Psychopathy and Patterns in Child Behaviour | Luna Centifanti | TEDxDurhamUniversity

so I'm going to talk to you about psychopathic traits and how they might reveal particular problem behaviors when I was asked to do this talk by the TEDx team they told me we're going to be doing a theme called patterns and symmetry it made me think about paintings and patterns and paintings and I immediately thought about it's silly but the movie clueless 90s teen movie where Alicia Silverstone says something about Monet about from far away it's okay but up close is a big old mess and I thought okay I'll send them a draft and I'll say something I'm going to talk about Monet and patterns and I'm going to relate it to my research and then I was like I can change it later and then they shared it on Facebook and said Lunas going to be talking about Monet and comparing it to psychopathic traits and I was like okay I'm committed to that so hopefully I've made my talk a little bit more clever rather than clueless for you but we shall see okay so I'm going to talk to you about Monet paintings and kind of relate it to my research so if you look at a Monet painting for example or an oppression impressionistic painting you can see that there are patterns in it and the paintings and colors look quite uniform from far away when you zoom up close you can see that the pattern really breaks down and you start to see individual dots and you find some lonely dot so for example there's some blue dots within this beige uniform color and up here you can see there's some purple dots in the blue and so these little lonely dots really enrich the overall quality of the painting but they are few color so you can see there's just a few blue ones in here but they're quite distinct in the pattern and actually I study antisocial behavior and problem behaviors in children as I said and I got this picture from Daily Mail article and they were talking about how the painting had been slashed by drunks who are I guess out in a museum as you do and so I thought this was quite apropos because of my study on anti-social behavior now of course this would have been very costly to repair and in the same way we know that conduct problem behaviors and antisocial behaviors and young children are also very costly not only in terms of juvenile justice costs but also lost educational and job opportunities for young people who persistently are get into trouble but also the cost of possibly taking children out of their home and into care if the parents cannot control their behavior so these problem behaviors are quite costly and something to pay attention to and when we think about children who show conduct problem behaviors we might think that they're all pretty much the same and that they show uniform kind of behaviors same kind of motivation for their behaviors same kind of personality characteristics and features might underlie these conduct problem behaviors when you look at it from far away however if you zoom up close we know that not all of them are the same some of them are quite unique they're the few amongst the larger array of uniformly colored patterns and I'm interested in these few kind of individuals so luckily these are the few but they show a persistent problem behavior that's more aggressive and tend to not feel bad when they do things wrong and just don't have a conscience for having done bad behavior in my early work I found that there were children again few that remained cool and kind of not bothered when they performed an aggression task where they were playing and competing against a fake opponent so I had them do this task in my research ok so you would hear something like I'm gonna do a male voice man you're so slow my grandma could beat you that's going to cost you 100 points so when you hear a provocation message like that especially you're playing this competitor game your heart might go beat faster you might sweat from your palms you might experience anger and kind of hotheadedness about it so those are normal reactions that most of us might feel in my research I found that there were some who stayed kind of cool as a cucumber at the same time that they were really aggressive so their hearts didn't really react their sweating really didn't go up and again these were a few individuals within the larger population of people that had problem behaviors they also tended to show particular characteristics so in terms of psychopathic traits they were less caring about the feelings of other people less caring about other people's values they didn't have empathy for other people and couldn't kind of share in other people's emotional expressions so you know these psychopathic traits tended to kind of delineate a certain kind of individual these were the few amongst the poor and I'm going to argue that again these are distinct individuals that show a particular pattern of behavior so those with what I did was to survey individuals at initial time point and those that had initially high conduct problem behaviors shown in the black line I followed them over time to see how their behaviors developed and you can see that at time two I mean two years later they're you know much higher than those who initially started with low conduct problem behaviors but there's a pattern here or distinctiveness based on psychopathic traits those that had high conduct problem behaviors and high psychopathic like traits at the initial survey we're actually much higher than all the other individuals and this is compared to those who had initially had the same level of conduct problem behaviors at the initial survey but who were low in psychopathic like traits so they're increasing in their conduct problem behaviors over time at an enormous rate and this is contrasted from those who initially started low and you can see there's some there that had you know high psychopathic like traits so high psychopathy is not always related to problem behaviors although I would expect them to still be quite hurtful interpersonally so these are this was only revealed when you look closer at the pattern of problem behaviors so looking closer at the picture revealed this distinctiveness of those now one thing in my field of research that we know is that the juxtaposition of you know people and their environments is also important so the thought is that being a bad child is because you're with a bad parent for example so we know that targeting and showing parents how to respond better to child problem behaviors is an effective way to affect change in that problem behavior over time so targeting the parent we know that it changes the parents behavior so in that way we think that perhaps the parent is a cause of the problem behavior if we change the parent that chime the child changes perhaps the parent was the cause after all so that juxtaposition of a child with a particular parent may be quite important the environment in which the child is growing up may be very important in terms of the influence on that child so that led us to kind of look at clinical populations of kids to kind of understand where their problem behaviors come from and again we know that or we think that parents behavior is a huge contributing factor to the problem behaviors in those kids but there was a really cool study done where they took children with problem behaviors these were children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and they gave them to other parents parents of children who didn't have problem behaviors now it was only temporarily it wasn't like forever but they gave them to these new parents and so really that juxtaposition of having a new parent with that problem behavior child should yield good behavior from that child actually what Ben was the parents tended to respond negatively to that child's problem behavior so the old adage you know you're driving me crazy could actually hold water actually the juxtaposition could work the other way so it could be one way is that the parents problem behaviors are the parents problem parenting is maybe an action that is causing the child's problem behavior but we could actually think of it as a reaction as well so it could be that the poor parenting that we see