Why do some people become psychopaths? (30 Jan 2014)

good afternoon everybody a very warm welcome to today's UCL lunch hour lecture it is my great pleasure to introduce s Eve eating professor of developmental psychopathology in the UCL division of psychology and language Sciences for the readings lecture for us today is entitled why do some people become psychopaths welcoming caretaker and individuals with psychopathy tend to capture public imagination people are fascinated by what makes these individuals so different and there has been a tendency to at times sensationalize the condition and the description of the condition in the media and I guess one of the signs that these individuals really do capture the public imagination is that they have featured in a number of popular films so here we have a picture of Joker a character from Batman films and he's very impulsive character and he's also entirely unconcerned about the impact of his behavior on other people and he seems to lack empathy we have Kevin who is from the movie we need to talk about giving this is a very chilling description of a child who's not capable of forming attachment relationships with his parents who's cruel to animals and cruel to younger children and who ends up by the end of the film and the book that it's based on becoming a killer he kills family members and also people at his school we have Anton Chekhov who's an absolutely chilling contract killer in the Cohen brothers brothers film No Country for Old Men and if anyone has seen the film I think one of the very scary things about observing this character is when you see shots that are focused directly at his eyes and there really is no emotion coming back at you from those eyes and then there's probably everyone's favorite psychopath from movies Hannibal Lecter from the silence of the lamb film and he is again a very good example of a psychopathic carrot ain't that he's entirely void of empathy for other people and is also extremely skillful at manipulating other people to his own ends and in fact if you ask members of the general public will springs to mind when they hear the word psychopaths people of them think about serial killers and real-life serial killers include characters characters such as Det Bundy and who killed at least 30 women in America in 1970s he was very bright and extremely handsome and he often posed as somebody who was in a position of authority or someone who was very reliable to entice these women to come with him and then he murdered them in a very cruel way and people think that he actually may have committed many more crimes than he confessed to his description of his himself was that he's the most cold-hearted son-of-a-bitch you'll ever likely to meet and interestingly his defense lawyer didn't have a lot of good things to say about him either and said that he was the very definition of heartless evil so this is a man who was able to be very charming was able to convince other people to come with him but who actually turned out to be somebody who felt absolutely nothing for his victims and didn't seem to really feel any guilt for what he had done but of course not all Psychopaths are serial killers in fact only very few are so what are the characteristics that define an individual with psychopathy well one of the most prominent characteristics is their lack of remorse and guilt so they simply do not feel bad about the things they have done they may sometimes say that they do if they receive that as getting them something that they want such as early release from prison but it's very clear from the way they behave and that they do not actually experience remorse for what they have done they don't feel bad about what they have done they're very shallow affect the emotions appear in genuine and often very short-lived they don't form typical attachment relationships they don't look after the people around them they can often have superficial charm so if you meet these individuals for the first time you may be very very alert by them they may seem very precarious very charming very nice but once you get to know them for a longer period of time that charm tends to wear off they often have a grandiose sense of self-worth they think they are better and more deserving than other people the pathological liars and they are typically very good at manipulating other people to their own ends as a developmental psychologist I am very interested in how these characteristics develop it's unlikely that anybody is born a psychopath but clearly you don't get this sort of condition as a birthday present when you turn 18 either so the research in our group has been focused on investigating what makes some children developmentally vulnerable to developing these sorts of personality traits as an adult and you can focus on very various different levels of query when you try and understand the development of this condition and so we can look at how children who are at risk for becoming adult like Psychopaths look like behaviorally what differentiates these children from typically developing children or other children who may have behavioral problems but who don't exhibit these core characteristics of lack of empathy and guilt we can study how these children see the world around them so we can use experimental tasks to focus on the psychological level of analysis and we can see if these children's brains react differently to information around them which is what you would expect if their behavior and if their way of processing information is different and you can also use genetically informative designs to study the relative importance of genetic and environmental factors in developing this type of condition and you can also try and look for specific risk genes and risk environmental factors that in concert might promote the development of the disorder now first tell you a little bit about what makes these children behaviorally different from their typically developing peers but also from other children who have behavioral problems so there are several early behavioral warning signs of children who at risk for psychopathy and this looked very different from the kinds of characteristics we see in adults Psychopaths the person who first formally down what extended this psychopathic criteria the children was poor freak and this was