Hello.
So, today, I'm going to be talking about what psychopathy is, the term,
and what we're doing about it here at Juniata College.
So, I'll begin by saying in the fall of 2016,
our lab in the Psychology Department, under Professor Rebecca Weldon,
was attempting to ascertain some of these features underlying psychopathy
and how they relate to student populations.
We found, consistent with the hypothesis called the distress-specific hypothesis,
which I'll talk about in a little bit,
that participants who were higher in psychopathy,
which is this empathic deficit,
were slower in recognizing the fearful faces of other people,
and I'm going to discuss the implications of this.
Now, in the fall of this school year,
we wanted to try something else, we wanted to question the impossible.
The fact is that there are very few treatments for psychopathy,
and we wanted to see if we could alter this effect,
this delay in recognizing the fearful faces of other people,
by priming empathy, or something like empathy,
in those people who were higher in psychopathy.
I think in order to understand what I mean by "psychopathy,"
we should discuss how the term has been sensationalized in the media.
So, in pop culture in Hollywood,
there is this thing that has been coined the "elite psychopath."
So, I'll tell you a bit about what that is,
but first, I think I should give some examples.
Such characters as Hannibal Lecter, Patrick Bateman from American Psycho,
or the most recent television adaptation of Sherlock Holmes,
all of these could qualify as this elite psychopath caricature,
and it's problematic in a number of ways.
These characters are antiheroes at the core.
So you are invited to empathize with these protagonistic characters
who never really do show empathy to other people.
And so, of course, we want to emulate these characters.
But as a matter of fact,
they do show some of the qualities of psychopathy.
They are cold, calculating, apathetic, they're sophisticated,
but they're also some things that we don't really see as often
in actual psychopathy.
They're one step ahead of the competition, always,
they are Machiavellian masterminds,
and that's not something we really see.
So I'm going to talk about how psychopathy has been characterized
in the field of psychology,
and those components will be differences in action and differences in the brain.
Also, I think it's important to note that in the DSM-5,
which is a terminology manual for Psychology,
antisocial personality disorder has been considered synonymous with psychopathy.
While it shares some common symptomology,
we will be considering psychopathy
in accordance with a different set of features and facets
that set it apart ever so slightly with antisocial personality disorder.
But I should start by saying in antisocial personality disorder,
we see symptoms like aggression, outward aggression,
that can be generalized,
this impulsiveness, sensation-seeking behavior,
recklessness and association with criminal behavior.
So let's talk about some of these.
There's a lack of guilt or remorse.
There's a lack of emotional expression.
These symptoms are affective or emotional processing differences.
Our study focused mainly on these.
So people who are high in psychopathy will tend to be callous,
a bit like the pop culture representation.
They will lack emotional expression,
so they won't be expressing emotions to other people.
There's also a lack of prosocial emotional response,
which means in day to day interaction, when someone is showing distress,
you are expected to behave in a certain way;
they don't do this.
There are also differences that are interpersonal in nature.
They manipulate other people, they use them as a means to an end.
And there is grandiosity as well,
or an exaggerated sense of self-importance.
This is also seen in psychopathy, in people who are high in psychopathy.
There's a last piece, and that piece is sensation seeking and impulsivity.
This is not so much seen in the elite psychopath caricature.
People who are high in psychopathy will act impulsively,
they will seek sensation and they will not duly consider risk versus reward.
And so, often, they will commit criminal acts
and subsequently be incarcerated.
When they seek sensation,
they have to calculate this risk versus reward,
they have to actively weigh the risk versus reward in order to make the action,
but we don't really see this in people who are high in psychopathy.
And of course there is that aggression piece,
this generalized aggression.
So, people who are high in psychopathy have difficulty determining
victims versus victimless crimes.
And so, when they commit these crimes,
they do not duly consider the potential impact this might have on another person.
So let's talk about some of the brain differences we see in psychopathy.
Mainly, we'll talk about the amygdala,
which is an area of the brain near the center of the brain,
and there's less activation in people higher in psychopathy, in this region,
when they are looking at the emotions of other people,
specifically distress emotions.
And that's important
because when you're not processing the distress of other people,
perhaps you're not also feeling the guilt and remorse
that a normal person would typically experience
when they can tell those people are experiencing those emotions.
So, when there's less activation in people who are high in psychopathy,
this area of the brain, the amygdala, involved in emotional processing,
again shows less activation.
So, what's the importance of studying psychopathy?
Well, there is this linkage between psychopathy and crime.
If you look at the literature on psychopathy,
you will find that most participants are inmates.
This is not a coincidence.
It is far more prevalent in prison populations.
It's been estimated anywhere from 50% to 80% of inmates could qualify
for some symptomology in psychopathy that is above the norm.
Outside of prison populations,
a much less percentage could be considered high in psychopathy.
It has been estimated anywhere from 1.3% to 6.85% of men in the general population,
mainly in the United States,
could qualify as having some symptomology associated with psychopathy,
whereas in women, it is 0.8%.
So considerably less
could be considered to qualify for the symptoms of psychopathy.
It is also important to study psychopathy because at this time,
treatments for psychopathy have been largely unsuccessful.
This is because treatments like cognitive and behavioral strategies
require some kind of agency or willingness to change,
in participants, or patients.
People who are high in psychopathy, unsurprisingly,
seem to lack this agency and willingness to change,
and so the treatments are largely unsuccessful.
So what is being done?
Well, currently, our lab, here at Juniata College,
is working on this distress-specific hypothesis,
which is that the affective symptoms,
the emotional processing symptoms of psychopathy,
could be responsible for this deficit
in processing the distress emotions in other people.
So we thought, "What if we could prime them for a congruent emotion,
and maybe that could, maybe, alter this effect,
this delay in processing the emotions of other people?"
So we used something called the autobiographical emotional memory task,
which challenges a participant to recall a time in their life
where they felt a specific emotion.
We used fear.
So our participants recalled a time in their life where they experienced fear,
and because of this,
it may be that fear becomes more salient, it's more accessible,
it's more easy to recognize in other people.
So if we could take participants, people who are high in psychopathy,
and prime them for this fear,
they may subsequently be better able to recognize that fear in other people.
And if our findings support this,
it may be that priming for a congruent emotion
could be a way, through exposure, to condition an empathic response
in people who would otherwise lack such a response.
In other words, we could foster empathy in psychopaths.
And this would be groundbreaking
because incarceration in our country is at an all-time high,
and if we could somehow minimize this
through developing strategies to address people who have psychopathic symptoms,
before criminal behaviors can begin to manifest,
we might be able to deal
with the current dilemma that is psychopathy in our country.
Thank you.
(Applause)