Callum Jones
Have you ever thought to yourself you may be a psychopath? Well, according to a new study, there's a surprising sign that you might have ‘psychopathic’ tendencies.
Even though the psychopath term is used a fair bit, it is not an official diagnosis, but instead an informal term often used for a condition called antisocial personality disorder (ASPD).
Healthline states: "The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition (DSM-5) does not list psychopathy as an official clinical diagnosis.
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"The true definition of a psychopath in psychiatry refers to someone with ASPD, explains Dr. Prakash Masand, a psychiatrist and co-founder of the Centers of Psychiatric Excellence.
"ASPD describes a condition marked by patterns of manipulation tactics and violation of others."
Signs of psychopathy include an inability to distinguish right from wrong, a lack of empathy, a tendency to manipulate others and a disregard for social norms.
Psychopaths can be hard to spot, with many being able to turn on the charm and blend in, but researchers have now found an unexpected sign that someone might have psychopathic tendencies.
In a 2016 study, researchers from the University of Innsbruck in Austria investigated the taste preferences of 953 Americans.
Those involved were asked about their partiality for sweet, sour, salty and bitter food and beverages.
The same group then had to answer four different personality surveys that analyzed their anti-social personality traits.
The traits measured in the groundbreaking study were psychopathy, narcissism, aggression and sadism.
The study's abstract reads: "Two US American community samples self-reported their taste preferences using two complementary preference measures and answered a number of personality questionnaires assessing Machiavellianism, psychopathy, narcissism, everyday sadism, trait aggression, and the Big Five factors of personality."
And the results were quite surprising...
"The results of both studies confirmed the hypothesis that bitter taste preferences are positively associated with malevolent personality traits, with the most robust relation to everyday sadism and psychopathy," the study said.
Though the researchers did warn that research linking taste preferences to personality traits is 'still in its early stages' and that 'evidence is still scarce'.
Also, some experts aren't all that convinced there's a significant relationship between a love of bitter food and psychopahtic tendencies.
Australian Catholic University lecturer Megan Willis, who was not associated with the story, provided her expertise on the matter in a piece for The Conversation in 2015.
She penned: "The only thing this study found was a weak positive relationship between psychopathy and a general penchant for bitter thing.
"In my view, this link is negligible compared with other, more well-established predictors of psychopathy, such as a person's genes or sex."