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Psychopathy as moral blindness: a qualifying exploration of the blindness-analogy in psychopathy theory and research
Abstract
The term psychopathy refers to a personality disorder associated with callous personality traits and antisocial behaviors. Throughout its research history, psychopathy has frequently been described as a peculiar form of moral blindness, engendering a narrative about a patient stereotype incapable of taking a genuine moral perspective, similar to a blind person who is deprived of proper visual perceptions. However, recent empirical research has shown that clinically diagnosed psychopaths are morally more fit than initially thought, and the blindness-analogy now comes across as largely misleading. In this contribution, the moral-blindness analogy is explored in an attempt to qualify anew its relevance in psychopathy theory and research. It is demonstrated that there are indeed theoretically relevant parallels to be drawn between blindness and psychopathy, parallels that are especially illuminating when accounting for the potential symptomatology, dimensionality, and etiological nature of the disorder.
The book’s core argument is that an artificial intelligence that could equal or exceed human intelligence—sometimes called artificial general intelligence (AGI)—is for mathematical reasons impossible. It offers two specific reasons for this claim:
Human intelligence is a capability of a complex dynamic system—the human brain and central nervous system. Systems of this sort cannot be modelled mathematically in a way that allows them to operate inside a computer. In supporting their claim, the authors, Jobst Landgrebe and Barry Smith, marshal evidence from mathematics, physics, computer science, philosophy, linguistics, and biology, setting up their book around three central questions: What are the essential marks of human intelligence? What is it that researchers try to do when they attempt to achieve "artificial intelligence" (AI)? And why, after more than 50 years, are our most common interactions with AI, for example with our bank’s computers, still so unsatisfactory?
This book brings together insights from the enactivist approach in philosophy of mind and existing work on autonomous agency from both philosophy of action and feminist philosophy. It then utilizes this proposed account of autonomous agency to make sense of the impairments in agency that commonly occur in cases of dissociative identity disorder, mood disorders, and psychopathy. While much of the existing philosophical work on autonomy focuses on threats that come from outside the agent, this book addresses how inner conflict, instability of character, or motivational issues can disrupt agency. In the first half of the book, the author conceptualizes what it means to be self-governing and to exercise autonomous agency. In the second half, she investigates the extent to which agents with various forms of mental disorder are capable of exercising autonomy. In her view, many forms of mental disorder involve disruptions to self-governance, so that agents lack sufficient control over their intentional behavior or are unable to formulate and execute coherent action plans. However, this does not mean that they are utterly incapable of autonomous agency; rather, their ability to exercise this capacity is compromised in important respects. Understanding these agential impairments can help to deepen our understanding of what it means to exercise autonomy, and also devise more effective treatments that restore subjects’ agency. Autonomy, Enactivism, and Mental Disorder will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, philosophy of psychiatry, and feminist philosophy.
The recurring claim that the construct of psychopathy is value-laden often is not qualified in enough detail. The chapters in this part of the volume, instead, investigate in depth the role and significance of values in different aspects of the construct of psychopathy. Following these chapters, but also by offering a background to them, we show how certain values are involved in the characterisation of psychopathy, inform societal needs satisfied by this construct, and have a central role in determining whether psychopathy is a mental disorder. Moreover, we relate this description to our criticism of the view that the entrenchment of the notion of psychopathy with values renders it in principle irreconcilable with sound psychiatric theory and practice. However, we also recognize that the value-ladenness of psychopathy leaves open other important challenges. Meeting them needs addressing interdisciplinary interrelated issues that have empirical, normative, and theoretical dimensions.
Many spectacular claims about psychopaths are circulated. This contribution aims at providing the reader with the more complex reality of the phenomenon (or phenomena), and to point to issues of particular interest to philosophers working in moral psychology and moral theory. I first discuss the current evidence regarding psychopaths’ deficient empathy and decision-making skills. I then explore what difference it makes to our thinking whether we regard their deficit dimensionally (as involving abilities that are on or off) and whether we focus on primary or secondary psychopathy. My conclusion is that most grand claims about psychopathy settling long-standing debates in moral philosophy and psychology are overblown, but there is much to be learnt from this disorder when it comes to formulating modern theories of moral psychology.
