Many of you have heard of virtue signaling.
It's when real victims and wannabe victims signal to the world how virtuous they are, how moral, how ethical, how reliable and predictable pillars of the community, and how they've been wronged, and how they've been wronged and how they've been abused and tortured and molested and so on so forth.
This is virtue signaling.
Virtue signaling is one form of signaling and signaling in general is an emerging field in psychology, one of the most complex.
Signaling is the conveyance of information.
You can convey information in many ways. One of the most efficient ways is by using words, but you could also convey information with your body language, with your expressions, with your micro-expressions, and with your behaviors.
All these signal something to others.
The intention is to elicit some kind of response or reaction or even behavior modification.
In this sense, anger, for example, is a form of signaling.
But signaling is very problematic, because you can never be sure that the recipient of your signal will decode and understand the signal the same way you do.
Moreover, signaling is heavily dependent on a cultural and societal context, on a period in history, on religious convictions, on ethical frameworks, on philosophies, on so many things that signaling often goes awry, often goes wrong, and this is the source of a lot of conflict in today's world.
Individual signal, collective's signal, nation's signal, everyone and his dog and his mother-in-law are signaling, but are these signals being received?
The lecture today, like everything Jewish, is divided in two parts.
The first part is about the signaling of the narcissists.
And the second part is about signaling theory in general.
My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited. The first book about narcissistic abuse. I'm also a professor of clinical psychology. And I'm signaling to you that you should watch this video to the bitter end. Yours. Not mine, of course.
Okay, Shoshanim, by now you are used to my biting humor. And, apropos biting, let's transition to the narcissists.
Narcissists signal.
One can generalize and say that narcissists signal even more than normal people.
And the reason narcissists use signaling so extensively and so ubiquitously is that narcissism, exactly like autism spectrum disorder, is a social handicap.
The narcissist finds it very difficult to interact with other people, to read social and sexual cues appropriately, and to react to them in socially acceptable, prosocial, communal manner.
Because the narcissist is cut off from other people, because the narcissist is immured and immersed in fantasy, because the narcissist is subject to numerous cognitive distortions, such as grandiosity, and because the narcissist is dissociative, he does not have a continuous memory, his memory is short and disjointed, the narcissist needs to signal rather than maintain continuous, efficacious communication.
So signaling is a key feature in narcissism.
Why do narcissists signal? How do they signal?
Using all the above, narcissists signal with their body language, facial expressions, fleeting micro-expressions, and especially with their behaviors. I've dealt with it at length in many of the videos in the mind of the Narcissist playlist.
But today I'm going to discuss the signals emitted via the Narcissist signaling.
Signal number one, virtue, superiority, morality, or supremacy of some kind, the narcissistic signal is intended to elicit reactions from the environment, from other people, reactions which would buttress and support and affirm and confirm the grandiosity of the narcissists.
The narcissists inflated fantastic self-perception.
So the narcissists emits a signal. The signal is like a catalyst or like turning on a light switch, and the expectation is that the environment, other people around the narcissist, would respond in a way that would somehow uphold and prove that the narcissist's grandiosity is real.
So if he thinks himself to be a genius, he would emit a signal. It could be a worded signal, it would be behavioral. And then the environment is supposed to say, you're right, you're really a genius. That's the general idea.
Virtue signaling, superiority and supremacy signaling are the number one signal in the narcissists' armory and vocabulary.
The narcissist dedicates an inordinate amount of time to the sustenance and the maintenance and the buttressing of his self-perception and self-image as perfection reified, as a godlike entity, omniscient, omnipotent, brilliant, and in some cases drop-dead gorgeous. This is virtue, superiority, supremacy, signaling.
Next.
Supply triggering.
Narcissists emit signals with growing frequency as the narcissistic supply dwindles.
When the narcissist is faced with the situation of deficient narcissistic supply, let alone, God forbid, collapse, narcissists become frantic and frenetically emit signals.
The signals are intended to solicit narcissistic supply, to somehow trigger it, to somehow regulate the flow of supply, and render it predictable and contiguous.
So supply triggering usually starts with the emission of a supply signal.
Next, maintenance.
Narcissists would signal to people around them, especially sources of narcissistic supply, insignificant others, so-called intimate partners, everyone who is meaningful to the narcissists, everyone who is a significant participant in the narcissistic shared fantasy.
So the narcissists would emit signals that are intended to maintain these people within the shared fantasy. These signals are intended to convey to these people that they matter to the narcissists, that the narcissists cares about them, that the narcissist has a soft spot when it comes to them, that he loves them, that he is empathic, so this is a fake signal, of course.
