South Carolina Nebraska Kentucky Washington Missouri Minnesota Georgia Kansas Lousiana Rhode Island Pennsylvania Alabama Michigan North Dakota Idaho Arkansas Utah Ohio The reality is that a very small percentage of individuals in any given state may actually be true psychopaths, according to the study. The meaningfulness of the results found here is contingent on both the translation of Big Five personality traits into psychopathy and that psychopathy is something that can be conceptualized as a statistical aggregate across people.
And if the estimates are conceptually meaningful, the question remains of whether the size of the differences across regions is practically significant.
The weak relationships found in the data can themselves be interpreted as support for skepticism, but whether that interpretation is correct requires further research beyond the scope of the presentation of this methodology and results. Primary Menu. Search for: Search. The authors cautioned that their measurements were indirect but research does point out that psychopathic tendencies have been found to be more common in: Men Younger people Professions such as a CEO, lawyer, media worker, salesperson, surgeon, journalist, police officer, clergy person, chef, and civil servant.
The researchers wrote: The presence of psychopaths in [the] District of Columbia is consistent with the conjecture … that psychopaths are likely to be effective in the political sphere. As one might imagine, such a trait does not mix well with the tedium of prison. If things are not happening around them, psychopaths often will make them happen.
Their need for stimulation and their impulsivity drive many of the other Factor 2 criteria, including their sexual promiscuity, their inordinate number of marriages, and even their criminal versatility. Psychopaths are notoriously parasitic. One incarcerated psychopath reported to our investigators that his mom and dad were always supportive, always ready to help him out and always had some money around that he could borrow.
The letter explained that the family, with agony, had decided on this course after 20 years of being deceived and manipulated by their son. They decided they no longer wanted him in their lives. Anger is never far from the surface in the psychopath. A perplexing aspect of that anger, particularly to the victims, is that the aggression is often over trivialities. Psychopathy does not show up unannounced at the door of adulthood. There are always early signs of it, which is why the Factor 2 list includes early behavioral problems and juvenile delinquency among its diagnostic criteria.
The typical incarcerated psychopath has a long criminal career stretching back into the juvenile courts, often with serious and violent juvenile adjudications. Recidivism statistics are discussed at length below, 92 but a short vignette may put a more personal touch on the numbers. When the scientist-author was at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, he and his fellow graduate students worked with psychopathic prisoners.
One of the prisoner-psychopaths constantly walked around with a car mechanics book under his arm and constantly talked about how he was planning to go to a car mechanics school in the interior of British Columbia when he was released. Coincidentally, on the very morning this man was released, the scientist-author was driving to the prison and saw him, still carrying his car repair manual under his arm, on his way to the bus stop.
There were two buses waiting outside the prison—one headed east to his car mechanics school and the other headed west to Vancouver. He looked at both buses, then casually dropped his car repair book in the trash and jumped on the bus to Vancouver. Two weeks later, the scientist-author was doing his rounds at the prison recruiting new volunteers for research when he came across the same inmate.
Consequently, we need to move cautiously, but we still need to move. The Hare instruments are reliable enough to be used to identify the most severe psychopaths in the system, both to manage them appropriately and insure that treatment efforts are guided by the best possible practices. Since group therapy is so common in prison settings, it will be critical for prison officials to be able to distinguish non-psychopaths, for whom such treatment might be effective, from psychopaths, for whom it might be contraindicated.
The psychopath has had and continues to have a grossly disproportionate impact at virtually every point in the criminal justice system.
There is no other variable that is more highly correlated to being in prison than psychopathy. Substance abuse, for example, on which our corrections systems have spent untold trillions, is a distant second. When one looks at violent crimes as opposed to any crime landing a person in prison, psychopathy continues to be impressively predictive. For psychopaths, their propensity to engage in sexual and nonsexual violence seems to decrease very little with age.
The correlation between high scores on the Hare scale and prison exists even at scores well below the arbitrary cutoff of All prisoners, psychopathic and not, tend to have much higher scores on the Hare scale than non-incarcerated males, which is not surprising given the tautological nature of some of the Factor 2 criteria.