work that started 20 years ago in United States and now several different research groups across the globe have studied these behavioral characteristics in children and in young people these children lack remorse and guilt so they don't express that they sorry for what they've done they lack empathy and this can be often manifest by them behaving cruelly amongst other children bullying being very physically aggressive in a way that is really showing no concern over the well-being of the other person they are sometimes also cruel to animals such as pets in the family they have shallow effects so many of the parents report that they don't feel like they can connect with this child they may have a perfectly nice relationship with their other children and if anyone has read the book we need to talk about kevin I think that's a very good example of a mother who was able to form an attachment relationship with one of her children but really felt like there was nothing coming back from the child who went on to develop psychopathy these children can manipulate other people for their own gain and they have a sense of being more important and more deserving than other people and in combination this constellation of traits in children is called callous unemotional traits so clearly we don't want to label children as Psychopaths but this constellation of traits gives you a warning sign that a child who scores very high on these traits may be at risk for developing psychopathy in the adulthood they kind of like the warning side you you want to start thinking about doing something to help this child if they display this constellation of characteristics there's now quite a bit of good longitudinal research showing that these sorts of traits are predictive of persistent violent and severe and social behavior and psychopathy in adolescence and adulthood they don't predict that every child who scores high on these sorts of traits will inevitably become an antisocial adult but they do index that that child it as is at a significantly increased risk of developing and the antisocial presentation in adulthood and social behavior in children is called conduct problems and if you think about this circle that I'm showing to you as representing all the children with conduct problems and the blue circles as representing the minority who also has high levels of callous unemotional traits and you get an idea that they are a minority but they are a sizable minority so people estimate that somewhere between 25 to as high as 50% of the children who are diagnosed with conduct problems also have this presentation of high callous unemotional traits and what sets them apart from other children with conduct problems is that they often engaged in proactive or planned acts of aggression so whilst the aggression in other children with contact roles is typically quite impulsive and in reaction to something external that happened for instance a perceived threat or slide to the child these children can engage in aggression if they think it's going to get them something they want it might get them status among peers it might get them some goods that they desire as I've already said they like guilt they don't worry about hurting other people to get what they want and they often have low levels of anxiety and this is in contrast with the remain Dolf children with conduct problems who have low levels of callous unemotional traits and who often address when they feel and under threat and whose aggression is often impulsive it's not premeditated and when these children have had a chance to reflect on what they have done they actually often feel bad and guilty about having hurt other people or having done something that has caused their parents or their teachers to feel sad and this presentation can also occur with high levels of anxiety so you're already beginning to see from this behavioural data that the reactivity emotional reactivity profile of these two types of children with conduct programs in is quite different you have a group that seems to be more cold and calculated and unimpacted and then you have another group group who seems to be more hot-headed reactive and impulsive but who also also has the capacity to empathize with other people so these differing behavioral profiles have got psychologists interested in how these children may see the world around them differently from typically developing children but also their peers with conduct problems and we can focus on the study of the psychological level of analysis by giving children experimental tasks which be often present on a computer for instance and and these tasks can give us an idea of how they process information such as facial emotional expressions so I want you to have a go at doing one of the tasks that we do with the children here's a face that is starting with the neutral rather calm expression and I'm going to press a button and it's going to start slowly developing an emotional expression and when you think you know what the expression is please shout it out loud and don't be shy happy very good so you can see fairly early on in the development of this expression that this is somebody who is looking happy the corners of the mouth are going upwards you can see a display of teeth this is a happy looking chap and here's the same chap pulling a different expression and again shout out when you think you know what emotion this person is displaying scared so I'm hearing people say scared so this is somebody who is fearful and you can see that this person is scared because they are showing a lot of Heights this is one of the very very ecologically valid signs that somebody's scared when their eyes are looking a little bit large and you can see a lot of the eyes now children who have quando problems and high levels of callous unemotional traits have difficulty in recognizing and reacting to other people's emotions particularly emotions of distress such as fear and and also sadness which is what you see here at the top right hand side oh sorry bottom right hand side and people have used facial stimuli such as what I just showed to you to assess this but people have also used stimuli that is auditory so people doing vocalizations that are emotional or body postures and and this work by our lab and labs of our colleagues has very conclusively