Office Hours: Psychopathy

the following program is a special presentation of the Big Ten Network produced in association with the University of Wisconsin Ed Gein Jeffrey Dahmer Ted Bundy these are all horrific criminals that put a recognizable face on the term psychopath we'll meet the University of Wisconsin professor who is working on separating truth from fiction when it comes to this frightening and misunderstood personality disorder next during office hours most people associate the term psychopath with bloodshed and violence yet this portrayal isn't entirely accurate professor Joe Newman is working here at the University of Wisconsin to understand and explain this disturbing disorder professor Newman has published numerous articles on the subject and has pioneered an innovative theory about attentional differences in psychopathic individuals Newman has served as president of the Society for the scientific study of psychopathy and recently received a Lifetime Achievement Award for his research professor Newman Joe welcome thank you first question what's a psychopath well people define the term differently but most experts when they use the word the referring back to the concept set out by her Vica luckily in his very famous book the mask of sanity and for collecti psychopathy was a profound form of psychopathology that was associated with a failure of regulation that influenced every part of their life whether it's getting along with teachers in grade school getting along with parents getting along with peers in the workplace if they were drafted in the military and collecti went so far as to say that the deficit that you see in psychopathy in terms of their adjustment socially is as profound as what you see in schizophrenia because it interferes with every aspect of life functioning so you're these terms insane psycho psychopath and thrown around how do you diagnose someone with psychopathy right so it has been difficult over the years and the definition changes very fortunately for those of us trying to work in the field Bob hare who had struggled with this he and his students developed a measure called the psychopathy checklist and now the pcl are because it's been revised and it's has 20 items and you might spend somewhere between an hour and an hour and a half asking questions looking up file information on people about their history and then reading each of these items are looking at attributes like do they have shallow effect are they irresponsible have they had have they violated probation have wonder some of the other are they do they show kind of a glib superficial style symptoms like that so if if both of us went to a prison or went to another place where you might find a lot of people with this possible this possible attribute would it be pretty clear if we went through and assess these people if we were using these measures that hair came up with where there be pretty good reliability there well when you use this measure and if you have the information and you ask all the questions and use the manual properly the reliability is really fantastic for us it's almost always over 0.9 which is a very high agreement and often it's in the neighborhood of 0.9 five so people who are doing these ratings independently can see the same traits understand the answers to the questions and can rate people on these 20 attributes and come up with a total score that tells us how psychopathic the person is so a little bit later we're gonna talk about how you may disagree with some other conventional wisdom in the field but even those scholars who may disagree with you would all agree on diagnosing someone who's a psychopath using these standard measures that be fair to some people realize that this psychopathy checklist measure that I'm talking about is really the measure to be using especially in a prison system when you move out into the outside of the prison and you start looking at trying to diagnose people at a at a college campus or in a community mental health center some people may may look to other measures but the core attributes are going to be pretty much the same and even when people use different assessment instruments they're pretty much trying to approximate what's happening with the psychopathy checklist there's this notion that you know anybody who would do a violent crime anyone who would doing this on any sort of crime must be some sort of psychopath right not true right no not true so for instance so I mean people commit crimes for so many different reasons and it's important to realize I think sometimes people don't that when you go into a prison the people there are as different from one another as the people out on the street and there's so many different reasons why people have committed crimes sometimes it's because there has been a terrible lack of opportunity there might be abuse there might be intellectual deficits that make it difficult for people to regulate their behavior they may be very emotionally reactive and angry people but the psychopaths even in a prison system probably would that term would only apply to about 10 or 15 percent of the people in the prison so the very large majority of those people are not psychopathic and what would be the general general number of psychopaths in the population as a whole we don't have a we don't have a terrifically accurate assessment of that because it's hard to do a real quality assessment on a complete sample but I think most of us agree the best guess would be in the neighborhood of 1% any difference between men and women in terms of prevalence well and there it depends on your definition if you use like a definition like antisocial personality disorder which really focuses on the more negative behaviors that Psychopaths do then the ratio is likely to be 3 to 1 so 3 times more common in men than in women so made the point that not everyone in prison is a psychopath but there's also lots of people who are Psychopaths