Jake Massey
Do you like the Eminem track 'Lose Yourself'? Well, if you do, you could be a psychopath.
To be fair, whatever music you like, you could be a psychopath, but research indicates 'Lose Yourself' is particularly popular among psychos.
Back in 2017, a team at New York University got 200 people to complete a questionnaire that assessed their level of psychopathy - a disorder characterised by a lack of empathy, deficient emotional response and manipulativeness.
They were then given 260 songs to listen to and rate on a seven-point scale, and researchers found that those with the highest psychopath scores were among the biggest fans of the 2002 Eminem track.
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'No Diggity' by Blackstreet and Dr. Dre was also a fave, as well as 'What Do You Mean?' by Justin Bieber.
You may think this seems like a bit of a frivolous study, but researchers insisted it could serve an important purpose.
Pascal Wallisch, who led the research, told The Guardian: "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.
"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."
The idea is that if a group of songs could be found to be a good predictor of psychopathy, then publicly available playlists could be used to flag potential psychos.
"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 explained.
"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."
If you've ever been called – or called someone – a psychopath, it's possible that you didn't actually realise the true meaning of the word you were using.
One definition of psychopathy from a paper written in 2014 describes the disorder as 'marked by deficient emotional responses, lack of empathy, and poor behavioural controls, commonly resulting in persistent antisocial deviance and criminal behaviour'.
There are a number of things believed to be involved in the make-up of psychopaths, including genetic influences, but also developmental factors as well... While liking 'Lose Yourself' by Eminem is probably just a correlation, not a causation.
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