shown that these children really do not appear to process other people's emotions in a typical fashion they seem to be under reactive that these displays of emotions and unable to recognize them as effectively as typically developing children do interestingly they also report feeling less fear themselves and one of the things that we are interested in researching in our lab at the moment is whether the reason they have such difficulty in processing other people's emotions stems from the fact that they don't feel those same emotions very strongly themselves so it's probably trickier to empathize with other people and to recognize their emotions if you have an impoverished experience of those same emotions yourself we also know from standard learning paradigms that these individuals who have conduct problems and high colors and emotional traits are less responsive to punishment so when you have to learn about which stimuli is good to go for and gives you points and which stimuli is back to go for and doesn't give you points these individuals are typically poor at modulating their behavior in response to the punishment cues and people have theorized that one of the way one of the reasons why these children may be tricky to socialize is that two very powerful tools of socializations are not as effective for them so anyone who has small children in the audience or has dealt with small children knows that when they misbehave we often give them sanctions so in my house at the moment with the three-year-old we have a naughty step and he sits there relatively regularly and so it's something that I employ in my house it's very effective he doesn't like sitting on the naughty step he said he'll he'll kind of improve his behavior Hewes who comes and joins us and he indeed does improve his behavior because he doesn't like being excluded from the activities and we also do empathy induction so anyone who's dealt with toddlers has basically repeated well think how Johnny's going to feel if you whack him with the toy car until they blue in the face so we try and get the children to focus on how their behavior might impact somebody else and somebody else's emotions now if you are really incapable of feeling perhaps those emotions yourself and also feeling for other people and if you don't react very much departments there are two very powerful socialization tools that are not going to be as effective in bringing you up as they are in typically developing children so really what we see in these children is this diminished emotional responsive 'ti to both kind of more material punishments but also in terms of their reactivity to other people and this profile is in contrast with the profile we see for children who have conduct problems but who have low low loss of callous unemotional traits these children if anything seemed to be a bit emotionally over-reactive they have what psychologists call a hostile attribution bias so they tend to see threat in even stimuli that typical individuals don't perceive threatening so they might see an ambiguous face and think that this is somebody who's trying to get at me so I'm going to address first so in this group what we see really is increased emotional reactivity at least some types of stimuli and these data have got ourselves and also other groups interested in looking at how these children's brains look like when we show them emotionally charged stimuli one of the ways in which we can study how the brain processes information is by scanning children using functional magnetic resonance imaging and this is a non-invasive technique that involves scanning the children's brains as they lie inside the magnet and they do tasks that we have said to them we can then look at their brain activity as they are doing the tasks and this gives us an idea of what parts of the brain are engaged in processing the information that we show them one of the brain areas that researchers on conduct disorder have organ drug problems have focused on is called the amygdala and this is a very small Amman shaped part of the brain it's a very preserved structure even reptiles have it it's there for basically alerting you that there's something salient in the environment that you ought to pay attention to and this salient information for us human beings includes emotions of other people and studies of children with conduct problems using emotional stimuli have been a little bit mixed some studies have reported increased amygdala reactivity to emotional stimuli other studies have reported decreased amygdala reactivity to emotional stimuli and our group recently wanted to investigate whether it's the callous unemotional trades that determine whether the children's brains are under responsive or the amygdalas are under responsive to emotional stimuli or over responsive to the same stimuli so we have carried out a range of paradigms recently I will talk about two here in the talk and here is an example of a recent task that we've used called masked fear task and in this task we presented either fearful faces which on the left hand side there or calm faces which on the right hand side there for a very short duration only 17 milliseconds and then we replace those faces with a calm face of a different identity identity and the replacement of the face happened so quickly that the participants are not consciously aware that they've seen a fearful face so the advantage of this task is that we can look at very early pre conscious processing of emotion in other words we get an idea of how automatically the brain attuned to the emotional and stimuli and when we contrast the fear and the calm conditions we find a pattern of brain responses where children who have conduct problems and high callous unemotional traits show very low amygdala reactivity that these pre consciously presented fear stimuli the typical children are somewhere in the middle and the children with conduct problems and low colors and emotional traits show if anything or reactivity to these fear faces that we present pre attentively and here I'm showing you a plot of the data from the children with conduct problems alone and on the left-hand side of the y-axis you can see the brain activity estimates from the fMRI analysis and on the right hand side you can see the child's callous unemotional trade score and you can