The first time I ever heard anyone use the word "asshat" was, in fact, Mattshizzle.

People apparently don't use that word in Texas.   Actually I never heard in during my six years in the military either.

I was thinking about psychopathy and how it is viewed.  This thread could have been a very interesting discussion had it not been derailed, ironically by it's originator.

It seems to me that it would be perceived subjectively, meaning that both the supposed psychopath would justify the reason to suppress emotions, and the examiner would inadvertently overlay their own bios when attempting to understand a psychopath.  

What is the difference between a soldier killing 100 enemy soldiers and a psychopath killing 100 people.  I say that objectively they are the same thing.  It's only when you apply a subjective blanket of motivation, bios and perceived worth that the two begin to be distinct. 

From an historical perspective there’s a bit more to add on the subject of psychopathy which is an evolving concept.   Psychologist Bob Hare the inventor of the PCL-R (current gold standard psychopath test) in DSM-IV, states in ‘Without Conscience’ that ‘psychopaths are genetically constructed’ which means he thinks they are born not made. This has been the prevalent view since the 1990’s.

They weren’t always seen that way, in the 60’s and 70’s Elliot Barker and Gary Maier two psychiatrists who worked at the Oak Ridge Hospital for the criminally insane in Ontario believed they could be cured using their Capsule Programme.  They had psychopaths naked and high on LSD talking about their feelings for 100 hours a week and declared they had made the psychopaths ‘gentle’ and released them in their droves.

But they’d got it wrong, researchers in the 90’s studying recidivism rates found that the Capsule psychopaths reoffended at a rate of 80% against the usual 60%.  Psychopaths were declared untreatable and this was later confirmed by Bob Hare’s tests which found they had malfunctioning limbic system/amygdala regions of the brain which govern emotion, see ‘The Psychopath Test’ by Jon Ronson.

Since the 90’s the received wisdom has been that psychopaths learn how to fake empathy better with treatment  but Bob Hare, changing his view slightly, interprets these results in another way and believes the problem is that  traditional programs aren’t designed for psychopaths because they’re designed for the average offender. He states that ‘developing a good treatment plan is a new frontier of studying the psychopath’ (who represents 1% of the population).
Hare says ‘We know we're not going to instill in psychopaths a sense of empathy or a strengthened conscience, but we can probably work with characteristics related to their antisocial behavior, such as impulsivity, stimulation-seeking, and irresponsibility.’

In addition, Hare believes, intervention can appeal to their self-interest and make use of the best available cognitive-behavior programs. Yet this requires their active participation. ‘You say to them, most people think with their hearts, not with their heads and your problem is you think too much with your heads so let's change the problem into an asset. They understand that, they say, 'oh yeah, I'm too rational like Spock on Star Trek.’

So finding data from programs designed specifically for psychopaths is a new arena for researchers.  Aina Gullhaugen’s study falls into this category plus she looks at how psychopaths may be nurtured through abusive caregivers even though at this early stage the evidence is inconclusive. On this basis I think the OP was right to state her work moves the nurture/nature debate on from where it has been stuck since the 90’s.