The general nonprison population scores a median of 6. After a psychopath has been sentenced to prison but before the adult system labels him incorrigible, data suggests that he is more likely to be released early than his non-psychopathic cohorts despite a typically long and uninterrupted juvenile record. In a study published in January , Stephen Porter and his colleagues examined the files of male offenders serving at least two years in a Canadian prison between and Once released, psychopaths are much more likely to recidivate than non-psychopaths.
Canadian studies have been most instructive on this issue because the Canadian federal government keeps national recidivism statistics. In a study, Canadian researchers identified a group of prisoners about to be released, gave them all clinical assessments for psychopathy using the Hare instrument, divided them into low, moderate and high categories of psychopathy based on their Hare score, and then followed them for three years.
Recidivism Among Psychopaths The recidivism patterns are similar if we look only at violent recidivism Figure 4 or, even more narrowly, violent sexual recidivism Figure 5. Violent Recidivism Among Psychopaths Violent Sexual Recidivism Among Psychopaths The picture is almost as bad for violent sexual recidivism. Psychopathy is a significant predictor of sexual violence.
Psychopathic traits in youths have also been shown to predict high recidivism. Figure 6 shows the results from a study by Vincent et al. Violent Recidivism Juvenile Offenders The average psychopath is back and forth to prison three times before the average non-psychopath with the same sentence makes it back once.
Many of the following statistics will be familiar to readers steeped in the public policy of crime control; they are visited here in an attempt to tease out the costs associated only with psychopathy. How do the social costs of other conditions high in the public consciousness compare with the criminal costs of psychopathy?
They all pale in comparison. Given the grossly disproportionate contribution that psychopaths make to the exploding costs of our criminal justice and correctional systems, one might expect that criminologists and corrections officials would be very interested in reducing the recidivism of psychopaths.
Alas, psychopath being a synonym for incorrigible, psychopaths have been not been the objects of sustained treatment efforts either in or out of prison. Given the neuroscience and therapeutic discoveries discussed in the next two sections, perhaps this neglect may soon come to an end. Psychopathy has been just as elusive to neuroscientists as to everyone else, and for the same reasons.
Much work has been done identifying the neurobiology of violence, showing a strong genetic component as well as a robust interaction between early childhood trauma to the frontal lobes and the emotional effects of abuse. As one neuroscientist writing about psychopathy has said:. When we attempt to focus on the psychopath, we find various difficulties.
Most large-scale studies are based on behaviors childhood aggression, criminal arrests, etc. This point is crucial, as the majority of aggressive individuals or even convicted criminals are not psychopaths, even though committing criminal acts is needed to fulfill definitions for either antisocial personality disorder or psychopathy. For example, Antonio Damasio and his colleagues published anecdotal cases of lesions to the inferior and medial surfaces of the frontal lobes that produced apparent psychopathic behaviors.
But even as late as the s, the neurological hallmarks of psychopathy remained unclear, and there were no hallmarks that came close to being reliable enough to be diagnostic.
Moreover, the hypothesis that psychopathy was generally a reflection of reduced frontal lobe activity seemed to conflict with a long-standing series of studies that began in the s showing that psychopaths in fact have greater than normal frontal EEG signals, both waking and sleeping.
Static images of brain morphology tell only the tiniest part of the story. Seeing brains functioning as they navigate social problems has shown us, with remarkable reliability, that psychopathic brains cannot navigate those problems.
Like muscles, neurons consume oxygen when they are working. The MRI can be tuned to locate regions in the brain where oxygen is being recruited. In a typical fMRI study, researchers present subjects with stimuli—videos, pictures, sounds or words—while the subjects are lying in the MRI scanner. The regions of the brain that are engaged with processing the given stimuli are mapped, and brains faced with the stimuli are compared with brains at a resting state. FMRI involves many technical and statistical processes, and significant training is required to understand its strengths, weaknesses and limitations.