lots you can tell me if that's correct who aren't in prison who aren't doing criminal behavior which i think is another misconception right to have this defect in self-regulation to maybe lack some of the affective responses that other people have doesn't mean that you're going to necessarily be driven to do antisocial behavior and collecti the person I referred to earlier went out of his way to try to make clear that Psychopaths are not driven by the things that lead to their behavior so not like they're driven to be especially violent or aggressive it's not like they're so motivated to get money that they're going to go after it in that way it's not that they're so turned on by sexual things that they do things that are sexually inappropriate and he went on and on that and he explicitly uh notes that if anything their drive for any of those processes for any of those towards of those goals it may be even be less than other people the only thing is when they even have an error whim just a thought that maybe I could I could might be interesting to try this or do this they're likely to act on it so he talks about very weak urges breaking through even weaker restraints as the hallmark of psychopathy interesting please come back and join us and when we do you're gonna hear from a psychopath and his words please come back on this average [Music] this program is a production of the University of wisconsin-madison if you have comments about this broadcast please email them to programming at UC Wis CED you consider this there's a public university that consistently ranks among the top and the number of Peace Corps volunteers and in the number of graduates serving as CEOs of Fortune 500 companies whether they are leading corporations or changing the world the next time you see people doing extraordinary things they are probably badgers the University of wisconsin-madison forward-thinking [Music] welcome back to office hours so I guess I should have been more clear when I said you were gonna hear from a psychopath it's not it's it's not Joe or me but we have a we have a quote from someone diagnosed as a psychopath and let me let me read this to you Joe and then have you react to it or explained to me the the relevance of this quote imagine if you can not having a conscience none at all no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do no limiting sense of concern for the well-being of strangers friends or even family members imagine no struggles with shame no matter what kind of selfish lazy harmful or immoral action you had taken and pretend that the concept of responsibility is unknown to you except as a burden others seem to accept without question like gullible fools I think this quote does a nice job of capturing the the processes that people consider to be the essence of psychopathy that there's something really missing there's something that there's a you know the guiding light is not there so if that's absent what I like about this quote is that it doesn't answer the question what will the person do and to answer that question you have to know something about the person's history probably something about their age their gender and and the point that that makes for me that I find so interesting is that I don't think psychopathy is really defined by the acts or the behavior that people do you know punching somebody defrauding them maybe but I have seen Psychopaths in the prison who are very large threatening men and they can be very effective in using dominance to control people but I've also seen psychopathic people who were very slight and they know they're not going to be able to dominate people but they may take advantage of them by manipulating them and then and then there's the female side of it or the child side of it and of course those people are going to do very different behaviors so just so having these attributes doesn't tell you exactly what the psychopathic behavior will really be like the characteristic it will be that there won't be much judgment going on the doing whatever they feel like if they feel like just avoiding responsibility and staying home psychopathy could be expressed that way so the not having a conscience part is consistent but then what you do was a result of not having a conscience lands them in one of your studies because they'd be in prison right the ones think once you break the law or who are violent or commit criminal acts those are the ones that are going to make it into my studies the psychopaths experience emotions at all a lot of people think that they're incapable of experiencing emotions and and among those people some of them make a distinction between a kind of quick peevish emotion like anger or frustration and then more general what they would consider more genuine motions that are deeper Psychopaths don't seem to spend much time dwelling or on their emotions and so they're not very elaborated and so shallow effect is probably the way to describe them but when they turn their attention to things I certainly have done in interviews and the psychopaths will tell us this themselves they'll say I don't know you know when I see somebody that's suffering I'll go and help them I'll do this and that for them and and they're saying they have emotions and if you look at some of their behaviors they actually go out of their way more than other people would to do something about it and yet people are because of the negative cruel things that they often do people are are saying the evidence is that those emotions are not genuine they're not there and so it's a real dilemma to answer the question in a genuine way are they having emotion responses or aren't they and I think we're going to talk about some of the work that I've done a little bit later in the show but in this work that I've done we measure things that I think correspond to genuine emotions and we find that the psychopaths time and time again is showing us that they're capable of responding