Cleckley reported that psychopaths never experience grief, honesty, deep joy, or genuine despair. From my own experience, I would add to Cleckley’s observations that the psychopath never ruminates on anything.
Rumination is a process that often contributes to depression and in extreme forms to obsessive-compulsive disorder.
The process of rumination is often associated with some anxiety or subjective feeling of concern or worry, and this can help precipitate change in the individual in order to reduce the anxiety.
The psychopath experiences none of this.
Indeed, if you ask a psychopath if he has ever worried about whether he left the house with the stove on (a common problem among those with obsessive-compulsive disorder), he will look at you like you are an alien, in stunned disbelief.
— Kent A. Kiehl
psychopaths