The narcissist fakes empathy. He fakes caring and compassion. He fakes affection. Everything is fake. Everything is contorted and convoluted, although the narcissists is unaware of this.
Narcissists are unaware of their internal psychology. They are aware of their actions. They are not aware of their motivations.
Still, the signals emitted by the narcissist intend to keep these crucial people within his remit, ambit, and the shared fantasy.
So the narcissist communication, the narcissist signaling, convinces these people that they have a place in the narcissist's life and that it's worth sticking around.
This is a maintenance function.
The narcissists may pick up the phone every two weeks, or send an enigmatic message, text message, or just let you know that he cares about you. All the time concerned that you may abandon him, or that you may let go of the shared fantasy, or worse still, that you may wake up from the trance, the hypnotic trance that the narcissist has induced in you via entraining.
Maintenance signals.
Next, the reactance invulnerability signal.
This is the type of signal that is essentially psychopathic or antisocial.
The narcissist emits this signal, broadcasts this information to inform the environment that he is untouchable, invulnerable, impermeable, godlike, invulnerable, nothing can be done to him.
And so this is a narcissist's way of defying and being contumacious, rejecting authority.
This leads narcissists to reckless behaviors and to an inability, an inbuilt inability, to gauge appropriately the adverse consequences of his choices and actions.
The reactance invulnerability signal blinds the narcissists and drives the narcissists into a euphoric state of mind, a kind of narcissistic elation, where the narcissist believes himself to be indeed divine, a deity that is above every law, especially man-made laws.
The next sort type of signal is the fantasy daydreaming signal.
This is a bit of information that is intended to lend credence to the shared fantasy.
It's a kind of emitted piece of data, kind of message sent out by the narcissist, intended to inform everyone that the fantasy and the daydream within which the narcissist resides, the habitat of dreamscape the narcissist inhabits are real. It's not fantasy, it's real.
So, for example, the narcissist may make promises.
When he makes the promises, the promises serve two purposes. One is to acquire or captivate the target.
The promises intend to convince the target that it's worth sticking around, it's worth working with the narcissist, and it's worth being included in the shared fantasy.
But the promises made by the narcissists have a second purpose in mind. They intend to lend credibility and believability to the shared fantasy.
They convert the shared fantasy into a kind of business plan, program. They render the shared fantasy programmatic. It's like the political platform of a political party.
Most platforms of political parties are utterly fantastic and never carried out. But they're there to convince people that the political parties are serious about business, the business of governing.
It's the same with the Narcissist. He emits a constant stream of information, promises, observations, analysis, in the explicit intention of generating a verbal wall, a soundscape, which corresponds with the shared fantasy.
So, fantasy and daydreaming signals.
Next is the idealization devaluation signal.
Those signals you are well acquainted with. The narcissists idealizes you.
Part of the idealization process, part of the love bombing, is via signaling.
For example, the narcissist's body language, the narcissist's facial expressions convey to you how unique you are, how amazing, how unprecedented, how drop-dead gorgeous, how hyper-intelligent, and generally speaking, how ideally perfect you are.
This is done partly via signaling.
Indeed, you grasp yourself through the narcissist's gaze, you see yourself in the narcissist's gaze as a kind of idealized object, which is irresistible to you.
It's part of the signaling process.
Similarly, when the narcissist inexorably transitions from idealization to devaluation, the content of the signals change, but their intensity and frequency remain the same.
Whereas prior, previously, you could have done no wrong, now you could do no right.
While previously you were drop dead gorgeous, now you're only dropped dead. Not gorgeous. While previously you were hyper-intelligent, now you're super stupid.
And this is done via signaling. Expressions of disgust or reluctance, for example, micro-expressions of contempt, body language which is withdrawing and avoidant, and so on and so forth.
These are all signals of devaluation.
Finally, there's the approach avoidance signal.
Approach avoidance signal is more common among borderline narcissists.
It's when the narcissist approaches you and at the same time develops a kind of propensity for avoidance.
He approaches you, but the very fact that he's approaching you, the very fact that there's developing intimacy, terrifies him, so he withdraws, approaches and withdraws.
Part of the approachavoidancerepetitioncompulsion, part of this cycle is conducted via signaling.
Again, the narcissist's body language, the narcissist's verbal cues, expressions, micro-expressions, and behaviors. All of them convey to you.
You are irresistible. You're one-of-a-kind. I want to spend my life with you.
And then the next day, you're suffocating me. I can't stand you. I want to spend my life with you and then the next day you're suffocating me. I can't stand you. I have to run away.
All this is done verbally, but also via signaling.