Recent debates in psychopathy studies have articulated concerns about false-positives in assessment and research sampling. These are pressing concerns for research progress, since scientific quality depends on sample quality, that is, if we wish to study psychopathy we must be certain that the individuals we study are, in fact, psychopaths. Thus, if conventional assessment tools yield substantial false-positives, this would explain why central research is laden with discrepancies and nonreplicable findings. This paper draws on moral psychology in order to develop tentative theory-driven exclusion criteria applicable in research sampling. Implementing standardized procedures to discriminate between research participants has the potential to yield more homogenous and discrete samples, a vital prerequisite for research progress in etiology, epidemiology, and treatment strategies.
Background
There have been relatively few attempts to represent vision or blindness ontologically. This is unsurprising as the related phenomena of sight and blindness are difficult to represent ontologically for a variety of reasons. Blindness has escaped ontological capture at least in part because: blindness or the employment of the term ‘blindness’ seems to vary from context to context, blindness can present in a myriad of types and degrees, and there is no precedent for representing complex phenomena such as blindness.
Methods
We explore current attempts to represent vision or blindness, and show how these attempts fail at representing subtypes of blindness (viz., color blindness, flash blindness, and inattentional blindness). We examine the results found through a review of current attempts and identify where they have failed.
Results
By analyzing our test cases of different types of blindness along with the strengths and weaknesses of previous attempts, we have identified the general features of blindness and vision. We propose an ontological solution to represent vision and blindness, which capitalizes on resources afforded to one who utilizes the Basic Formal Ontology as an upper-level ontology.
Conclusions
The solution we propose here involves specifying the trigger conditions of a disposition as well as the processes that realize that disposition. Once these are specified we can characterize vision as a function that is realized by certain (in this case) biological processes under a range of triggering conditions. When the range of conditions under which the processes can be realized are reduced beyond a certain threshold, we are able to say that blindness is present. We characterize vision as a function that is realized as a seeing process and blindness as a reduction in the conditions under which the sight function is realized. This solution is desirable because it leverages current features of a major upper-level ontology, accurately captures the phenomenon of blindness, and can be implemented in many domain-specific ontologies.
The chapter starts from a specific interpretation of what it means to know the difference between right and wrong, which stems from Gilbert Ryle. To know the difference between right and wrong implies caring about morality. The author links Ryle’s ideas to the notion of being a moral person. Two different ideas found in moral philosophy are delineated, namely, the amoral person, that is, someone who rejects the demands of morality, and the morally incapacitated person, that is, someone who cannot take those demands into account. Psychopaths are not amoral in the philosophers’ sense of the word, but are incapable of, or seriously deficient in, taking the moral point of view.
This article introduces a novel theoretical framework for psychopathy that bridges dominant affective and cognitive models. According to the proposed impaired integration (II) framework of psychopathic dysfunction, topographical irregularities and abnormalities in neural connectivity in psychopathy hinder the complex process of information integration. Central to the II theory is the notion that psychopathic individuals are “‘wired up’ differently” (Hare, Williamson, & Harpur, 1988, p. 87). Specific theoretical assumptions include decreased functioning of the Salience and Default Mode Networks, normal functioning in executive control networks, and less coordination and flexible switching between networks. Following a review of dominant models of psychopathy, we introduce our II theory as a parsimonious account of behavioral and brain irregularities in psychopathy. The II theory provides a unified theoretical framework for understanding psychopathic dysfunction and integrates principle tenets of affective and cognitive perspectives. Moreover, it accommodates evidence regarding connectivity abnormalities in psychopathy through its network theoretical perspective.
