Sociopaths differ fairly dramatically in how their brains react to emotional words. An emotional word is love, hate, anger, mom, death, anything that we associate with an emotional reaction. We are wired to process those words more readily than neutral, nonemotional words. We are very emotional creatures. But sociopaths listen as evenly to emotional words as they do to lamp or book - there's no neurological difference.

The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy.

I am not allowed by my profession to diagnose somebody from a distance, but one can observe certain symptoms of sociopathy in George W. Bush.

Most of us fill up our lives and end our boredom with our involvement with other people - people we love, people we hate, people we're afraid of, people we're interested in - and that's what keeps our minds going. So if you're sociopathic and you really have no caring for anybody, there's not much left, only boredom, and the way to relieve that, apparently, is to play a game and make sure that you win.

I am always impressed by the fact that even the tiniest amount of being listened to, the barest suggestion of the possibility of kind treatment, can bring such an immediate rush of emotion. I think this is because we are almost never really listened to. In my work as a psychologist, I am reminded every day of how infrequently we are heard, any of us, or our actions even marginally understood. And one of the ironies of my "listening profession" is its lesson that, in many ways, each of us ultimately remains a mystery to everyone else.

The perfect victim, from the sociopath's point of view, is the person who is smart enough and capable enough to do him some good in the world and who is also fun to manipulate. How much fun is it to manipulate someone who is stupid and incompetent?

If you see somebody really pulling for your sympathy while at the same time hurting you intermittently, you should start to wonder. If somebody plays to your pity and really tries to draw that out of you, that's not normal.