Still Waiting for a Pill to Instill Empathy — Studying Psychopaths0

There are no medications that can instill empathy, and some experts in the area of mental health believe that psychopathy stems from a specific neurological disorder which is biological in origin and present from birth. Robert D. Hare, an expert in the field and author of the “Psychopathy Checklist” estimates that about one percent of the population are psychopaths. [audio:http://hospitalstay.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/01-Crazy-Gnarls-Barkley-cover-2.mp3|titles=Crazy]

In a recent study published in Psychological Science, two groups of prisoners, psychopaths and nonpsychopaths, were challenged with a series of problems based on three specific rules: (1) descriptive rules (such as, “If a person is from California, then that person will be patient”); (2) social contracts (”If you borrow my motorcycle, then you have to wash it”), and (3) precautions (”If you work with tuberculosis patients, then you must wear a surgical mask”).

The study concluded that while psychopaths performed comparably to nonpsychopaths on descriptive reasoning problems, they significantly underperformed in the area of social contract and precautionary problems. The authors of the study concluded that these findings may suggest psychopaths have specific reasoning impairments, manifesting itself in chronic cheating and impulsive risky behavior. According to the study co-author Elsa Ermer: “This work suggests that psychopaths don’t understand cheating in the normal way, so they might not realize when they’re cheating other people or when other people would react badly to cheating.”

Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist identifies three separate factors typically associated with this social enigma:

Personality “Aggressive narcissism”

  • Glibness/superficial charm
  • Grandiose sense of self-worth
  • Pathological lying
  • Cunning/manipulative
  • Lack of remorse or guilt
  • Shallow affect
  • Callous/lack of empathy
  • Failure to accept responsibility for own actions

Case history “Socially deviant lifestyle”

  • Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom
  • Parasitic lifestyle
  • Poor behavioral control
  • Lack of realistic long-term goals
  • Impulsivity
  • Irresponsibility
  • Juvenile delinquency
  • Early behavior problems
  • Revocation of conditional release

Traits not correlated with either factor

  • Promiscuous sexual behavior
  • Many short-term marital relationships
  • Criminal versatility

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