People with full-blown psychopathy are generally remorseless, callous, don’t take responsibility for their actions, lie and manipulate others, says Sheilagh Hodgins, a professor at the University of Montreal and at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute.
Most end up in the criminal justice system, where they are subjected to periodic punishment like other incarcerated people, she says. But new research co-led by Hodgins suggests that not only does punishment have no corrective effect for these people, they also mentally process it in a completely different way than anybody else, even other violent criminals.
The results of the study suggest that those with psychopathy don’t understand or process punishment in a normal way and that different rehabilitation techniques should be undertaken at a young age for people with behavioral problems that might signal psychopathy, Hodgins says.
In the study, published in The Lancet Psychiatry, the researchers looked at 32 violent offenders with antisocial personality disorder, 12 of whom also had pronounced psychopathy, and compared them to 18 mentally healthy non-criminals. Marked differences were seen in the brains of the 12 psychopathic criminals compared to the other antisocial offenders and healthy civilians.
These divergences were picked up by a functional magnetic resonance imaging, which analyzes the activity of neurons. While in the scanner, participants completed a matching game in which, midway through, they began to be assigned a diminishing number of “points” for choosing certain shapes, a type of “punishment” that normal and non-psychopathic offenders picked up on, which led them to change their behavior. But the psychopathic participants didn’t alter their actions; unlike others, they didn’t seem to understand that by failing to change, they were hurting themselves (in the context of the game). And this failure to respond to punishment translates into their actions in normal circumstances, she says.
In normal people, punishment or censor shows people that their actions harm others and will not be tolerated, Hodgins says. And this signal is usually sufficient to change behavior. But not so in psychopathy, which entails “seeing rewards everywhere, but no negative consequences,” she says.
Psychopathic people showed different activation patterns in the areas of the brain known as the posterior cingulate and insula, which are involved in learning from punishments and rewards, and involved in changing behavior when unexpected outcomes occur, she says. These people also had reductions of the brain’s gray matter in the anterior rostral prefrontal cortex and temporal poles, regions involved in empathy as well as in the processing of pro-social emotions like guilt and embarrassment.
Hodgins says the study suggests that more work needs to go into understanding how to treat these people early in life; as kids, they pretty much all have marked behavioral problems. “I think the solution is to invest all of our money in children,” she says.
Although she doesn’t have a particular program in mind, because a proven method doesn’t exist, she said that “we need to figure out a way to get [people with psychopathy] to see punishment as a signal” to change their behavior.
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