Nevertheless, fMRI provides an unprecedented opportunity to study clinical disorders in general and psychopathy in particular. In , the first study to use fMRI to study the brains of criminal psychopaths was published; this study is discussed in detail below. It is difficult to find psychopaths and expensive and time-consuming to administer the Hare instruments to them. Statistically, one of the best places to find psychopaths is in prisons.
But prisons typically have no MRI equipment, so early investigators had to transport psychopathic prisoners to and from prisons to local hospitals. The logistics, cost, and security issues associated with such arrangements kept the subject numbers on these studies low. In collaboration with the New Mexico Corrections Department that equipment is brought to the prisoners rather than the other way around. In the first three years of deployment, more than 1, inmates volunteered to participate in fMRI studies.
This collection of brain scans is the largest forensic brain imaging database in the world. The fMRI data shows a robust and persistent pattern of abnormal brain function in psychopaths: namely, decreased neural activity in the paralimbic regions of the brain. These are the regions generally below the neocortex, including and adjacent to the limbic structures, as shown in Figure 7. The Paralimbic System The paralimbic regions form a kind of girdle surrounding the medial and basal aspects of the two hemispheres.
They contain many important structures, including the anterior temporal cortex, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, amygdala, insula, temporal pole and cingulate, many of which are associated with moral reasoning, affective memory and inhibition, exactly the kinds of puzzle pieces one would expect might be involved in psychopathy.
In the moral reasoning task, 72 incarcerated subjects, of whom 16 were psychopaths with Hare scores of 30 or greater, were shown a series of pictures and asked to rate them on a scale of 1 to 5 for moral violation, 1 being no moral violation and 5 being severe moral violation. Behaviorally there was no significant difference between the ability of psychopaths and non-psychopaths to recognize the moral content of these scenarios.
Compared with non-psychopaths, psychopaths showed decreased activation in the right posterior temporal cortex and increased activation in the amygdala, two areas well known to be associated with moral reasoning.
Moral Decision Making in Psychopaths A simple word recognition test was used for the affective memory study. They then were shown additional lists of words and asked whether the additional words were on the original memorized list. Different word lists are presented over the course of the study. Some of the words on the lists were negative in affective content words including misery, blood, frown, scar, wreck and some neutral words including gallon, oat, brass, card.
It is well established that unimpaired people are better at remembering words that have an emotional content than they are at remembering words with no emotional content. Researchers have also known for some time that psychopaths remember emotional words just as well as non-psychopaths do, even though it takes psychopaths longer to recognize the emotional content of the words. But this study showed those memories seem to take a very different path in psychopathic brains than they do in non-psychopathic brains.
Prisoner-psychopaths showed greatly reduced activations in the amygdala and posterior cingulate, somewhat reduced activations in the ventral striatum and anterior cingulate, and greatly increased activation in the frontal gyrus.
That is, they showed reduced activity in paralimbic regions—amygdala, anterior and posterior cingulate—and increased activity in the lateral frontal cortex, an area typically associated with cognition, not emotion. See Figure 9. The figure shows the rendering of the neural areas in which criminal psychopaths showed significantly less affect-related activity than noncriminal control subjects for the comparison of affective words versus neutral words of an affective memory task.
Also shown are the regions in which criminal psychopaths showed greater affect-related activity than noncriminal control subjects and criminal non-psychopaths bottom panels; depicted in gray scale; see Kiehl et al. These regions include bilateral inferior frontal gyrus. In turns out that the regions of the brain involved in inhibition overlap the paralimbic regions, primarily the anterior and posterior cingulate.
Both adults and juveniles high in psychopathic traits exhibited dramatically decreased activity in these inhibitory regions. Putting these results together begins to paint a picture of the psychopathic brain as being markedly deficient in neural areas critical for three aspects of moral judgment: 1 the ability to recognize moral issues; 2 the ability to inhibit a response pending resolution of the moral issue; and 3 the ability to reach a decision about the moral issue.
