Analyses in this chapter focused on what happens in the somewhat rare event that positive outcomes in adulthood do occur for people with psychopathy traits. Do people with psychopathy traits respond to their environment the same way that people without psychopathy traits do? For example, do positive sources of informal social control (e.g., a job, stable housing, and prosocial relationships) decrease the frequency of offending even for people with psychopathy traits? Analyses indicated that measures in adulthood of informal social control, prison networks, and substance use failed to moderate the relationship between psychopathy and offending. However, there was evidence that only people with low scores on the PCL:YV responded to positive sources of informal social control in the expected manner. This implies some level of social resistance on the part of people with psychopathy traits. This finding is illustrated by using qualitative data from an ISVYOS participant who had a relatively positive social environment yet continued to offend over the life course.

Chapter 1 sets the stage by describing several linguistic and psychological aspects of word meaning, with emphasis on those that have received the most attention in cognitive neuroscience. Specific topics include the treatment of word meanings as public concepts for social coordination; the decomposition of word meanings into semantic features; the characterization of word meanings in terms of frames, prototypes, mental models, and background situations; the nature of word associations and co-occurrence patterns; the influence of context on interpretation; and the importance of crosslinguistic similarities and differences.

Zombie myths have captured imaginations for centuries, but their roots may lie in real-world infections that alter behavior in terrifying ways. This chapter explores the biological underpinnings of the zombie archetype, beginning with cultural practices surrounding Haitian Vodou and moving into the realm of neuroscience and virology. Rabies serves as a chilling real-world analog to zombification, with symptoms like aggression, hydrophobia, and loss of cognitive control emerging as the virus travels from the bite site to the central nervous system. The chapter also examines Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite capable of rewiring host behavior and reducing fear responses, particularly in rodents. By tracing the ways infectious agents can alter motivation, movement, and fear, this chapter offers a grounded, scientific perspective on one of the most enduring horror tropes—and explores what happens when the threat isn’t supernatural, but biological, and it’s already inside the body.

Chapter 7 concentrates on abstract words like democracy, luxury, and chance. These words are harder to characterize and investigate than concrete ones like bird, mug, and banana, but the pace of progress in understanding their cognitive and neural bases has dramatically increased in recent years. For instance, it’s now clear that compared to concrete words, abstract ones rely more on verbal associations, occur in a broader range of contexts, and are rated higher for certain types of semantic features (e.g., time, social interaction, emotion, and drive). Consistent with these differences, it’s well-established that abstract words rely more than concrete ones on a few very high-level cortical areas that play vital roles in language processing while also contributing to the GSN/DMN. And yet there’s also mounting evidence that, like concrete words, many abstract ones are anchored to some extent in systems for perception and action. In addition, an increasing amount of research has been exploring how different categories of abstract words (e.g., those for numbers, emotions, mental states, and moral judgments) are associated with different sets of partly shared and partly segregated brain regions.

Studies that focus on whether psychopathy statistically predicts reoffending are not informative of the process that connects the cause (psychopathy) to the outcome (offending). Understanding the causal mechanisms behind the relationship between psychopathy and offending has received minimal empirical attention. ISVYOS data were used to examine whether the relationship between psychopathy traits in adolescence and persistent offending in adulthood was mediated by social and health outcomes in early adulthood. Of principal importance was the observation that a person’s social environment partially mediated the relationship between psychopathy and persistent offending. Part of the reason why youth with psychopathy traits continue to offend over the life-course is due to the cumulative consequences that psychopathy has on positive social roles and responsibilities, including family relationships, education, and employment. The mediating effect was robust to unobserved confounders. Findings supported the philosophy of risk management strategies that target a person’s social environment when aiming to reduce reoffending. A series of case studies is used to describe the social lives of people with psychopathy traits.