see that the higher the callous unemotional trade score below the amygdala response to these fearful faces we've also used a more complex emotional star's tasks such as tasks that show scenarios of other people in distress this is a cartoon task where the children saw a scenario where the mother is reading a newspaper child is going down the slide and the child ends up hurting himself and falling off the child and then the person inside the scanner gets two choices as to what is the appropriate ending to the task and most children even the children with conduct problems are very able to say that the appropriate responses for the adults occur and comfort the child so behaviorally the children behave and process this task very similarly but interestingly again the amygdala of the children would conduct problems particularly those children would conduct problems and callous unemotional traits is less reactive to observing other people in distress in this very complex social scenario and the kind of contrast we're giving us in a scanner is we have a similar scenarios but without the emotional content so we can really extract the emotional response of the brain so the data from this behavioral psychological and brain imaging studies is really showing this picture of shallow effect and lack of empathy and demonstrating it in different levels of analysis so we know from naturalistic behavioral settings from more experimental behavioral settings and also from brain imaging settings that these children really seem to have this under reactivity to other people's emotions perhaps particularly distress so these sort of data obviously begs the question as to why do these children process the information around them so differently are they genetically at risk for being this way are there some environmental risk factors that mean that they come to be very unimpacted very emotionally under reactive and one of the ways in which you can broke the origins or the etiology of any given trait or disorder is by classical twin design and the twin design relies on a comparison between identical or monozygotic twins and non or die site psychotic twins the identical twins are result of a single fertilized egg splitting so they are for all intents and purposes each other's genetic clones an example of the news here I run the research group with dr. Raymond McCrory who's an identical twin and his brother has three children but if they did a paternity test they couldn't tell whether it's the brother or whether it's Eamonn who's the father so these are two individuals who have identical DNA then we have non identical or die psychotic twins who are the product of two separate eggs being fertilized by two separate sperms so they are like any other sibling pair but they have been born at the same time which makes them a good comparison in the studies for the identical twins and you can use the twin studies to infer the relative important of importance of genetic and environmental influences on variation on any given trait the way you can do it is you can compare how similar do these clones look to each other on any given behavior and how similar do these non identical twins look to each other on any given behavior and you can conclude that there is more likely to be genetic influence on a trait if the identical twins look more similar to each other than the non identical twins so if genetics are important in driving similarity then the individuals who share hundred percent of their DNA should look more similar to each other than individuals who share on average 50 percent of their DNA you can also conclude that there may be environmental factors that make family members similar to each other if the non identical twins and correlate with each other resemble each other more than the half of the identical twin resemblance so if you think that only genetics are important for driving similarity then the dizygotic twin resemblance should be exactly half of the identical twin resemblance now if the dye side psychotic twin resemblance is actually larger than half the identical twin resemblance this tells us that there are some environmental factors that act over and above genetic factors to promote similarity between family members and we can also infer that there are some individual specific or non-shared environmental factors if they're identical twins are not hundred percent identical on the trait so these are each other's genetic clones to the extent that they differ on any given feature there must have been some environmental influences that differed between the twins and an example I often use to drive this point home is if you imagine a identical twin who grew up in Britain versus an identical twin who went to live in Australia you would expect that there are changes and differences in pigmentation between these twins because one of them is exposed to constant Sun and the other one has to deal with the kind of weather that we've been having last week so this is environmental factor that differed between the twins and drives differences between family members and we have used the twin design to ask whether there are differences in the relative importance of genetic and environmental factors for the development of conduct problems in children who have high colors on emotional traits and in children who have low callous and emotional traits and I've been fortunate to work with a very big twin registry that is headed by a Robert Plomin at the Institute of Psychiatry here in London and what we were able to do because this was very large to example is to select those children who are in the top 10% for conduct problems for the twin sample so they are scoring in an atypical range for conduct problem and then we divided this extreme group to two we took those children where either one or two members of the twin pair also scored in the top 10% for callous unemotional traits and then we looked at children where neither member of the twin pair scored in the top range for callous unemotional traits and within each of these groups we were able to compare the identical and non-identical twins to give us an indication of how heritable are the conduct problems for children who have callous unemotional traits and how heritable our conduct problems for children who have low levels of callous unemotional traits what