people with a different socialization, autists and like. And remember, the really bad ones are not likely to give this response, otherwise they would have elicited this response before and got caught. To put things into perspective, being ADHD, I’m used to elicit a similar response in some people[1], same people later getting pulled on by con artists or similar[2], so forget about specifity. Gut insincts have a place, but one shouldn’t be too sure about them, or one risks helping evolution to fine-tune them[3].

On a related note, why is there no talk about 13? There is nothing to imply the patient chose to be that way, and I know ‘pillars of the community’ who have done worse then her; I wouldn’t exactly trust her with the key to my appartment, but then, there are a lot of other people I wouldn’t. So why the hell shall we punish her just because G*D fucked up her empathy circuits[4].

[1] No, I don’t think I’m a sociopath; at least the thought gives me remorse; but then, do I feel remorse or just imagine it…

[2] Well, high self esteem is quite high in the con artist’s book of ‘potential victim’s traits’.

[3] And the abilities of would-be sociopaths; BTW. if the result is rape and it leads to pregnancy, that’s in for some interesting execises in population genetics…

[4] Or did his capo lavoro; come on, we’re talking about the guy who rivels in things like the Lancet liver fluke and like…

I love how they keep the weather geographically appropriate instead of year-round non-weather Southern CA. The only other TV show I can remember that did that correctly was X-Files, but they really didn’t have to much choice given that most of the show was filmed in Vancouver. (It moved to LA in later seasons, but I’d quit watching it by then.)

Factor 1
Aggressive narcissism, Glibness/superficial charm, Grandiose sense of self-worth, Pathological lying, Cunning/manipulative, Lack of remorse or guilt, Emotionally shallow, Callous/lack of empathy, Failure to accept responsibility for own actions

Factor 2
Socially deviant lifestyle, Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom, Parasitic lifestyle, Poor behavioral control, Promiscuous sexual behavior, Lack of realistic, long-term goals, Impulsiveness, Irresponsibility, Juvenile delinquency, Early behavioral problems, Revocation of conditional release

Traits not correlated with either factor
Many short-term marital relationships, Criminal versatility

How many of these traits can be assigned to House?

I’m not an MD, although I did know a psychopath/sociopath in the past. Personality disorders are a long-term deal that show up in childhood or adolescence. (It’s not true that just because “she hasn’t always been like this” means it’s a symptom of her current disease.) My interpretation of psychopathy is that empathy is a learned thing — we aren’t born with it, but with proper social development we learn to share, consider the feelings of others, play fair, etc. When we’re adults some of us may behave more selfishly than others, but can choose to focus on or develop more empathy if we want to (like House does this season), but psychopaths never learned it in the first place. Which means that if they are to change, they wouldn’t just suddenly start feeling all the things that had been so foreign to them all this time, but would practically be starting from scratch — especially since they’ve developed strategies to live life that revolved around lacking empathy and often-neurotic self-centeredness. I would imagine that it’s worse than “5 years into debt/5 years out of debt.” It’s more like having a straw house on a structurally unsound foundation that’s been frantically patched up whenever there’s a problem.

Note that “empathy” doesn’t mean being able to feel emotion… it means being able to feel another’s emotions. I agree that psychopaths feel emotions, but they seem cold because they don’t feel *other* people’s emotions.

I don’t think it matters whether it was copper, child abuse, a Psychopath gene, or any combination of those things. It’s not going to suddenly reverse itself.

But that might have been due to last week’s promo.

Maybe Thirteen saw the promo as well.

the Clinic, yes

apart fron the weird “House’s recited-from-memory spanish”, after two views, it indeed had sense:

Wilson is treating the chican guy with his injured finger
House finds it odd, suspects, and asks about how happened
Chican guy says: my work can be very dangerous, or sort of
Then House tells him: next time you’re taking drugs at work, don’t mistake your finger for a nail (SORT OF)

Reasoning: too much crying came (because it didnt match), not from pain, but because of overdose of eye drops… which are used for red eyes..and red eyes came from taking marijuana… which made the worker slow and not so much dexterous with the hammer, so he hit his own finger

cool huh