This chapter explores the friendship practices of midlife men and women in long-term couple relationships in the UK. Drawing on qualitative interviews with eighteen adults aged forty to fifty-nine, it examines how friendship is shaped by, and often subordinated to, the couple norm, an ideal that centers monogamous, cohabiting relationships. Although friendship is increasingly celebrated in cultural discourse, it remains routinely deprioritized in midlife. Friends offer emotional support, companionship, and moral guidance, yet their contributions are often undervalued or constrained by normative expectations. At times, emotionally significant friendships were perceived as disruptive to the primacy of the couple bond. The contemporary ideal of friendship as autonomous, equal, and elective, sits uneasily alongside the institutional authority of coupledom. This chapter argues that friendship and couple relationships are not discrete domains but are relationally entangled. By tracing how intimacy is organized through these entanglements, it calls for a critical rethinking of friendship’s role in contemporary personal life.

I wrote this book to help readers entering into the psychopathy literature come away with an understanding of psychopathy that is not watered down. As a professor, I regularly encountered students who sought to learn more about psychopathy but found that peer-reviewed papers were overly technical and assumed a certain level of background knowledge on the part of the reader. Books are not always a viable alternative, as they can be informal and make statements about psychopathy in the absence of empirical evidence. Edited books feature multiple authors, which is a strength; however, they often present contrasting opinions, and no explanation is provided for the differences in opinion. Popular culture sources like True Crime podcasts are regularly factually inaccurate when it comes to discussing psychopathy. In this chapter, I reflect on the limitations of my analyses, describe key take-home messages from each chapter, and integrate these messages to identify overarching themes from the book.

Chapter 3 begins to elaborate a central theme of the book, which is that word meanings are not localized in just one part of the brain; instead, they have a widely distributed web-like layout that includes many different cortical areas and corresponding types of representation. This particular chapter focuses on the experiential (e.g., visual, auditory, and motor) features of word meanings. The key idea is that, in keeping with theories of grounded/embodied cognition, these concrete features are identical to some of the modality-specific representations that allow us to make sense of our nonlinguistic experiences involving the pertinent types of entities and events. For example, the word “scissors” denotes a kind of household tool with specifications for shape, motion, sound, and manipulation, and considerable research suggests that we store these features directly within some of the same cortical areas that are engaged when we see, hear, and use scissors. Such findings are exciting because they support the intuitive view that words are like instructions for neurally simulating experiences, albeit usually in an automatic, implicit manner. There’s still a great deal of debate, however, about the precise ways in which word meanings relate to perception and action.

Chapter 6 tackles the environment in which the social life of the image takes place. The image interpretation is situated within the immediate material environment where the image appears, which includes the medium, genre, and placement of the image. Then the interpretation takes into account the broader time and space surrounding the image, which includes the extended historical, social, cultural, and political context that the image exists within. The method of photo documentation is presented and applied on the case example of graffiti images.

This chapter discusses five debates in the academic literature on psychopathy: (1) is criminal behaviour a trait or a consequence of psychopathy, (2) what is the structure of psychopathy traits, (3) is there such a thing as “successful psychopathy”, (4) can self-report tools reliability measure psychopathy, and (5) do people with psychopathy traits change? Like Chapter 1, the goal is not to determine who won or lost the debate. Instead, the goal is to inform readers of different views on key matters. Where I do not remain neutral is with respect to debunking myths and misconceptions about psychopathy that have been perpetuated by news media and popular culture sources. I explain what the myth is, where the source of confusion appears to have arisen, and what the reality is within the academic literature. For example, I discuss how True Crime podcasts mistake psychosis for psychopathy, how media overestimates the prevalence of psychopathy, and the Hannibal Lecter myth in which people with psychopathy traits are assumed to have high IQs and act as a criminal masterminds.

The final chapter ends the book with a discussion about when do images still matter despite their abundance and why images have an ambivalent relationship with reality. Can we distinguish between images that reflect reality, manipulate reality, or help us imagine an alternative reality? Can we talk of a ‘good’ image, a powerful one that lives on, and invites dialogue? Can we talk of a ‘just’ image? We want images that do us justice, whether it is for our personal memories or grieving, or for our collective identity and society.