Along with several other researchers, we have demonstrated that each of these tasks recruits areas in the paralimbic system, and that those precise areas are the ones in which psychopaths have markedly reduced neural activity compared with non-psychopaths. What does all this mean? First, it suggests that the story of psychopathy is largely limbic and paralimbic rather than prefrontal. He is missing the moral core, a core that appears intimately involved with the paralimbic regions.
If the key to psychopathy lies in these lower regions, then it is no mystery that the psychopath is able to recruit his higher functions to navigate the world.
In fact, when he gives a moral response, it seems the psychopath must recruit frontal areas to mimic his dysfunctional paralimbic areas. That is, the psychopath must think about right and wrong while the rest of us feel it. Second, these neurological results should go a long way toward ending the debate about whether psychopathy is just too difficult to diagnose to justify inclusion in the DSM. Any lingering doubts about the clinical reliability of the Hare instruments disappear now that those instruments have been shown to be robustly predictive of a demonstrable neurological condition.
Third, and perhaps more significantly, these imaging techniques may help us identify and then understand the development of psychopathic traits in juveniles.
It is difficult, and controversial, to assess psychopathic traits in young people. No one wants the label psychopath to become self-fulfilling, especially given the hopeful treatment possibilities discussed in Part V.
Brain imaging may help us improve our understanding of the developmental trajectories of these traits in ways that might improve treatment. Still, caution is in order. Neuroimaging has its own embedded limitations, making the reliability of conclusions based on imaging data a complex and still developing story. One also might argue that these results support the position that psychopathy should be an excusing condition.
We have known forever that psychopaths are rational yet persistently immoral. The received dogma has been that psychopathy is untreatable, based on study after study that seemed to show that the behaviors of psychopaths could not be improved by any traditional, or even nontraditional, forms of therapy.
Nothing seems to have worked—psychoanalysis, group therapy, client-centered therapy, psychodrama, psychosurgery, electroshock therapy or drug therapy —creating a largely unshakable belief among most clinicians and academics, and certainly among lay people, that psychopathy is untreatable, though as we will discuss below few if any of these studies were properly controlled and designed. Most talking therapies, at least, are aimed at patients who know, at one level or another, that they need help.
Psychotherapy normally requires patients to participate actively in their own recovery. But psychopaths are not distressed; they typically do not feel they have any psychological or emotional problems, and are not only generally satisfied with themselves but see themselves as superior beings in a world of inferior ones.
Clinicians report that psychopaths go through the therapeutic motions and are incapable of the emotional insights on which most talking therapy depends. No one yet knows how to restore the paralimbic functions that seem so impaired in psychopathy. Treatment not only seems not to work, there is evidence that some kinds of treatment make matters worse. In a famous study of incarcerated psychopaths about to be released from a therapeutic community, those who received group therapy actually had a higher violent recidivism rate than those who were not treated at all.
They teach you how to put the squeeze on people. But all treatment hope for psychopaths is not lost. Like many mental health treatment efforts, prior efforts to treat psychopaths, as well intentioned and numerous as they have been, have almost never been designed to meet acceptable scientific and methodological standards. Even the better studies typically involved moderate rather than intense treatment, and over relatively short durations.
And of course one of the self-defeating aspects of these studies is that the psychopaths themselves often become disruptive in therapeutic settings not designed to deal with such levels of disruption. The good news about all this bad science is that maybe something does, in fact, work. There may be some room for some thoughtful, targeted, well-designed, and controlled treatment efforts—efforts that might even prove effective, especially with juveniles.
In a landmark metastudy focused on the treatment of juveniles with psychopathic tendencies, Mark Lipsey and David Wilson concluded that, although the reported treatment outcomes were not encouraging, pieces of many different studies might be.
Inspired by Lipsey and Wilson, Michael Caldwell and his colleagues at the Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center in Madison, Wisconsin and the University of Wisconsin, reviewed the treatment literature in detail, noticed all of its failings and promises, and decided to design a specific treatment program for psychopathic juvenile offenders.