we found was that for children who had high callous unemotional traits the conduct problems were strongly heritable there is for children who had low levels of callous unemotional traits environmental influences both shared and non shared we're more important for the development of conduct problems now that doesn't mean that the children who have high callous unemotional traits are somehow genetically destined to become antisocial and but it does mean that they probably have more of a vulnerability innate funner ability for developing conduct problems similarly it doesn't mean that the children who have low levels of callous unemotional traits have no genetic risk whatsoever but it may be that that takes different form and may require some environmental factors to express or more environmental factors that you may need to express this vulnerability and if you have high callous unemotional traits of course the twin studies only give us an idea of the relative importance of genetic and environmental factors and they don't tell us what the actual genes are or the actual environments and currently there is very scarce data about the actual genes and actual environments particularly for children with high callous unemotional traits so ourselves and other people have speculated that the risk genes for high callous unemotional traits and low callous and emotional traits type antisocial behavior may be different and this would be in line with the fact that the other group is associated with low emotional reactivity whereas the other one is associated with high emotional reactivity so in a way you would expect there to be different vulnerability genes for the two groups perhaps genes that confer low emotional reactivity and arousal in the case of children with high palace and emotional traits and there's certainly some data to support that this may be the case so a genotype called serotonin transporter polymorphism has been associated with callous unemotional traits and the allele what the type of that genotype that was associated with one that confers slow the emotional reactivity we know that from imaging genetic studies but this is just the single study interestingly this genotype only conferred risk in children who lived in low resource neighborhoods so it suggests that you may have propensity to lack emotional reactivity or lack empathy but whether that expresses itself as callous unemotional traits or not may depend on your environmental conditions there are also some studies that have suggested that genes that may be associated with attachment processes could be important such as the oxytocin receptors in but ultimately they haven't really been replications of these findings we have ourselves conducted a genome-wide Association study which means that we comb through the whole genome looking whether there is anything that crops up and they really went any big hits and there hasn't been a robust replication of either our study or any of the other studies so it's very early days but if this particular phenotype goes in line with what we know from other behavioral phenotypes and I have no reason to expect that it would be different we're likely to be spending a long time looking for those genes they are going to be small genes that probably sorry genes a small effect size that probabilistically increase the risk for developing this sort of behavioral outcome and it is more than likely that any of these genotypes will require the presence of other risk genes and environmental risk factors in order to penetrate as a risk phenotype again ourselves and others have proposed that for those with low Callison emotional traits we might be interested in looking for genes that confer high arousal and reactive aggression and against there so there's some tentative data suggesting that these sorts of gene types may be associated with the low callous unemotional type of anti-social behavior and gene environment interaction may be particularly important with regard to this subtype that there are a number of good studies suggesting that if you have a polymorphism of monoamine oxidase a gene that confers increased in motional reactivity and if on top of that you experience maltreatment then you are at a substantially increased risk for developing conduct problems but very very early days and all of these studies need more replications and we probably need to really wait for a lot of methodological developments speak up before we can reliably start finding genes associated with this condition similarly the risk environments may differ for the two condition so we have reasonably good data for the low callous unemotional trait subgroup it's reliably associated with heartening consistent parenting and maltreatment but we have less of an idea of what our environmental risk factors that promote development of callous unemotional traits and our own work using identical twin differences design where we rely on the fact that this I eat others clones and any differences in phenotype in response to environmental factors such as parenting and should be kind of we can reliably say that that's environmental using that sort of methodology we haven't been able to show that harsh and inconsistent parenting for instance predicts increase in callous unemotional traits so that doesn't seem to be something that impacts development of those traits or at least not as reliably as it does for the children who have low callous unemotional traits there's some very interesting early data this is a funny-looking graph with lots of little data points but I will talk you through it Paul Frick and his colleagues looked at the relationship between harsh and inconsistent parenting and conduct problems and when you look at children who have quando problems and lo colors and emotional traits you can see this dose-response relationship the higher the frequency of high and inconsistent parenting the higher the level of conduct problems for these children but in contrast children who have conduct problems and low levels of callus and emotional traits appear to have high levels of conduct problems regardless of whether they receive less or more the heart and inconsistent parenting now this is not to say that environmental influences don't matter for these children at all and in fact there is some very interesting new work