These are the seven types of narcissistic signaling and now we transition to the second part of this video and as we said at the beginning of this video, when we were all much younger and sprucer.
A signal is a presentation of information.
Usually the signal is intended to evoke some kind of action or response or to modify the signal recipient's behavior.
And again, in this sense, all verbal expressions are signals, and anger is a signal, many types of behaviors are signals.
All signals come with noise.
Noise is anything that interferes, obscures, reduces or otherwise adversely affects the clarity or precision of an ongoing process of signaling.
So when you communicate a message, for example, that's the signal, the content of the message is the signal, and the message is conveyed via some kind of communication channel, for example the internet.
But the message comes with a lot of noise. The noise could be anything from actual disruption to the communication process or the context of the message or the fact that the message drowns in a sea of spam.
This is all noise.
So noise to signal ratio.
When human beings signal something, it normally comes with noise, and whether the signaling is effective, efficacious or not, crucially depends on what we call the signal to noise ratio, S to N ratio. The ratio of signal power, intensity to noise power.
And this is usually expressed in music in terms of decibels.
But we have signal to noise ratios in all communication theories, including in psychology.
When the signal is speech, for example, this is called the speech to noise ratio.
The narcissist signaling contains more noise than signal.
This is why it's extremely difficult to understand the narcissist, to decode him.
When I say him, her, half of all narcissists are the women.
It's very difficult to understand narcissists because the signal comes out with a lot of noise.
What is this noise in the case of the narcissist?
His fantasies, his grandiosity, his inability to gauge reality properly, other repressed emotions, negative affectivity, negative emotions such as anger and envy, ulterior considerations, the fact that the narcissists fakes a lot, albeit unconsciously.
So there's a lot of noise in narcissistic communication.
And again, this makes it exceedingly difficult to effectively communicate with the narcissist, to reach consensus, to negotiate, to compromise, to understand. It's literally impossible, even in contexts which involve communication professionals such as therapists.
Now, there is something called interpersonal gap. This is the difference between what a speaker intends to convey and the impact of the message on the listener.
So there's always an interpersonal gap.
When you signal something, when you communicate something, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't work.
When it doesn't work, the interpersonal gap is too big. It overwhelms the message. It introduces so much noise into the equation that the message is overwhelmed or drowns.
In a way, this model can be used to conceptualize the internal dynamics of narcissism, borderlines.
For example, we could conceive of the borderline's emotions as some kind of signal, some kind of communication.
And so the borderline's emotions are so alien to her. Her understanding of her emotions is so low that her emotions appear to be alien.
This process is known as estrangement in clinical psychology. The borderline is estranged from her emotions and from herself.
So because these emotions appear to be alien, out of nowhere, abrupt, crazy, there is an interpersonal gap between the borderline and her emotions.
And this gap represents a lot of noise.
We will wait for this car to pass.
It passed, it seems.
This gap represents, this interpersonal gap between the borderline and her emotions gives rise to a lot of noise, and the noise drowns and overwhelms the borderline.
So here's an application of this model to emotional dysregulation.
Many factors contribute to the interpersonal gap. Some are related to the speakers encoding of the message.
For example, the narcissists messages, narcissists signals are highly encoded. They're difficult. They're like a cipher. You have to decipher them. You have to work hard to understand the narcissists.
And some of the interpersonal gap is the outcome of the listener's ability or inability to decode the message.
Research has shown that speakers often assume that their intent is transparent to the listener when actually it is not.
And this is called signal amplification bias. So when the narcissist communicates with you, he assumes that you understand him. Because narcissists have this bias, this signal amplification bias. Narcissists believe that everyone is like them. They believe that they are representative. They believe everyone around them is like them. Everyone around them is inferior to them. They are vastly superior, but the motivations of people are the same.
When the narcissist, for example, is envious of someone, he believes that everyone is envious of other people. When the narcissist rages, he believes it's an appropriate response. He believes that nothing's wrong with him. He believes that he's perfectly okay.
And so because he believes that he's perfectly okay and nothing's wrong with him. He believes that he's perfectly okay. And so because he believes that he's perfectly okay and nothing's wrong with him, he believes that his communication is transparent, should be easily understood. And when people fail to understand the narcissists signals and messengers, he becomes infuriated. He gets very frustrated and aggressive. He develops paranoid ideation.
