Professor Sam Vaknin argued that higher empathy (in healthy individuals) paradoxically correlates with reduced ability to recognize others’ emotions, citing recent studies. He explained that emotions arise from cognition, bodily signals, and context, and that cluster B personality disorders (narcissism, borderline, psychopathy, histrionic, codependency) involve cognitive distortions and malformed or goal-oriented empathy that cause mislabeling, dysregulation, avoidance, or dissociation of emotions. He outlined coping mechanisms—repression/avoidance, mislabeling/intensity errors, dissociation, dysfunctional self-soothing, and controlled approach-avoidance—that lead to behaviors like love-bombing, manipulation, and formation of persecutory introjects. Borderline Misunderstands Her Emotions (as do Narcissist, Psychopath)