Are you referring to the
thousand-yard stare? Were they combat veterans? I certainly had that in basic training.
That actually looks more like some of the links in this thread to other neglected children. I realize this young girl of the thread topic was acting out her PTSD, but she didn't have a traumatized stare, she was speaking calmly about how she tortures and desires to kill those around her.
In a larger context, there is definitely a problem using just the impression of someone's eyes to judge their condition. This thread makes that clear because of the way everyone is seeing it differently. People tend to see a more general impression of maladjustment and neuro-atypical aspects to people's eyes.
That being said, I would not discount an individual's ability to read the nuance of true, sociopathic eyes. I think it is possible that [MENTION=122]marm[/MENTION] has more ability to do this than most anyone/everyone else in this thread. Once you interact with a true sociopath/psychopath, it provides a different ability to read the nuance of their expression. For posters who have not interacted with such a person, how could they read the specific nuances of it in someone's eyes? Well, they probably cannot and that is evident in the expressed inability to distinguish between different types of distance, hyper-focus, and trauma in various examples of non-expression in this thread.
For whatever this is worth, each expression shown in this thread look very different to me. Some are opposites - especially the deep authenticity vs. the artifice in various expressions. The two I would relate as most similar is the neglected girl [MENTION=9273]Vasilisa[/MENTION] posted and the soldier's eyes that [MENTION=9807]Moniker[/MENTION] posted.
My position is that different people have differing levels of ability to distinguish what a person's eyes are expressing. Because of this it is important to not dismiss someone's impression, but also to realize it would be dangerous to expect accuracy from people in general.