Psychopaths: Society's Scourge

"This is the first information we have that shows they [psychopaths] don't understand the consequences of punishment. And like most of us, they are driven by reward."
"Punishment provides information that what you are doing is really not appreciated by those around you. Clearly, they don't use the information from punishment like everyone else does. The question is: why do they persist?"
"Their inability to use information from punishment to guide their behaviour [marks the difference between psychopaths and others committing grave crimes]. That's exactly the information [discovering innate motivation] we need to develop programs that target their deficits."
"Even with these extraordinarily simple tasks, their brains react completely differently than the violent offenders and the healthy men. We suspect this means they are not gleaning information about punishment and consequences."
Sheilagh Hodgins, professor, Universite de Montreal

KEVIN ARGUE   Canadian killer Paul Bernardo is among those diagnosed with psychopathic personalities, meaning they lack empathy and are callous, glib, manipulative, shallow and violent.

Academics in the fields of neurology, psychiatry and psychology already have amassed significant findings relating to the problem of psychopaths within society. It's an important issue to try to understand given the quite surprising number of psychopaths who haunt society anywhere in the world. Most psychopaths don't take the horrendous path of becoming serial or mass murderers, they simply inhabit society as a sinister force for ill, not as clearly defined as the criminals among them, but as individuals whose presence is a mild pestilence.

With the use of magnetic resonance imaging, researchers led by Professor Hodgins at King's College London, interpreted the brain characteristics of 60 men, eighteen of whom represented a control group of healthy non-offenders. The control group was compared to the violent convicts equipped with anti-social personality disorder. Among them a sub-group was identified of a dozen men meeting the criteria for psychopathy.


Men who share selfies online are more likely to exhibit psychopathic tendencies. That’s what researchers are saying after conducting a lengthy study on the link between selfie-taking and certain personality traits.
Their distinct personality traits have long been recognized; callousness, glibly capable of talking themselves out of problematical situations, or into self-serving situations, manipulative in an effort to achieve their ends, and coldly pathological liars who strike those with whom they come in contact as also charming people. Now, the study has concluded that the brains of psychopaths are hard-wired differently in other ways than those of other people who are not morally and ethically challenged.

To the extent that punishment for crimes make no impression on them, to inhibit their future criminal activities.

One in five jailed violent criminals is held to be genuinely psychopathic in comparison with their one percent presence in the general population. They are clearly more given to distinguishing themselves through their criminal actions disproportionately to their numbers in society, an unsurprising fact. The abnormalities in their brain structure result in lack of empathy for others, the ability to emotionally process their actions and their impact on others, in representing a deterrent to their actions.

The study appears to have linked those same brain regions deficient in empathy and personal responsibility to an inability [a disinterested unwillingness?] to learn from reward and punishment. One might think that the reward-and-punishment lessons congruent with behaviour would be addressed in the formative stages of a personality, while a child is learning to navigate the social world around him, and not necessarily with an adult's reaction to the recognition of crime's results.

What goes on inside the brain of a psychopath? One new study, the latest in a line of controversial recent research tackling that question, offers yet another clue about how the grey matter of individuals diagnosed with psychopathy — a complex personality disorder often characterized by impulsive behavior, lack of remorse, and antisocial tendencies — might be “hardwired” differently than those who don’t fit the profile.
Katie Drummond, The Verge

In the study the men were rewarded for their success in achieving good results in problem solving tasks that were quite simple; matching pictures while in the MRI scanners, as an example. Hard to believe that such simple tasks might elude the cleverly manipulative minds of men accustomed to deceiving others of their true intentions while balefully planning actions of malicious destruction.