Asking
@dfwatt to comment on this if he has time. This is right in his field of medicine, if I recall correctly.
Sorry to be late in getting to this. The conventional view was that Psychopaths were born and Sociopaths were made. That view has broken down (there was never much great data supporting it in any case) and it's pretty clear that both concepts are probably best described as emergent phenotypes with a high number of weak penatrance genes, but the gene environment interactions, although unmapped in terms of dynamics, look to be generative. There is evidence against the idea that sociopathy / psychopathy is genetically determined including the famous case example of a neuroscientist I believe his name is James Fallon if I remember that correctly, who essentially pinned the meter on the gene set and even had some consonant and classical neuroimaging findings but who clearly was not a sociopath.
Another part of the problem is trying to get it what's essential versus derivative in psychopathy / sociopathy. I believe it's the empathy deficit and the deficits in conscience and impulse control maybe more derivative. Empathy in this context is defined as emotional empathy in other words the capacity to feel somebody else's pain and to be motivated by that experience to reduce their pain. Sociopaths/ Psychopaths simply don't feel that or it exists as a vestigial function. Because empathy underpins reciprocity in Social relations and therefore underpins most social rules which in turn are derivative of basic reciprocity principles, sociopaths have poor Conformity to social rules.
An additional element is that they do not fear punishment and do not learn from aversive consequences, after breaking said social rules, something generally linked up with amygdala networks and orbital frontal function, which appear compromised. It is a non explanation however as referenced in another post by someone else on the Forum to suggest that these things can be explained in terms of "neurotransmitter issues". Some of the sociopathy gene set clearly affects the Dynamics of neurotransmitter uptake, transport and signaling, but this is not really an explanation. Perhaps a future science will be able to link those changes in cell signals to poor empathy / inability to share emotion / impoverishment of social relations. But we're not there yet.
To make a long story short I think where we're at is that sociopaths probably emerge from a fairly diffuse and distributed set of genes interacting with neglect and abuse. Both neglect and abuse look to be critical and abuse by itself may not be enough.
I left out the controversy about whether there is a clear phenotypic separation between Psychopaths as colder and more ruthless and sociopaths as more impulsive, more likely to get drug-addicted, Etc. I suspect those are secondary distinctions. Both share the core empathy deficit and the lack of conformity to social rules, the heavy Reliance on lying and manipulation, and the fundamental grandiosity.
A final interesting question is the relationship of both of these to narcissistic personality disorders which also share the empathy deficit but perhaps not as severe a disruption of the capacity to conform to social rules. Because of all these considerations in my research I argued that these are on a continuum rather than clearly separated bins or baskets.
