Neuroscientists Explain Why Psychopaths Lack Empathy
When psychopaths think about other people’s suffering, areas in their brain necessary for empathy and concern fail to activate and connect to other regions, such as those involved in affective processing and decision-making. Instead, they showed increase activation in the ventral striatum – the area known to be involved in feelings of pleasure.
A new study published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience involved the fMRI scans of 40 individuals who suffer from low, medium or high psycopathy – a personality disorder characterised by lack of empathy and remorse, manipulation, glibness and callousness. This mental illness is more common than people realise. Research carried out in England in 2010 suggests that there is one psychopath in every 2,000 people.
Brain scans show psychopaths lack empathy
In the current study, US researchers looked into the fMRI scans of psychopathic individuals to better understand the neurological basis for their lack of empathy. Whilst being subjected to the fMRI machine, the participants viewed visual scenarios illustrating pain, such as a toe caught under a heavy object or a finger caught in a door. They were asked to imagine the scenario happening to themselves and to other people. Participants were grouped into three – highly, moderately, and weakly psychopathic.
When the highly psychopathic participants imagined being in the painful situations, their brain demonstrated a typical neural response in the areas involved in empathy for pain, particularly in the anterior insula, anterior midcingulate cortex, somatosensory cortex, and right amygdala. The increase in brain activities in these areas suggests that psychopathic people are sensitive to experiencing pain.
But things turn different when they were asked to imagine the pain being experienced by another person. In this case, the highly psychopathic individuals showed no increased activity in areas involved in empathy. Instead, they showed an increased response in the ventral striatum – the area involved in pleasure.
The results showed that people with high levels of psycopathy enjoyed imagining pain inflicted on others and did not care about them. These new findings may boost research on developing more effective therapies for people with psycopathy. According to the researchers, imagining oneself in pain or in distress may trigger a stronger affective reaction than imagining what another person would feel, and this could be used with some patients in cognitive-behaviour therapies as a kick-starting technique.
Source of this article:
©Copyright 2013 by http://www.naturaltherapyforall.com Hypnotherapy Nottingham All Rights Reserved .