Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized by a profound lack of empathy and elevated instrumental aggressive behaviour. This trait is mostly due to a dysfunction in the amygdala, the area of the brain that is responsible for fear and that also lights up when it comes to empathy. In a study published in the journal Brain, MRI was used to study the neurological response to witnessing the emotions and actions of others and how that influences one’s motor and somatosensory cortices in individuals with psychopathy (Meffert, Gazzola, den Boer, Bartels, Keysers, 2013). A number of studies provide evidence that psychopaths display reduced physiological responses to social emotional stimuli and recognize less accurately emotions in the faces or voices of others.
The study subjects were asked to watch short clips of a pair of hands interacting with each other. The gestures were either neutral: shaking hands, loving: one hand caressing the other, or hurtful: one hand is slapped with a ruler. Some more complex gestures included a hand gently approaching the other just to be violently pushed away. The actions performed in the clips were of emotional, goal- oriented nature, therefore meant to induce vicarious activation of motor, somatosensory and emotional brain regions. The same actions were then performed with the subjects’ hands. Psychopathic individuals’ responses were much lower than those of the control group, that is, less activity manifested in the temporal, insular, parietal and frontal lobe. When explicitly encouraged to emphasize with the actors on the screen, the differences in the neural responses of psychopathic individuals and those of the control group were greatly reduced.
This study sheds new light on the neural basis of psychopathy, showing that the individuals suffering of it are not completely incapable to emphasize, but rather do not do so spontaneously. In other words, if empathy would be a switch, for most of the neurotypical population it would be turned on, while for psychopaths it would be turned off.
This discovery may serve as a new starting point in showing that therapeutic efforts do not need to be based on the effort of creating the ability to empathize, but rather on how to make it more automatic. However, it is yet unclear how to do so. Low motivation for change and less compliance with therapy of psychopathic individuals will represent an unfortunate challenge in such efforts.
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