New Recording 36

Jodi's behavior is compared to certain personality disorders, including sociopathy and narcissism. She had a high sense of self-importance and became infatuated with Travis. When their relationship ended and he showed interest in another woman, it broke her bubble and she became jealous. Women high in psychopathy tend to offend out of relational frustration, which aligns with Jodi's case. She also displays traits of factor one psychopathy, such as being manipulative and lacking remorse. During her interrogation, she manipulated her emotions to gain sympathy and asked to see pictures of Travis after his murder to ensure she hadn't missed anything. So I just want to preface by saying that we're not diagnosing Jodi with any disorder, but we're just comparing Jodi's behavior with well established research and personality traits found with any certain disorders that we're going to talk about. So again, I wanted to start by saying that many sources did label Jodi as high in sociopathy, which we've learned in class that sociopathy actually ties into the antisocial personality disorder and certain factors of psychopathy. So antisocial personality disorder is correlated with the narcissistic personality disorder, which again, other sources labeled her as having. And I just wanted to say that someone high with this disorder has a pretty high sense of their own self importance. So the only issue with this disorder is that if this narcissistic bubble that they talk about is broken, or in other words, they get rejected, they tend to lash out. So to tie this back in the case of Jodi, she was absolutely infatuated by Travis, who didn't really share the same feelings towards her. But when the relationship ended, she initially was still able to have sexual relationships with him and kind of continue this infatuation and this relationship, and it only made her grow fonder. But that eventually ended too, which kind of only knocked her bubble down more and more and more. And what became the last straw was when he presumably was going to take another girl to Mexico, and Jodi thought that female was going to be her. And she changed her whole life for him. She converted to Mormonism, and she was really happy with the sexual ties that they had and this fondness that she had for him. But what I think really got her was when that other female was Mormon and fit under this idealized bubble that Travis and Travis's friends had for who and what his spouse should be like. Yeah, absolutely. Kind of going back to like her bubble was broken, and that is the same case with people who are bound to have narcissistic personality disorders. So Jodi definitely, I would argue, could fall into that category here. But then also kind of transitioning into talking about psychopathy a little bit. In a study done by DeVogel and Lancel in 2016, which was really trying to figure out the gender differences in the way that psychopathy is manifested in certain behaviors between females and males, they found out that women are actually more likely to offend out of relational frustration and presume more manipulative behaviors compared to men who are high in psychopathy. So this could look like women were offending more out of relationship-related revenge or jealousy. So in Jodi's case here, I think this is really clear that she felt a lot of jealousy and felt like this was really motivating her to a point where she killed someone because of it. So this really kind of drives home this point. Again, not saying that Jodi is high in psychopathy, but she definitely falls into this category that aligns very nicely with research that has been done on gender differences in psychopathy. And then another example of this is women tend to be higher in factor one psychopathic traits. So that's more like the affective, emotional sides of it rather than violent criminal behavior. And this is evident through Jodi's case through the idea that she had a very normal childhood. There was nothing in her childhood that showed any red flags that she could potentially score high in psychopathy on the PCLR test as an adult because she did not have a criminal record whatsoever. So she does fall into that category of having more factor one psychopathic traits. That includes being more cunning and manipulative, having not a lot of short-term relationships, but I guess just like being able to move on quickly, a lack of remorse, impulsive, definitely falls into that category. And you can definitely see this in her interrogation. It's kind of glaringly obvious after hearing about these psychopathic differences with gender because she would show these strong emotions for so long, like crying profusely, coming off very upset, and then immediately snapping out of these behaviors. At least when I was watching it, right after she would snap out of this, she actually asked the officer who was interrogating her if she could see pictures of Travis after the murder occurred. And I don't know, in my opinion, that is just something that I wouldn't expect her to want to see because if she was so in love and infatuated with this man, wouldn't it break her heart to be seeing pictures of him being dead? Why do you think she'd ask that? Right, so it's almost like she wanted to confirm that she didn't miss anything or leave anything behind in the pictures. She did this through manipulating her emotions to help officers be on her side and really just showed this manipulating and conning behavior in action.