The paper critically reexamines the well-known “Julie and Mark” vignette, a stylized account of two college-age siblings opting to engage in protected sex while vacationing abroad (e.g., Haidt, 2001). Since its inception, the story has been viewed as a rhetorically powerful validation of Hume’s “sentimentalist” dictum that moral judgments are not rationally deduced but arise directly from feelings of pleasure or displeasure (e.g., disgust). People’s typical reactions to the vignette are alleged to support this view by demonstrating that individuals are prone to become morally dumbfounded (Haidt, 2001; Haidt, Bjorklund, & Murphy, 2000), i.e., they tend to “stubbornly” maintain their disapproval of the act without supporting reasons. In what follows, we critically reassess the traditional account, predicated on the notion that, among other things, most subjects simply fail to be convinced that the siblings’ actions are truly harm-free, thus having excellent reasons to disapprove of these acts. In line with this critique, 3 studies found that subjects 1) tended not to believe that the siblings’ actions were in fact harmless; 2) notwithstanding that, and in spite of holding a number of “counterargument-immune” reasons, subjects could be effectively maneuvered into exhibiting all the trademark signs of a morally dumbfounded state (which they subsequently recanted), and 3) with subjects’ beliefs about harm and standards of normative evaluation properly factored in, a more rigorous assessment procedure yielded a dumbfounding estimate of about 0. Based on these and related results, we contend that subjects’ reactions are wholly in line with the rationalist model of moral judgment and that their use in support of claims of moral arationalism should be reevaluated.
Psychopathy, characterized by symptoms of emotional detachment, reduced guilt and empathy and a callous disregard for the rights and welfare of others, is a strong risk factor for immoral behavior. Psychopathy is also marked by abnormal attention with downstream consequences on emotional processing. To examine the influence of task demands on moral evaluation in psychopathy, functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to measure neural response and functional connectivity in 88 incarcerated male subjects (28 with Psychopathy Checklist Revised (PCL-R) scores ⩾ 30) while they viewed dynamic visual stimuli depicting interpersonal harm and interpersonal assistance in two contexts, implicit and explicit. During the implicit task, high psychopathy was associated with reduced activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and caudate when viewing harmful compared with helpful social interactions. Functional connectivity seeded in the right amygdala and right temporoparietal junction revealed decreased coupling with the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), anterior insula, striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. In the explicit task, higher trait psychopathy predicted reduced signal change in ACC and amygdala, accompanied by decreased functional connectivity to temporal pole, insula and striatum, but increased connectivity with dorsal ACC. Psychopathy did not influence behavioral performance in either task, despite differences in neural activity and functional connectivity. These findings provide the first direct evidence that hemodynamic activity and neural coupling within the salience network are disrupted in psychopathy, and that the effects of psychopathy on moral evaluation are influenced by attentional demands.
Morality and emotions are linked, but what is the nature of their correspondence? Many "whole number" accounts posit specific correspondences between moral content and discrete emotions, such that harm is linked to anger, and purity is linked to disgust. A review of the literature provides little support for these specific morality-emotion links. Moreover, any apparent specificity may arise from global features shared between morality and emotion, such as affect and conceptual content. These findings are consistent with a constructionist perspective of the mind, which argues against a whole number of discrete and domain-specific mental mechanisms underlying morality and emotion. Instead, constructionism emphasizes the flexible combination of basic and domain-general ingredients such as core affect and conceptualization in creating the experience of moral judgments and discrete emotions. The implications of constructionism in moral psychology are discussed, and we propose an experimental framework for rigorously testing morality-emotion links.
© 2015 by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.
Affective science conducts interdisciplinary research into the emotions and other affective phenomena. Currently, such research is hampered by the lack of common definitions of terms used to describe, categorise and report both individual emotional experiences and the results of scientific investigations of such experiences. High quality ontologies provide formal definitions for types of entities in reality and for the relationships between such entities, definitions which can be used to disambiguate and unify data across different disciplines. Heretofore, there has been little effort directed towards such formal representation for affective phenomena, in part because of widespread debates within the affective science community on matters of definition and categorization. We describe our efforts towards developing an Emotion Ontology (EMO) to serve the affective science community. We here focus on conformity to the BFO upper ontology and disambiguation of polysemous terminology. The full ontology is available for download from: https://emotion- ontology.googlecode. com/svn/trunk/ontology/EMO.owl under the Creative Commons CC BY 3.0 Attribution license.