from parents is actually a reaction to the child's problem behavior and this is not an entirely new idea we do know from influential research that when you have kind of a well call this one I called the other one a cool one so we'll call this one kind of the hot child we know that children who kind of push parents buttons and push the boundaries of what they can get away with and have tantrum and you know whining and crying that parents sometimes respond in kind or sometimes parents back away from kind of controlling that problematic child because it becomes so difficult and over time this process could unfold with the child pushing further and further maybe the second time the parent tries to hold their ground but with this escalation of problem behaviors from the child from tamp trimming the child learns if I push just that bit further my parent will back down and I'll get what I want and I'm not saying that the child is doing this consciously and that they're trying to manipulate the situation it's just learning that we all do when we have a payout for example we would reenact that behavior over and over again to get that payout to get what we want and so this is a coercive process that is happening bi-directionally there's a reciprocal process going on between the parent and child that is leading to this behavior I mean think about if you take a child to a supermarket for example and they want subtour they want chocolate and they start you know crawling on the floor crying and tantrum inge and screaming and have other parents watching you for a parent it's really uncomfortable to not want to give in to that situation and a child then learns if I just push those boundaries especially when it's on public display I might get what I want so there might be some children that are particularly attuned to the rewarding aspects of their problem behaviors so they're aware of that payout and they kind of live for it and these are children that again I argue are more cool and more kind of callous the way that they use other people who don't feel for other people and lack emotional depth we call these callous and unemotional traits they're part of the psychopathic trait dimension callous unemotional traits have now been added to diagnostic criteria of clinical disorders from the American Psychiatric Association that mental health workers use and what we know is that children with callous unemotional traits don't respond as much to parents behaviors and in that way we almost think of them as being resilient now usually resilience is a good thing you know you're resilient to kind of resistant to bacteria resilient to you know kind of stressful life events but actually these children might be more resilient in that they're not affected by their environment which could be a negative thing for the hot child what we know is that the things that influence their problematic behavior are things like not being able to communicate effectively with other people lacking in intellectual functioning or reasoning ability we also know that it's related to their problem behaviors might be related to poor parenting being too harsh or being too lacks in your parenting but also their problem behaviors might result from you know hanging around bad peers for example in contrast the child who is more cool is actually more calculated in their behavior and so their problem behaviors as I've shown in previous work of mine is not related to poor intellectual functioning they're pretty normal and intellectual functioning they're able to reason quite well they're able to communicate well they're poor behaviors recent research shows is probably not related to hanging out with bad peers so possibly it's motivated from their own kind of personality and like I suggested their problem behaviors those who are high in callous unemotional traits are shown in the blue line they're probably not related to poor parenting so their condo problem behaviors are not linked up to poor parenting whereas the hot ones are you can see that more effectively here you have parenting inefficiency as being related to as parenting interface efficiency goes up you can see conduct problem behaviors go up that's for your low callous unemotional child for the high callous unemotional child their high regardless of what their parents parenting is like now this is one time point I should point out but so what this would suggest is that perhaps children with cows and emotional traits don't change their spots based on their environment this juxtaposition works the other way possibly and I argue one thing that we hadn't really considered from all the prior research is whether instead of being affected by their environment perhaps children with callous unemotional traits are changing their environment so we can actually swap these around so perhaps they're creating an environment in which their problem behaviors are just simpler to get away with so I follow children and their parents over time and survey them about every year since I'm looking at problem behaviors that are relatively infrequent and I try to get the child's perspective in the parents perspective in order to understand the dynamics unfolding within those relationships and what I find consistent with what I've been talking about is that for those with low callous unemotional traits the more that their parents are distressed the more these children increase in their problem behaviors over time so their parents distress and feeling inefficient with their parenting is causing their problem behaviors to go up over time for those with high callous unemotional traits we don't find that so for them we actually find that the more that they engage in problem behaviors or have more conduct problems parents tended to become more distressed over time based on those problem behaviors parents also became more erratic and less stable in their control so you know setting limits and having curfews and things like this they tended to be more erratic if they had a child with callous unemotional traits and lastly if these children showed severe problem behaviors if they had delinquent behavior their parents even more reduced in their control or backed off in terms of the control so these children seem to be more resilient to those parenting strategies and they're also creating an environment in which their behavior might be more less controlled and so they're able to engage in problem behaviors over time because their environment is changing to suit that problem behavior again I'm not arguing that this is conscious on their part it's just that everything's creating a perfect storm for creating bad behavior because people are backing off from them because they don't seem to respond to punishment for them so in that way instead of it being an action in the case of children who will have callous and emotional traits it's more of a reaction parents are reacting to the behavior and one thing that was really interesting to me is that not only our parents aware of the conduct problem behaviors and kind of reacting to them they're actually reacting to the way in which those problem behaviors are evidence without remorse the one way that we can change even though parents aren't may not be the cause of problem behaviors we can definitely make them a part of the process to eliminate problem behaviors so it could be that focusing on the emotional connection early on could defuse the effects of callous unemotional traits work in my lab and others shows that parental warmth for example is one way to diffuse the effects of callous unemotional traits another way is to talk to children about thoughts and feeling early on what we know is that you know think about the painting any any mistakes or inadvertent inadvertent brushstrokes within that painting are fixed simpler early on rather than later when the pattern might become too complex to fix it

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 91,794

Keywords: TEDxTalks, tedx talks, Social Science, tedx, ted talks, United Kingdom, ted, Psychology, tedx talk, Children, ted talk, English, ted x, Childhood

Id: kcUp8TOXC_4

Length: 18min 17sec (1097 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 24 2015