He says, people pretend to not understand me in order to frustrate me and cause me anger. They're doing this on purpose. So, because they're envious of me, for example. So signal amplification bias is very common in narcissism. Speakers perceive that their listeners are less responsive than they would like them to be, even when the speakers are healthy. But in the case of the narcissist, this gap, the interpersonal gap, is so frustrating to the narcissists that he assumes that people maliciously and malevolently conspire to drive him crazy by pretending to not understand his signals, messages, verbal communications, and other types of communication. Now, the narcissists is prone to anxiety. And as I said, signaling theory can be easily applied internally as well as externally. When you apply signaling theory internally, both the speaker and the listener are the same person. There is an internal psychological process that mediates the distance between listener and speaker.
So for example, the borderline is a very conflicted relationship with her emotions and the signals emitted by these emotions. The messages the emotions are sending to the borderline, these are lost because of the noise, as an interpersonal gap. Similarly, anxiety is provoked by internal signaling. In psychoanalytic theory, anxiety arises in response to internal conflict or to an emerging impulse which is uncontrollable. And it functions, the anxiety functions as a signal. In psychoanalytic theory, anxiety is the signal. It's a signal to the ego that something really bad is going to happen. It's a catastrophizing signal, an impending threat. Because the anxiety says, hey, Mr. Eagle, there's a conflict out here. It's going to erupt. It's going to get out of hand. Or the anxiety signals to the ego, hey, Mr. Eagle, there is an impulse here. It's uncontrollable. This guy is going to do something crazy. Do something about it.
And then the ego activates the ego defenses or the ego defense mechanisms.
So anxiety is a form of signaling in psychoanalytic theory, which is a great way to think about it, by the way. Similarly, I regard emotions in my work as signals. I conflate the theory of emotions with the theory of signaling. I consider emotions and many, many cognitions, many thoughts, as a form of internal signaling, messages going back and forth via couriers, the internal FedEx or DHS, messages going back and forth between various areas and parts and components of the personality and the mind. We could reconceive of the entire mental apparatus as a kind of communication network. There's something called signal detection theory. It's a body of concepts and techniques from communication theory. And it's applicable and has been applied in electrical engineering and even in decision theory. For example, you've heard of radar. Radar was developed in World War II. By the Germans and by the British, by the way, not only by the British. And the radar made use of this signaling, signal detection theory.
Then, in the 1950s, signal detection theory has been applied to auditory and visual signals in the late 1950s.
And now you can find signal detection theory in many, many fields of psychology.
For example, signal detection theory was used to refine the perception of psychophysical techniques to permit the separation of sensitivity from criteria decision-making factors.
Signal detection theory provided valuable theoretical framework for describing perceptual and other aspects of cognition. And quantitative aspects of signal detection theory were used to kind of link body and mind psychophysical phenomena using sensory physiology as a foundation.
Anyhow, why am I mentioning this?
A key notion of signal detection theory is that human performance in many tasks is limited by variability in the internal representation of stimuli. And this variability is interlinked, connected to internal noise and external noise.
This is the work of Lewis Thurstone, by the way.
And so detection theory is crucial to understanding the signals emanating from mentally ill people, for example, from the narcissists, and even more so from someone with psychosis.
When we try to decipher these messages coming from individuals who are incapable of coherent, cohesive messaging, communication, we then use signal detection theory.
We know, for example, that the ability to detect signal is variable. Not everyone has the same capacity to detect signal.
This is actually called in clinical psychology. It's called D-prime, like the letter D detection.
D-prime is a measure of an individual's ability to detect signals, a measure of sensitivity or discriminability derived from signal detection theory.
So if we eliminate response biases, what's left is your ability to detect signals, your D-prime.
The narcissist's D prime is very diminished, very reduced.
And because the narcissist's ability to detect signal is compromised severely, equally, he is unable to construct and emit signals which would be detectable.
Your capacity to signal to the environment, to other people, your capacity to communicate with other people, your capacity to send messages to other people, depends crucially on your inner experience of messages and signals received.
When you receive signals and messages, you decode them, you deconstruct them, you decipher them, you understand them. And by doing so, you learn the process of sending messages and decoding them.
If you are not able to receive messages, you are not able to transmit messages.
And anyone who has ever attempted to communicate with the narcissist would tell you the narcissist's ability to receive messages, to understand them, to grasp them, to decode them, this ability is much diminished, much reduced.
The narcissist in this sense is not very far from the most extreme forms of autism spectrum disorder and the most extreme forms of psychotic disorders.
So this exposure to internal noise which drowns the ability to detect external signals. There's so much noise inside the narcissist and the borderline and so on. This noise drowns the intensity of external signals. The internal noise cancels out the external signal.
And this is why narcissists and borderlines experience themselves as solipsistic entities separate from the world, floating, adrift, kind of isolated bubbles. It's because they are unable to interface with the human environment or even non-human environment in any meaningful way. They are so consumed and are so overwhelmed by internal dynamics, they are not open to any inputs from the outside, except the inputs that support their fantasies, in both narcissism and borderline.
