psychopathy


Rembrandt, Prodigal Son	The Amygdalae	Goya, Disasters of War
https://bit.ly/2Imuiwj	https://bit.ly/2EDeRfv	wdl.org/en/item/19462/

Among the different forms of altruism, perhaps the most dramatic is the donation of a kidney to an unspecified recipient. For that reason, Abigail A. Marsh, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Georgetown University, decided to examine the brains of nineteen altruistic kidney donors to see what neurological features might be connected to this remarkable behavior. She found a clear expansion of an almond-shaped part of the brain called the amygdala. (“Amygdala” is Greek for almond.)

The amygdala is associated with vigilance and emotion. It receives perceptions requiring a response of fight or flight. This “alarm bell” would sound in altruists at the perception of another person’s need but not in the brain of a psychopath. Worse, no restraint would inhibit the aggressive action of a psychopath, who would be essentially blind to victims’ fearful expressions. The amygdala is therefore the pivot between a willingness to help and a willingness to hurt on what Walsh calls a “caring continuum.”

Walsh and her colleagues obtained these results by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a prominent method of measuring brain activity, and particularly its response to different stimuli. The researchers used identical, standardized face-imaging tests on the altruists and psychopaths. “Altruists and controls viewed fearful, angry, and neutral facial expressions” and found the opposite results in the same tests administered to psychopaths. In the case of these nineteen extreme altruists, the right amygdala is larger, and is more responsive to facial fear expressions than controls. In psychopaths the right amygdala is smaller and less responsive.

Other researchers have obtained parallel results. For example, Elizabeth Shirtcliff and her colleagues’ review article of 2009 summarized experiments that indicate a contrast in brain activity between empathy and callousness. Their sources identified a range of measures in two parts of the brain, the insula and the ACC (anterior cingulate cortex). In another review of many experiments, R. J. R. Blair states that the “callous-unemotional component” of psychopathy, which impairs empathy, “reflects reduced amygdala responsiveness to distress cues.” But he expands his focus from the amygdala to circuits connecting other brain regions. Poor responsiveness to distress cues, so prominent in psychopathy, are “associated with reduced amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC)” functioning. Instead of studying the brain in action, as it responds to stimuli, Sandra Thijssen and Kent Kiehl examined the brain at rest, that is, the default mode network (DMN). After testing incarcerated male adolescents, they found that disruptions in connectivity between the components of this network characterize psychopathic adolescents. Indeed, without therapeutic intervention, those disruptions would continue in the same persons as adults.

Because the volume, activation, and coordination of brain parts are measurable, the range of values from high to low potential for empathy can be considered a continuum. This sliding scale dramatizes the reflection that our language for psychology and behavior is older than the nomenclature of neurology. We don’t say a person’s action or mood was amygdalic or cortical. And scientists consider measurable activity in particular brain parts or their circuits as correlations with emotions, expressions, or behaviors — not causes.

Nonetheless, these findings suggest a spectrum from altruists to psychopaths that would look something like this.

• extreme altruists (e.g. living kidney donors).
• altruists (blood donors, first responders, philanthropists)
• prosocial, empathetic persons
• asocial egoists, individualists
• antisocial, callous persons
• extremely antisocial, callous persons: psychopaths

Altruists are indeed different from egoists, as I suggested in Introducing TEMPO and HUP and as Ayn Rand insists. But still, egoists are not psychopaths and altruists are not pathologically selfless. This scale describes a spectrum, and there are very few perfect types. Over the course of their lifetime, people move back and forth along the continuum of caring. Some egoists perform dramatic, altruistic acts, as when an entrepreneur becomes wealthy and donates generously to charity. One philosophical school, effective altruism, as articulated by Peter Singer in The Most Good You Can Do (Chapter 4, “Earning to Give”), urges accumulating wealth quickly in order to do more good than possible through a more modest or gradual approach. Nor is it necessary to be wealthy in order to share. Some of the most dramatic examples of generosity occur in dire circumstances.

Finding one’s path through life between these landmarks is a challenge. Heredity, neurology, the environment, and social constraints each play a role. We also have individual responsibilities. Beyond a decent concern for others, it behooves us to assure an environment conducive to healthy neurological maturation in the womb, in infancy, childhood, adolescence, and even into early adulthood because the brain is not fully formed until about age 26. Proper brain growth for the greatest number should improve mental health in the population and decrease psychopathy (see Hurt People). Then the moral factors favorable to individual rights and a just society can interact maximally to our mutual benefit.

References Not Linked.
Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes (2014), 122, 126.
Robert Sapolsky, Behave (2017), 44, 58.
Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions are Made (2017), 17-24.