Negative gut reactions to harmless-but-offensive transgressions can be driven by inferences about the moral character of the agent more so than condemnation of the act itself. Dissociations between moral judgments of acts and persons emerged, such that participants viewed a harmless-but-offensive transgression to be a less immoral act than a harmful act, yet more indicative of poor moral character. Participants were more likely to become “morally dumbfounded” when asked to justify their judgments of a harmless-but-offensive act relative to a harmful act. However, they were significantly less likely to become morally dumbfounded when asked to justify character judgments of persons who engaged in the harmless-but-offensive transgression, an effect based in part on the information-rich nature of such behaviors. Distinguishing between evaluations of acts and persons helps account for both moral outrage over harmless transgressions and when individuals are (and are not) at a loss to explain their own judgments.
We defend the fundamental ontological-pragmatic principle that where there are continua in reality science is often forced to make partly fiat terminological delimitations. In particular, this principle applies when it comes to describing biological organisms, their parts, properties, and relations. Human-made fiat delimitations are indispensable at the level of both individuals and the natural kinds which they instantiate. The kinds of pragmatically based 'fiatness' that we describe can create incompatibilities and lack of interoperability even between properly designed ontologies, if not appropriately handled.
Psychopathy is a personality disorder associated with a profound lack of empathy. Neuroscientists have associated empathy and its interindividual variation with how strongly participants activate brain regions involved in their own actions, emotions and sensations while viewing those of others. Here we compared brain activity of 18 psychopathic offenders with 26 control subjects while viewing video clips of emotional hand interactions and while experiencing similar interactions. Brain regions involved in experiencing these interactions were not spontaneously activated as strongly in the patient group while viewing the video clips. However, this group difference was markedly reduced when we specifically instructed participants to feel with the actors in the videos. Our results suggest that psychopathy is not a simple incapacity for vicarious activations but rather reduced spontaneous vicarious activations co-existing with relatively normal deliberate counterparts.
Recent work in cognitive science provides overwhelming evidence for a link between emotion and moral judgment. I review findings from psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and research on psychopathology and conclude that emotions are not merely correlated with moral judgments but they are also, in some sense, both necessary and sufficient. I then use these findings along with some anthropological observations to support several philosophical theories: first, I argue that sentimentalism is true: to judge that something is wrong is to have a sentiment of disapprobation towards it. Second, I argue that moral facts are response-dependent: the bad just is that which cases disapprobation in a community of moralizers. Third, I argue that a form of motivational internalism is true: ordinary moral judgments are intrinsically motivating, and all non-motivating moral judgments are parasitic on these.
Previous studies associated psychopathy in adults with deficits in empathy but these studies did not directly compare cognitive and emotional facets of empathy. The present study sought to establish whether psychopathy is associated with impairments in emotional empathy among adult offenders. Participants were 90 male offenders scoring low (n = 29), medium (n = 33) or high (n = 28) on the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) and n = 28 male noncriminal controls. Empathy functioning was assessed through self-report and computerized decision tasks, differentiating between perspective-taking (cognitive empathy) and compassion (emotional empathy). Against expectations, level of psychopathy among the offenders was not associated with either emotional or cognitive empathy. Offenders however had lower scores for both cognitive and emotional components of empathy functioning than controls. Both facets of empathy showed small but significant positive correlations with education level and social desirability. The methods employed to assess differences in empathy functioning may not be sensitive enough to assess differences in forensic samples.
This book argues that recent work in philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology supports two radical hypotheses about the nature of morality: moral values are based on emotional responses, and these emotional responses are inculcated by culture, not hard-wired through natural selection. In the first half of the book, the hypothesis that morality has an emotional foundation is defended. Evidence from brain imaging, social psychology, and psychopathology suggest that, when we judge something to be right or wrong, we are merely expressing our emotions. The book claims that these emotions do not track objective features of reality; rather, the rightness and wrongness of an act consists in the fact that people are disposed to have certain emotions towards it. In the second half of the book, it turns to a defence of moral relativism. Moral facts depend on emotional responses, and emotional responses vary from culture to culture. The book surveys the anthropological record to establish moral variation, and draws on cultural history to show how attitudes toward practices such as cannibalism and marriage change over time. It also criticizes evidence from animal behaviour and child development that has been taken to support the claim that moral attitudes are hard-wired by natural selection. The book concludes that there is no single true morality, but also argues that some moral values are better than others; moral progress is possible.