Early results were encouraging. This pilot study suggested that Lipsey and Wilson might be right—that treatment might work if juvenile psychopaths are treated early enough, intensely enough and for long enough. But of course the numbers, though promising, were extremely small. Caldwell and his colleagues subsequently conducted a larger follow-up study. In the latest published study, Caldwell and his colleagues followed 86 maximum security juvenile offenders in the Mendota center, and again looked at arrest recidivism, this time four years out.
All of these quantitative measures were analyzed and correlated. Caldwell and his group reached several conclusions. The best predictor of reductions in institutional misconduct and recidivism was the length of the decompression treatment. Short-term treatment seemed to have no effect. But long-term treatment, lasting up to and beyond one year, significantly reduced both institutional misconduct and recidivism, at least for the subjects scoring 31 and less on the Hare instruments.
These results are just the first shots across the bow of the conventional wisdom that psychopaths are incorrigible. But they are nevertheless very encouraging, not only because of the poor results of past studies but also because psychopathy is such a big problem that even a small and costly improvement is likely to be cost effective. Finally, let us assume, also extraordinarily conservatively, that only half of all incarcerated juvenile psychopaths come to the attention of the authorities or are otherwise able to receive decompression treatment.
Another way to look at this is on an individual incarcerated person basis, even ignoring the cascading effects of recidivism. In their study, Caldwell and his colleagues looked at the treatment costs and benefits of the two treatment modalities, not distinguishing between psychopaths and non-psychopaths. They then added in the treatment costs and compared those overall costs—of treatment itself and the savings in reduced recidivism—between the two treatment conditions.
Not right. Something , the world thinks, went badly wrong with these people. Americans creep the entire world out by now, make it shudder, give it the chills. The world knows that there is nobody — and I mean nobody — else in it quite like them. Americans are renowned the entire world over by now for what can only be described as incredible levels of cruelty , brutality , violence , stupidity , and indifference. Americans tend to be seen as bullies and fanatics and maniacs. They are laughingstocks now because they have made fools of themselves.
Certainly not the world, certainly not anything that matters, like science, literature, art, love, truth, beauty, goodness…not even each other, and by now, not even themselves. Something is not right with Americans.
Something is wrong with them. That is what the world thinks. That is what I hear, day in, day out, from my non-American friends, colleagues — hell, even in casual conversation with the cab driver. Most of the rest of the countries in the world in which people live such brutal, violent, and ignorant lives as Americans do are dictatorships, authoritarian states, theocracies , or all three.
Americans are the only people in the world who choose all that. And they seem to choose it over and over again. The first kind of American Idiot is the right-winger, who throws a tantrum when you tell them Trumpism was badly self-destructive, especially for them.
In fact, though, America is remarkably homogeneous. But neither side — nor the huge numbers of millions who back them — support any of the following: public healthcare, education, retirement, childcare.
All those things are what we give people, by the way, when we consider and care about them, when we wish them to live in dignity and peace and grace. Neither side in America wants to give everyone much of anything. The question which dominates American politics is: how much should we deny people? An extreme amount, or a less extreme amount? How much do we let people suffer intense harm and a stunted life — a massive amount, or a slightly less massive amount.
That is how the entire rest of the world sees it, make no mistake. Every single one of my friends from every corner of the globe thinks this, often in literal terms. Americans on both sides are far, far closer to each other than they are to the rest of the rich world when it comes to social, political, and cultural attitudes and preferences. In Canada and Europe, for example, the sentiment above, the basic philosophical position which both sides in America share — nobody in society has inalienable and intrinsic worth, therefore nobody deserves anything for free, which is how Americans on both sides end up voting against public healthcare, retirement, education, childcare, and so forth — is seen as repugnant as it is baffling as it is mindless, thoughtless, immoral, disgraceful, and foolish.
But they are a tiny minority. That just makes them hypocrites and liars, who say the right thing to pollsters, and then turn around and vote against it.
What does all that say to you? What question does it raise for you? The question goes like this:. Are Americans psychopaths?
I say that as objectively as I can. Because when I think about what makes a psychopath, it seems to me that Americans are beginning to fit that description altogether too well.
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