Is it true that hurt people hurt people? Physical damage from war, a crime, an accident, a natural disaster, can cause bitterness. The resentment may be even greater if the harm was deliberate. This is physical abuse. Psychological abuse can also weaken a person’s ability to engage with the world, form friendships, find love, earn a living, and participate in the community. Some deprivation from the environment —famine, drought, pollution, poverty— can hinder fetal development. Genetics, too, can be a factor. Not everyone impaired in one or several of these ways will prove equally dangerous. I do not assume a perfectly fair criminal justice system, but incarceration provides a useful threshold of those most significantly affected. Those imprisoned for violent crimes constitute a much higher proportion than the general population of mentally ill people often called psychopaths (Dargis and Koenigs, 444a).

There is a danger in mentioning psychopathy. The concept may be overly broad, and the label “psychopath” can, perhaps wrongly, stigmatize a person for life. Still, we need a term to group the traits commonly found in violent criminals. Although the definition is still in flux, most psychologists agree that it has an inward and an outward aspect. Some psychopaths present a surly, emotionless withdrawal from others, a radical retreat into themselves. Others act outwardly through aggressive behavior. Their extreme goals overwhelm empathy or guilt and drive them with Machiavellian ruthlessness. (Marsh, et al. 2014, 36a, 37b-38a).

Psychologists have devised various ways to rate patients on the various symptoms of psychopathy to obtain a numerical score, indicating a person’s degree of illness (Bergstrøm, et al. 2018). “Psychopathic individuals” beyond a certain score, “commit a disproportionate amount of crime” (Dargis and Koenigs, 2018, 444a). An Italian study of 139 people “convicted of violent crimes (murder, rape, child sexual abuse, armed robbery, assault causing bodily harm)” found they scored high on a standard checklist for psychopathic traits. Prominent among those traits were two that show weak attachment to sexual partners. The convicts were promiscuous and had many marital relationships. Thus, they lacked affinity with people who might otherwise have aided them. Then, when the researchers interviewed the top ten scorers on the psychopathy checklist, all ten lacked fortifying adult relationships.

Seven of the same top ten “reported severe abuse during their childhood.” (Schimmenti, et al. 2014, 256.) That means they were deficient in attachments to those who, in more usual circumstances, would have raised them affectionately. Leaving aside purely genetic and environmental factors present before birth, inconsistent parent-child attachment or, worse, outright psychological or physical abuse during infancy or childhood may produce emotional conflicts that become “one pathway to psychopathy” (Dargis and Koenigs, 2018, 448b). There is, indeed, a clear “link between the exposure to abuse in childhood and subsequent criminal behaviors” (Schimmenti, et al. 2015, 340). Since those convicted of violent crime have, by definition, hurt people, and they frequently lacked emotional support from parents or parental figures in childhood and from mates in adulthood, it follows that HUP: hurt people hurt people.

Important questions nonetheless remain. What about abused or neglected children who do not become psychopaths or criminals? What about victims of crimes whose perpetrators were not psychopaths — who did not come from abusive backgrounds? Clearly, not all hurt people hurt people and not all hurt people were hurt by hurt people. These are important reservations to the principle of HUP.

There are, nonetheless, psychological traits that predispose some to harm others and these appear, though not as prominently, in adolescents. Weiler and Widom (1996), who studied adolescents, not convicted criminals, suggest that childhood neglect may provoke styles of coping that are not adaptive. Abuse may lead to abnormal brain chemistry that stimulates or worsens aggressive behavior. Removal to alternative child rearing arrangements such as foster parenting or institutionalization may turn out to be as traumatic as the original situation. Finally, the psychopath may have a genetic predisposition to seek external stimulation and sensations, to court danger, oblivious to the consequences. Once the pattern manifests itself, it is hard to break. “Some children disconnect their emotions as a coping response to repeated and significant trauma. Over time, this disconnection becomes permanent and the individuals present as if they were genetically predisposed psychopaths” (Stephen Porter, 1996, as cited by Campbell, 2004, 42). Even in this younger population, then, traumas such as psychological or physical abuse or being raised separately from one’s parents typify those who later score high in psychopathy, and these, in turn become a significant fraction of violent criminals. More concretely, and in conformity to HUP, higher scores on the psychopathy checklist (adjusted for adolescents) “were related to the experience of physical abuse and higher frequency of maltreatment by caregivers” (Campbell, 41). In short, childhood deprivation, abuse, or trauma can bend young people towards persistent antisocial or violent actions. Psychopathy can be a lifelong affliction (Weiler and Widom, 1996, 266). Its victims often victimize others.