The Hare Psychopathy Checklist (PCL; Hare, Neumann, & Mokros 2018) scales are among the most widely used forensic assessment tools. Their perceived utility rests partly on their ability to assess stable personality traits indicative of a lack of conscience, which then facilitates behavioral predictions useful in forensic decisions. In this systematic review, we evaluate the empirical evidence behind 3 fundamental justifications for using the PCL scales in forensics, namely, that they are empirically predictive of (1) criminal behavior, (2) treatment outcomes, and (3) a lack of conscience. We found the PCL scales can predict criminal behavior to a statistically significant degree, though with important limitations. We found no evidence of PCL psychopathy being predictive of treatment and rehabilitation outcomes. We found no evidence of PCL psychopathy being predictive of a lack of conscience. These findings disprove widespread beliefs about PCL psychopathy among forensic practitioners and questions the current and future role of the PCL scales in forensic settings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: journal abstract)
Background
A lack of concern for the feelings, needs or suffering of others and lack of remorse after hurting or mistreating others are key characteristics of antisocial personality disorder (ASPD), otherwise identified as dissocial personality disorder (DPD) and suggest that impaired emotion processing and empathy may contribute to antisocial behaviour. Whilst psychopathy is more commonly associated with an absence of empathy and emotional affect, the nature of emotion processing and empathy deficits specific to adult male ASPD populations with and without co-morbid psychopathy has not been systematically reviewed.
Aim
To determine the nature of emotion processing and empathy deficits specific to adult male ASPD populations with and without co-morbid psychopathy.
Method
We conducted a literature search across seven electronic databases and a range of grey literature sites, hand-searched reference lists of relevant papers and contacted fourteen authors of published studies related to this topic. Inclusion and exclusion criteria were applied and quality assessments undertaken on eligible studies.
Results
Searches located 10,217 records and 205 were eligible for full assessment. 22 studies were identified as suitable for inclusion in this review and 19 reported evidence of emotion processing deficits in ASPD/DPD groups with and without co-morbid psychopathy.
Conclusion
This review found no evidence of empathy deficits in ASPD/DPD groups with or without co-morbid psychopathy and only limited evidence of diminished startle reactivity in those with ASPD alone. In contrast, ASPD groups with co-morbid psychopathy were found to exhibit aberrant patterns of affective reactivity and difficulty when processing negative/aversive stimuli which lends support to the notion that these groups may be differentiated in terms of emotional dysfunction. However, as the majority of reviewed studies employed ASPD/DPD groups that included participants with co-morbid psychopathy/psychopathic traits and did not delineate effects for ASPD/DPD groups with and without co-morbid psychopathy, the degree to which emotion processing deficits were mediated by co-morbid psychopathy or evident in ASPD/DPD alone could not be established. Therefore, further research to compare emotion processing and empathy in these groups is required before firm conclusions can be drawn about the extent of overlap between these populations and/or the differences that exist between them.
Research on moral judgment has been dominated by rationalist models, in which moral judgment is thought to be caused by moral reasoning. The author gives 4 reasons for considering the hypothesis that moral reasoning does not cause moral judgment; rather, moral reasoning is usually a post hoc construction, generated after a judgment has been reached. The social intuitionist model is presented as an alternative to rationalist models. The model is a social model in that it deemphasizes the private reasoning done by individuals and emphasizes instead the importance of social and cultural influences. The model is an intuitionist model in that it states that moral judgment is generally the result of quick, automatic evaluations (intuitions). The model is more consistent than rationalist models with recent findings in social, cultural, evolutionary, and biological psychology, as well as in anthropology and primatology.
