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you sweat more as you become more emotional. Even a small increase in moisture can be detected, because it makes it easier for an electric current to pass between sensors placed on your skin. Scientists measuring this skin conductance see it increase when a person with a conscience and a sense of empathy reads about, or views a disturbing picture of, a person experiencing fear, pain, or grief.
    Attach the electrodes to men like Richard Kuklinski, Ted Bundy, or LTK and you will see that they are literally unmoved. And so is the recording device that’s measuring their skin conductance. They hardly respond emotionally to stimuli that make the rest of us uncomfortable and a little bit sweaty. These stress-and fear-inducing situations also affect brain and body so the heart beats two or three beats per minute faster thannormal. But in the one percent of the population with significant psychopathic features, these physiological responses are significantly toned down.
    That is what Christopher Patrick and his fellow researchers found in 1994 when they presented 54 criminals, including some with psychopathic features like LTK’s, with imagined fearful and neutral scenarios. 2 Regardless of their Psychopathy Checklist scores, all of the criminals rated themselves about equally capable of fear and equally capable of imagining themselves in described situations. But the physical responses of the criminal psychopaths in the group showed significantly decreased changes in heart rate and electrical skin conductance compared to the criminals who had lower psychopathy scores.
    In fact, you can predict which criminals will have the least response to fearful images by looking for those who have the highest antisocial behavior factor scores on Hare’s psychopathy scale. These differences suggest that something is deficient or at least different—depending on how you regard psychopathy—in the brains of psychopaths.
    These and other studies in the past twenty years suggest that there seems to be a disconnection between words and emotions in the brains of criminal psychopaths. Their brains do not process them the way non-psychopathic brains do. High psychopathic traits come with emotional disability. The oft-quoted, pithy characterization of this deficit made by psychologists John H. Johns and Herbert Quay more than a half century ago bears repeating: “Psychopaths know the words but not the music.” 3
    Hare expanded on this insight for Dick Carozza of Fraud magazine: “It means that psychopaths understand the denotative, dictionary meanings of words but do not fully appreciate their connotative, emotional meaning. Their language is only ‘word deep,’ lacking in emotional coloring. Saying ‘I love you’ or ‘I’m truly sorry’ has about as much emotional meaning as saying ‘have a nice day.’ This lack of emotional depth in language is part of their more general poverty of affect as described by clinicians and observed in neuroimaging studies.” 4
    People like LTK, however, often act as if they have emotional ability. They can often convincingly fake recognizing and experiencing emotions, for example, when they think the act will help them con others. But, in reality, it is fake. The quality of the acting differs amongindividuals, but in some it can be very convincing. The practiced deceitfulness can routinely fool naïve victims. For a short period of time, skillful psychopaths can even fool experienced researchers upon first meeting, according to Robert Hare. But repeated studies over the past fifteen years indicate that psychopathy is harder to hide in the laboratory.
    Before LTK entered the lab to have his brain scanned to see how he responded to emotion-related stimuli, Hoff and his colleagues needed to find out more about their volunteer. The history they gathered about his family background uncovered little that would have predicted his future career as a psychopathic rapist. While there is evidence that psychopathy has