showing that for instance parental warmth is associated with lower levels of Allison emotional traits so these children may be responsive to some positive environmental influences there have also been treatment studies that have shown that some parent focused parenting focused interventions can be effective in reducing Galison emotional traits and conduct problems and there is a recent study showing that if you add empathy training to normal parent training programs children who have high levels of conduct callous unemotional traits may particularly benefit from this sort of training at least when it's done with children who are the preschool early primary school aid rates so some evidence that there are protective environmental factors that can be very helpful for these children so why do some people become Psychopaths I'm afraid that we have only taken baby steps so far in terms of research so we have some inclination but we really don't have a good idea of the developmental trajectory particularly at different levels of analysis so there's indication that these children may be more genetically vulnerable but I hasten to add not genetically destined for this sort of outcome it may be that they lack environmental buffers or they have some risk environmental factors which we yet don't know what they are that mean that the genetic vulnerability expresses itself as callous unemotional traits and we know that they are not very emotionally reactive empathetic they insensitive to punishment and this sort of presentation at the cognitive emotional level is probably going to make them more resistant the typical socialization efforts but we also know from longitudinal studies that not all children you have contact problems and hi callous unemotional traits grow up to be adults with psychopathy so we really do need more longitudinal studies that combine different methodologies and will enable us to really study what are the environmental risk factors how may they be different at different time points how do they influence a development of these children's cognitions and and affect processing so how does the atypical emotion I did develop over time and it's interesting to find out that this is something that we are we are studying at the moment in our group is whether these children can empathize under any circumstances so if we focus their attention differently or if we use stimuli that they themselves report as say sadness or fear inducing do we then see an emotional response and if we do can that be harnessed to teach them a bit more about how to empathize with other people so can we help to see them to see the world differently I think that's a kind of an important research question for the next 10 20 30 years I know that there are specific interventions being developed that really focus on the difficulties that these children and experience and I'm sure that there will be a lot of cross talk between these interventions and the basic science research so some of our basic science findings will feed into how these interventions are tailored more specifically to meet the needs of these children and of course there is the hope that eventually there will be very few of the individuals who develop psychopathy as an adult outcome and I want to finish by very much acknowledging all the people who working in our team at the moment and who've worked in our team in the past this sort of research requires a lot of theoretical knowledge technical skills statistical skills and first and foremost a lot of people skills in in when we recruit the sample so when we test the children and we have a very capable team of people who are involved in the research and I particularly want to acknowledge Eamon McCrory who's there at the center with me who co-directs the research group with me and also want to acknowledge the people who have very generously funded our research and I'm very happy to take questions and I should also mention that you can go to our labs website and there will be information about our research and materials in that website thank you very much we have time for one question anybody has a good question has to be the very best question can be asked um if our hi Arden callous and unemotional traits are genetic that would suggest that maybe one or both of the parents also share some of those traits so could that be an environmental factor leading to so that's one of them so that's an excellent question so the question was that if these traits are heritable and one or two of the parents share two traits does that mean that the child is more likely to be exposed to environmental risk in short yes it's a phenomenon that we call gene environment correlation which is that the parents parent according to that genotype that they pass on to their children said the child kind of has the double whammy of having genetic vulnerability and then perhaps perhaps having a parent who is not really able to provide the optimal parenting environment either there is some interesting data suggesting that that may not always be the case so this data from a colleague of mine in Australia mark that that has looked at how the children and the parents engage with each other and interestingly at least in the case of the mothers the mothers of these children try and look for eye contact try and engage the children just in the same way as any typical mothers do but the children themselves don't engage in the same way so they don't look the mothers in the eyes they don't kind of give back in the same way so whilst I'm sure that you're right that there are number of times where the environment is also important swooner ability it's not always the case and sometimes these kind of attachment difficulties may be driven by the child and the very difficult temperament that the child has thank you very much will you join me in thanking professor reading again for an excellent lecture

Channel: UCL Minds Lunch Hour Lectures

Views: 292,770

Rating: 4.6185532 out of 5

Keywords: Psychopathy (Disease Or Medical Condition), psychopath, psycho, behaviour, behavioural, Psychology (Medical Specialty)

Id: 4yB_syUDbjs

Length: 42min 22sec (2542 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 03 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/gazeebo_larry]

Damned if this one doesn't really make you think.