In this paper it is proposed that important components of moral development and moral judgment rely on two forms of emotional learning: stimulus-reinforcement and response-outcome learning. Data in support of this position will be primarily drawn from work with individuals with the developmental condition of psychopathy as well as fMRI studies with healthy individuals. Individuals with psychopathy show impairment on moral judgment tasks and a pronounced increased risk for instrumental antisocial behavior. It will be argued that these impairments are developmental consequences of impaired stimulus-aversive conditioning on the basis of distress cue reinforcers and response-outcome learning in individuals with this disorder.
Although psychopathic individuals are often considered immoral in their thinking, research support for this view has been inconsistent. We examined psychopathy's relation to two indices of moral reasoning and decision-making, namely (1) Kohlbergian moral dilemmas and (2) sacrificial moral dilemmas in an undergraduate sample (N = 191). We hypothesized that psychopathic traits would not be strongly associated with moral reasoning on Kohlbergian moral dilemmas, but that they would be associated with a greater willingness to engage in utilitarian moral judgment by virtue of psychopathic individuals' affective deficits and emotional detachment. We expected these relations to be most pronounced for the psychopathy subdimensions Fearless Dominance and Coldheartedness. Counter to prediction, we found only a modest negative association between psychopathic traits and Kohlbergian moral reasoning. Psychopathic traits did not relate consistently to utilitarian decision-making. These results suggest that, despite the common perception that psychopathic individuals are deficient in moral understanding, psychopathic traits may be largely unassociated with profound moral reasoning deficits.
After describing the disorder of psychopathy, I examine the theories and the evidence concerning the psychopaths’ deficient moral capacities. I first examine whether or not psychopaths can pass tests of moral knowledge. Most of the evidence suggests that they can. If there is a lack of moral understanding, then it has to be due to an incapacity that affects not their declarative knowledge of moral norms, but their deeper understanding of them. I then examine two suggestions: it is their deficient practical reason or their stunted emotions that are at fault. The evidence supports both explanations. I conclude with an overview of the debate concerning whether they are morally or legally responsible for their actions.
We respond to Newman and Baskin-Sommers’s (2016) criticisms of our meta-analytic and narrative synthesis of the response modulation hypothesis (RMH) of psychopathy (Smith & Lilienfeld, 2015). We concur with Newman and Baskin-Sommers that our results offer modest support for the RMH and that several of our arguments apply with equal force to rival etiological models of psychopathy. Nevertheless, we contend that Newman and Baskin-Sommers’ criticisms of our findings and conclusions are unconvincing, and that the research support for the RMH is considerably more mixed than implied by Newman and Baskin-Sommers. We address a number of conceptual and methodological concerns regarding the RMH literature, especially (a) the ambiguous operationalization of a dominant response set, (b) selective and inconsistent interpretation of findings, (c) the failure of successive modifications in the RMH to bolster the model’s predictive power, (d) the hazards of ex juvantibus logic (reasoning backward from what works), (e) reliance on a positive test strategy in theory testing, and (f) the questionable assumption that psychopathy is a monolithic entity, rendering it unlikely that the RMH provides a comprehensive causal account of psychopathy. We conclude with a discussion of broader lessons for the psychopathy field imparted by the RMH debate, with particular emphasis on the problematic track record of models of specific etiology in the field of psychopathology at large.