So there's a lot of mathematics involved in signal detection and even in the calculation of D prime.
But D, this measure of D detection, has proven to be sufficiently bias-free.
And now we consider it the best measure of psychophysical performance. It's a kind of standardized score.
And when we use D-prime, when we use this formula, when we use this equationto describe other people's receptability, other people's ability to receive messages, to be open to signals, when we use this equation, we discover that there is a curve.
It's known as the receiver operating characteristic curve, ROC curve.
The receiver operating characteristic curve in detection, discrimination, or recognition tasks is a relationship between the proportion of correct yes responses, the hit rate, and the proportion of incorrect yes responses, the false alarm rate.
So we send signals to people. We expose them, for example, to communicated messages, verbal sentences, and we ask them, is the answer yes?
So these are phrases, questions, is the answer yes?
And so then we separate, some of the answers are correct, some of the answers are incorrect.
And it is this ratio that determines the curve, generates this graph.
And this plotted on a graph shows the individual sensitivity on any particular tasks. The axes are hit and false alarm.
So some people get many more hits than false alarms, and some people get many more false alarms than hits.
People with autism spectrum disorder, narcissists, to some extent borderline, psychopaths, by the way, and paranoids, schizotypals, to some extent schizoids, people with bipolar disorder.
So quite a few people with psychosis or schizophrenia or psychotic disorders, quite a few people who are mentally ill would get many more false alarms than hits.
In other words, they are prone to misinterpret, misunderstand communication, let alone non-verbal messaging and signaling.
So these people are lost, they're clueless, they go through life constantly puzzled and befuddled. They don't understand other people.
And gradually they develop different responses.
The narcissist fails to understand other people, fails to decode and read their expressions, their behaviors, their body language and their words.
So the narcissist says, my failure to understand other people is because other people are inferior to me. I am so superior that no communication is possible.
And he begins to hold people in contempt. They're all idiots.
The schizoid says, the avoidant, many people with autism spectrum disorder, they say other people are alien to us. They're not like us. So they're best avoided.
So they have an avoidant reaction.
Whereas a narcissist and psychopath have an aggressive reaction.
What are they reacting to?
They're not reacting to other people. They are reacting to their failure to interact with other people.
This is an inbuilt failure which starts in early childhood, very early childhood.
And so it's very frustrating and very painful.
So, a narcissist has a child, doesn't integrate with his peer groups, doesn't play with other kids, is isolated, usually, not always.
The schizoid child, definitely, borderline child is emotionally dysregulated.
They're freaks. All these children are freaks.
And they're rejected and shunned by their peers and by society at large, sometimes by adults in their lives.
So they learn to develop some defenses against this breakdown in communication, which is constant and all pervasive.
And these defenses could be aggressive.
Other people are stupid. That's why I cannot communicate with them. I hold them in contempt. That's aggression.
Or other people are stupid so they deserve to be exploited and abused. That's a psychopathic reaction.
Or other people are so different to me that there's no point in trying to communicate. That's the autistic reaction or the avoidant.
Or other people are likely to hurt me and judge me and cause me pain. That's the avoidant reaction, etc.
These are reactions of children who fail to communicate.
And these children fail to communicate because they've been exposed to the kind of environment, familial dysfunction, that generated a lot of internal noise inside them.
This internal noise drowns the external signal and they are unable to make sense of the world.
And so the ROC curve may be used to indicate how well a person detects a specific tone in the presence of a noise, for example. Specific meaning of a word in the presence of other words, specific email in the presence of other emails, etc.
So it's an extension of the signal to noise ratio.
And when you apply it to narcissists, to borderlines, to other people with mental health issues, you see that they are outliers. They are not on the typical healthy normal curve.
Their noise exceeds the signal. The noise they absorb exceeds the signal. The noise that generate internally exceeds the internal signal.
So the external signal is garbled by the internal noise, and the internal signal is garbled by the internal noise.
We have this single quantitative index of performance, which is calculated from the curve. And this isosensitivity function. And the isosensitivity function index in the case of narcissists and borderlines and others is indicative of severe decoupling of the narcissists from other people.
There is no communication bridge.
Language is so deformed and distorted by the internal dynamics of the narcissist that his perception of words has nothing to do with your perception of the very same words. It's not possible to communicate with the narcissists in a normal, healthy manner.
You need to tailor, you need to customize your language, your behavior, your body language, your expressions. You need to become a different person around the narcissists, or else you will lose the narcissists, and the narcissists will have nothing further to do with you.