Have you ever
wondered if you truly know the people sitting next to you? Can you ever
actually know how a person feels or what they are actually thinking? A lot of
times people are astonished when they hear someone they are close to has done
something “out of the norm”. On the
news, sadly, we see stories of individuals partaking in crazy and unacceptable
actions: murder, domestic violence, and rape. The individuals who commit these
heinous crimes are usually branded as psychopaths. The interesting thing is,
when the news comes out about what certain individuals have done, the people
closest to them are the most shocked. It
is cases like these that interest me, in whether we can ever truly know the
people around us, and whether we can truly know if someone has psychopathic tendencies.
In The Psychopath Inside, James
Fallon discusses this exact same dilemma. Specifically, in the first chapter of
Fallon’s book, What is a psychopath?, he
discusses the obstacles and struggle to identify certain individuals as
psychopaths. Fallon writes that one way to identify if a person has
psychopathic tendencies is to take a PCL-R test. He also notes that, “ a person
with a perfect score of 40 is full blown, categorical psychopath on this scale.
Thirty is the normal cutoff for diagnosis”.
These are people who have clear psychopathic tendencies, but there is
still another category of psychopaths. There are people who can have a, “score
of 15 or 23… and you would think he is completely normal”. These are the types
of people that shock the people closest to them. A perfect example of this in the real world
is the two brothers that committed the Boston bombing. The community and their parents were the most
shocked. Their friends at college and their parents described the two as happy
and good kids. Yet, to the rest of the world, these two brothers are
psychopaths. Two people who intended to harm a large number of people without
remorse. The topics Fallon discusses in his book and this example bring me back
to my original question. Can you ever truly know the people closest to you? Another article that related to Fallon’s book
and this question is, A neurological
basis for the lack of empathy in
Psychopaths. The article mentions how the, “rate of
psychopathy in prisons is around 23%, which is greater than the average
population around 1%”. The article then describes a set of experiments where
prison inmates were tested for psychopathic tendencies. Once again, just as mentioned in Fallon’s book, prison inmates
took the PCL-R test. In addition, the inmates had scans of neural activity when
they imagined pain to others. The researches found an, “increased response in
the Ventral Striatum, an area known to be involved in pleasure”. The one thing
this article does not address however is how certain people who would most
likely pass these tests, still end up acting like a psychopath. Unlike this
article, Fallon addresses this issue throughout his book. He accounts for
multiple factors, one being genetics/ family history in attempt to explain why
his brain scan matches one of a psychopath, although in the end Fallon comes to
the understanding that the human mind is to complex for us to fully understand
with science alone.
So in the end,
after reading Fallon’s book, and a scientific article, I have partially found
an answer to my question. We can use the common PCL-R test, genetics, and brain
scans to further study people’s emotions and tendencies, but there is no
sure-fire way to truly know the inner thoughts and identities of the people
closest to us.
Fallon, J. (2013). The
psychopath inside: A neuroscientist's personal journey into the dark side of
the brain. New York: Current.
A neurological basis for the lack of empathy
in psychopaths. (n.d.). Retrieved February 27, 2015, from
http://esciencenews.com/articles/2013/09/24/a.neurological.basis.lack.empathy.psychopaths
Cool.
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