Psychopathic individuals are often characterized as lacking a moral sense. Although this hypothesis has received ample experimental attention over the past decade, findings have been inconsistent. To elucidate the relationship between psychopathy and abnormal moral judgment, we conducted a meta-analysis of the research on psychopathy and morality-related variables (k = 23, N = 4376). A random effects model indicated a small but statistically significant relation between psychopathy and moral decision-making (rw = .16) and moral reasoning (rw = .10) tasks. These results reveal at best modest support for the common perception that psychopathic individuals fail to understand moral principles. A secondary meta-analysis (k = 9, N = 4294) of the growing body of literature on the relationship between psychopathy and moral reasoning on moral foundations measures provides preliminary evidence that psychopathic individuals may possess a differential set of "moral taste buds" than less psychopathic individuals. We discuss the implications of the results from both meta-analyses for models of the etiology of psychopathy and the criminal responsibility of psychopathic individuals. (PsycINFO Database Record
This research investigated whether emotional hyporeactivity affects moral judgements and choices of action in sacrificial moral dilemmas and in everyday moral conflict situations in which harm to other's welfare is differentially involved. Twenty-six participants with high trait psychopathy (HP) and 25 with low trait psychopathy (LP) were selected based on the primary psychopathy scale of the Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy Scale. HP participants were more likely to sacrifice one person to save others in sacrificial dilemmas and to pursue a personal advantage in everyday moral situations entailing harm to another's good. While deciding in these situations, HP participants experienced lower unpleasantness as compared to LP participants. Conversely, no group differences emerged in choice of action and unpleasantness ratings for everyday moral situations that did not entail harm to others. Importantly, moral judgements did not differ in the two groups. These results suggest that high psychopathy trait affects choices of action in sacrificial dilemmas because of reduced emotional reactivity to harmful acts. The dissociation between choice of action and moral judgement suggests that the former is more closely related to emotional experience. Also, emotion seems to play a critical role in discriminating harmful from harmless acts and in driving decisions accordingly.
By some estimates, there are as many as twelve million psychopaths in the United States alone. Cold-blooded, remorseless, and strangely charismatic, they commit at least half of all serious and violent crimes. Supposedly, most serial killers are psychopaths, as, surprisngly, are large numbers of corporate executives. They seem to be an inescapable, and fascinating, threat in our midst. But is psychopathy a brain disorder, as many scientists now claim? Or is it just a reflection of modern society's deepest fears? The Myth of the Born Criminal offers the first comprehensive critique of the concept of psychopathy from the eighteenth-century origins of the born-criminal theory to the latest neuroimaging, behavioural genetics, and statistical studies. Jarkko Jalava, Stephanie Griffiths, and Michael Maraun use their expertise in neuropsychology, psychometrics, and criminology to dispel the myth that psychopathy is a biologically-based condition. Deconstructing the emotive language with which both research scientists and reporters describe the psychopaths among us, they explain how the idea of psychopathy offers a comforting neurobiological solution to the mystery of evil. A stunning merger of rigorous science and clear-sighted cultural analysis, The Myth of the Born Criminal is for anyone who wonders just what truth - or fiction - lurks behind the study of psychopathy.
The chapter is concerned with a connection between emotional deficits of psychopaths and their inability to linguistically express and communicate emotions. This idea goes back to Cleckley’s account of “semantic dementia.” In pursuing the thesis that psychopaths “know the words but not the music,” the author draws on qualitative empirical research concerning forensic psychiatric patients. It is argued that certain negative emotions, such as guilt, shame, and disgust, are relevant for moral understanding. In order to understand and to cause emotions, we can make use of language since words can represent feelings. The specific deficit of alexithymia, that is, the incapacity to put feelings into words, seems pertinent in this regard, but respective research is inconclusive. A different approach is therefore applied, one that does not focus on linguistic parts, but on meaning-conferring narratives. In conclusion, the author aims to identify traits of narrative incoherence in psychopathy, using examples from her own interviews.
This volume develops a new account of the nature of moral judgment. Evidence from developmental psychology and psychopathologies suggests that emotions play a crucial role in normal moral judgment. This indicates that philosophical accounts of moral judgment that eschew the emotions are mistaken. However, the volume also argues that prevailing philosophical accounts that embrace a role for the emotions are also mistaken. The empirical work points to a quite different account of moral judgment than philosophers have considered, an account in which normative rules and emotions make independent contributions to moral judgment. Further, the volume argues that the emotions play an important role in the normative rules that get fixed in the culture. The history of norms indicates that norms that resonate with our emotions are more likely to survive.