to affective materials and and and one of the things which we're gonna we're gonna tackle here in in the next section is your work differs from some of the conventional wisdom in the past and showing that that Psychopaths have that ability but let me let me stop you there and we'll jump right back into that when we come back to office hours we'll continue our conversation with dr. Joe Newman about psychopathy thanks for joining us in office hours for more than 100 years the University of Wisconsin has been inspired by the Wisconsin idea which says the good work of the university extends to the boundaries of the state and beyond so that you worked hard the University of Wisconsin Madison forward-thinking [Music] welcome back to office hours continuing our discussion on psychopathy with dr. Joe Newman from the University of wisconsin-madison so Joe let's let's follow on an hour on our comments from before what you just explained to me and to our viewers would differ a little bit from the conventional wisdom of other scholars about psychopathy I'm gonna explain to me what that conventional wisdom is and how your conception differs a bit right and the conventional wisdom is that Psychopaths are fearless and then sometimes that is expressed as they're incapable of emotions or have a general emotion deficit and because of that they just feel free to do whatever that they'd like my view of that is that emotions don't have any power if you don't attend to them and actually the reason that psychopaths appear to be fearless or without emotion is that they're not attending to the cues that would normally elicit those emotional responses and so in the work that we do in order to to really look I think you can't let me be clear about one thing is that some people look at my attention theory and think that I'm denying that there's an emotion deficit in Psychopaths but that's not the case I mean their emotion deficit is what really does distinguish them from other criminals that we were talking about earlier and so where does that come from are they really incapable of fear or is it something is it a matter of attention and in order to really answer that question you have to do well controlled experiments in the laboratory is my view of it and the way you can do that is you can you can present threatening information information that means that they have to inhibit a response or they're going to be punished and you can look at their ability to learn that inhibition under different conditions what we've done over the years is if the threat cues are something they're paying attention to then they show that they care about it they're motivated to learn about those cues and they'll inhibit behavior and regulate behavior quite well but if you do redirect their attention if you get them focused on getting some reward and then periodically if they do the wrong thing you also punish them now you've set up a division where the threat cues are the emotion related cues are peripheral to what they're focusing on and that's when they look deficient let me see if I can reword this is a simple political scientist who might so conventional wisdom would be that a psychopath simply does not have fear does not have emotion when they go and do some sort of horrific act yours would be we still get the horrific act that emotion or fear is not something that they can pay attention to that they can access but it's there well emotions are there to some extent to the degree that you attend to them I mean you may have a signal that that says you know maybe you shouldn't do this but but that's a weak signal and what that does is it calls for attention and the more attention you pay to that signal the the more developed that emotion response becomes so fine but I'm a psychopath according to your theory I am so obsessed with the act I'm doing that none of those other cues or signals are getting in my brain they're just not getting through to the point where they're gonna influence your behavior let me just comment on the word obsessed remember the clock lis quotes having to do with the weak urges it's not that there's it's their motivation or Drive is so strong but you're right in the sense that they focus so entirely on what it is they're looking at that those other things are not getting through to the point where they can influence their behavior we're gonna have to jump to a commercial here in a couple seconds but so what you're also saying is if you have them focus on not doing it from the start then they have ability to - that's right if you can get them to pay attention to this important information they'll use it but if I'm in the if I'm already if I'm a psychopath and I'm already doing it and then you start to try and provide me information that's not going to work exactly okay when we come back on office hours dr. Newman's going to show us one of the experiments that he uses to prove his to prove his point thanks for joining us on office hours we'll be right back [Music] [Music] this program is a production of the University of wisconsin-madison if you have comments about this broadcast please email them to programming at UC Wis CED you welcome back to office hours and our discussion about psychopathy so Jo we're gonna take our viewers inside one of your experiments here and I think we can we can put up a graphic here of one of the experiments that you've used words animals how does that tell me something about about the evidence you're providing about psychopathy okay this doesn't look like this would be the most relevant thing to be thinking about with regard to psychopathy but if you go back to the last thing we were talking about when Psychopaths are insensitive to punishment cues because they're focused on reward it could be attention or it could be that they really don't care about the punishment what you really want to do is test the theory using something that has nothing to do with punishment which is what's