Early Signs of Psychopathy

When you ask someone to picture a psychopath they will often think of someone like Ted Bundy or Hannibal Lecter.  While the former is one of the most infamous serial killers of our time and the latter was chosen by the American Film Institute as the best movie villain of all time, they both represent what most people believe psychopathy to be: a lack of empathy and remorse that leads people to commit heinous crimes.  This conception is certainly correct for some individuals, but what most people don't realize is that psychopathy comes in a wide range of intensities.  Granted, there are those rare cases such as Ted Bundy, who fit the common perception of psychopathy perfectly, but many people have some psychopathic tendencies yet never commit such terrible crimes as would be expected.

James Fallon's book, The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist's Personal Journey Into the Dark Side of the Brain, covers this very topic.  In his book, Fallon recounts how he discovered that he has many biological traits that consistently appear in psychopaths.  More specifically, certain regions in his brain are either less effective than normal or simply inactive.  In his career as a neuroscientist, Fallon, had noticed that these areas in the brain were consistently ineffective in psychopaths.  If Fallon has these biological issues, then what caused him to be relatively normal compared to the crime-committing psychopaths we see on the news?  The largest factor that Fallon discovered had separated him from the crime-committing psychopaths was that almost all off the crime-committing psychopaths had been abused as a child, while he had not. 

So how does Fallon's story help us prevent more depraved crime sprees from people like Ted Bundy? In a perfect world, targeting child abuse overall would be ideal, but that is much too large of a target to tackle and people are bound to slip through the cracks.  A possibly more effective method would be to identify psychopathic tendencies in children and focus on supporting these at-risk children and helping them learn to control themselves.  A The New York Times article titled "Can You Call a 9-Year-Old a Psychopath?" showcases one such attempt at helping these children.  The article tells us about Dan Waschbusch's work with callous-unemotional children, children who show a clear lack of empathy or remorse.   

The Article focuses mainly on Michael, a child who seems to portray all the telltale signs of psychopathy.  When Waschbusch first met Michael, he seemed like a well-behaved kid, but the longer he observed Michael, the more signs of the opposite would slip through.   Michael would go from hugging his mother to being moments away from hitting his brother with a plastic chair before his father takes it away,  all because his brother had unpaused Michael's YouTube video he was watching.   Even the signs of empathy such as hugging his mother seem to be due to an ulterior motive, with the mother explaining that Michael had not hugged her in two weeks.  It was regular behavior for Michael to act nice for his therapists and he was doing the same for Waschbusch.  
Manipulation is a consistent theme with psychopaths, even Fallon admits to enjoying manipulating his opponents while playing games.  For Waschbusch, manipulation has stood out as a defining factor for all the callous-unemotional children present in his summer treatment program.  He claims that the kids do not seem to act impulsively, instead they manipulate the rules to best serve their wants.  Waschbusch offers the example of a girl who would act out and cause havoc but when asked to calm down she would go back to her desk and stay calm for an extended period of time, earning herself some reward points.  Waschbusch believes that this reward system can help to change a child's behavior better than a punishment strategy but so far his program has not seen consistent result, which he attributes to the small sample size.  He plans to increase the program size from one group to four, as well as including conduct disorder kids in order to compare how the two types of children react to the system.

References:

Fallon, James H. The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist's Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain. New York: Current, 2013. Print.

Kahn, Jennifer. "Can You Call a 9-Year-Old a Psychopath?" The New York Times. The New York Times Company, 11 May 2012. Web. 27 Feb. 2015. 
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/magazine/can-you-call-a-9-year-old-a-psychopath.html