great about this picture word task so here what the instructions tell people to do is focus on the pictures and just name them and ignore the words the thing is that almost no normal person can read those pictures without being distracted by the words that actually are different than the picture and we compare that to something that doesn't have those words and we look at the extent to which the words are interfering the psychopath actually performs significantly better than non Psychopaths on this task because they're not distracted by those words and it makes the point quite clearly that they're not picking up on peripheral information okay so we would show this to a group of psychopaths we would show this to a control group of normal people if we can use that term and we have that little one where it said cow and duck right and Psychopaths would say cow and ignore the word duck where's the rest of us would hesitate just hesitate or stall or say do you want me to do duck or cow right how striking are those differences in your law they're very reliable you only see that interference and non psychopathic people and in the psychopaths when we did the most well controlled study we saw a zero interference so it's pretty dramatic so now applying that to criminal behavior or brutal behavior it's if I'm a psychopath I'm doing something awful I'm just paying attention to the cattle not a pain to enter the words which might be emotion or consequences right the emotion set defines the attentional set defines what they're looking for and what they're focused on nothing else is really going to be computed in the it's not going to influence in that moment or effector or affect their behavior correct talk to me a little bit about some of the most current research that your follow up quickly on this because then getting back to a more meaningful study we think we've just completed some work with John Curtin and Jeremy Burch and RL Baskin summers in our department where we actually used a fear conditioning paradigm which is what's guided thinking in the area for 50 years and to make it simple what we did is you know you were punished for one kind of stimulus if the letter was read you were punished if it was green you were safe and in one condition we tell people just tell us what color the letter is we focused them right on the threat relevant information and we seen normal fear conditioning in that situation which I don't think there's another person in the field that would predict that they would show normal fear responses there all you have to do on the the letters that I think your viewers are looking at is in another condition we say tell us whether the letters are uppercase or lowercase and we so we focus their attention on something else now red and green are still associated with punishment or the absent or safety and now the difference between the groups just drops out all you have to do is get them to focus on something else and their emotion response is gone does this have any consequences for treating psychopaths because I think the assumption would be you can't treat a psychopath right a lot of people have assumed over the years that you can treat psychopaths and the data on treatment suggests that they're very difficult to treat but people you know in order to have a successful treatment you have to be able to accurately identify what the problem is and I think knowing that you can begin to and we know what influences their attention as you were saying earlier if you can get them to focus on the right things they have the right response they control their behavior so that's one thing that can be done the other thing is early intervention if you know that this is the root cause that there's some sort of information processing deficit that's setting them up for misbehavior that's alienating them from their parents from their teachers and so forth you intervene early you stop that negative interaction with other people in the society and you may actually be able to prevent the full-blown negative expressions in this disorder quickly we got 30 seconds left I'm wondering I'm sure a lot of viewers are wondering how the heck did you get interested in Psychopaths well I'm sorry to give you so short a time I actually was interested in brain mechanisms that might be related to depression and the the brain the area the brain that I began to study is something that seems to make people resistant to depression and we found the characteristics the deficits that you see associated with lesioning that area of the brain actually result in a lot of behaviors that fit this psychopathic profile Joe thanks for joining us thanks to our viewers for joining us for a very very interesting conversation on psychopathy hope you'll join us next time on office hours here in studio a [Music] the preceding program was produced by the University of Wisconsin in association with the Big Ten Network

Channel: uwmadison

Views: 56,408

Rating: 4.7978339 out of 5

Keywords: Psychology, psychopaths

Id: kmZgnCHweLM

Length: 24min 4sec (1444 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 08 2009

Reddit Comments

[u/chen914]

The whole point is not to pay the attention to "emotional cues" to start with. What is wrong with this professor? Why does he want psychopaths to pay attention to things that they totally don't want to pay attention to? What is even the point of paying attention to emotional cues if it interferes with my task management and efficiency. If I need to kill somebody, then why should I pay attention to negative emotions against the action? If I want to conduct a crime, why would I pay attention the negative consequences of the crime. I certainly wouldn't be able to do the work as efficiently as I would have been if I think about going jail all the time. What kind of idiots do things like that? If I have to think about all possible negative consequences of my actions, I would better off doing nothing at all.