Due to the current revolution in brain research the search for the "moral brain" became a serious endeavour. Nowadays, neural circuits that are indispensable for moral and social behaviour are discovered and the brains of psychopaths and criminals - the classical anti-heroes of morality - are scanned with curiosity, even enthusiasm. How revolutionary this current research might be, the quest for a localisable ethical centre or moral organ is far from new. The moral brain was a recurrent theme in the works of neuroscientists during the 19th and 20th century. From the phrenology era to the encephalitis pandemic in the 1920s a wide range of European and American scientists (neurologists, psychiatrists, anthropologists and criminologists) speculated about and discussed the location of a moral sense in the human cortex. Encouraged by medical discoveries and concerned by terrifying phenomena like crime or "moral insanity" (psychopathy) even renowned and outstanding neurologists, including Moritz Benedikt, Paul Flechsig, Arthur Van Gehuchten, Oskar Vogt or Constantin von Monakow, had the nerves to make their speculations public. This book presents the first overview of believers and disbelievers in a cerebral seat of human morality, their positions and arguments and offers an explanation for these historical attempts to localise our moral sense, in spite of the massive disapproving commentary launched by colleagues.
The causes of psychopathy, a condition characterized by interpersonal (e.g., superficial charm), affective (e.g., lack of empathy), and behavioral (e.g., impulsive actions) features, remain contested. The present review examines 1 of the most influential etiological models of psychopathy, the response modulation hypothesis (RMH), which proposes that psychopathic individuals exhibit difficulties in adjusting their behavior in the presence of a dominant response set. We conduct a meta-analysis and narrative literature review to examine the RMH quantitatively and qualitatively, estimate the statistical effects of response modulation (RM) deficits in psychopathic individuals, and ascertain the boundary conditions of the RMH. Ninety-four samples from published and unpublished studies involving 7,340 participants were identified for inclusion. Overall results provided some support for the RMH, revealing a small to medium relationship between psychopathy and RM deficits (r = .20, p < .001, d = .41) that extended to both psychopathy dimensions. Moreover, as predicted by the RMH, RM deficits were observed for both affectively neutral and affectively laden tasks. A number of moderators, such as anxiety, laboratory task, dependent measure, psychopathy measure, and race, contributed to significant variability in effect sizes; we also found evidence for potential publication bias using 2 methods, raising questions concerning the robustness of RM findings. An ancillary narrative review revealed that the RMH is inconsistent with a number of replicated findings in the psychopathy literature, suggesting that the RMH, at least in its present form, is unlikely to provide a comprehensive etiological account of psychopathy. Nevertheless, more recent attentional versions of the RMH may hold promise with respect to intervention. Further fruitful directions for research on the RMH, including the use of multiple dependent measures of RM and latent variable approaches, are delineated.
This review outlines the neurocognitive and neurobiological models of psychopathy. Neurocognitive models propose that deficits in cognition (specifically attention) underlie the deficient processing of emotional information among people with psychopathy. Neurobiological models propose that abnormalities in brain structures, functions, and circuitry give rise to the emotional and behavioral disturbances, including violent criminal behavior, that characterize the disorder. The relevant neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies of individuals with psychopathy are reviewed. Findings implicate structural and functional abnormalities in prefrontal, limbic, and paralimbic structures, including the orbital frontal cortex, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, anterior superior temporal gyrus, insula, anterior and posterior cingulate, amygdala, and parahippocampal gyrus. Proposed therapeutic and neurobiological treatment interventions are discussed.
The Two-Process theory of psychopathy posits that distinct etiological mechanisms contribute to the condition: (a) a weakness in defensive (fear) reactivity related to affective-interpersonal features, and (b) impaired cognitive-executive functioning, marked by reductions in brain responses such as P3, related to impulsive-antisocial features. The current study examined relations between psychopathy factors and electrocortical response to emotional and neutral pictures in male offenders (N = 139) assessed using the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R). Impulsive-antisocial features of the PCL-R (Factor 2) were associated with reduced amplitude of earlier P3 brain response to pictures regardless of valence, whereas the affective-interpersonal dimension (Factor 1) was associated specifically with reductions in late positive potential response to aversive pictures. Findings provide further support for the Two-Process theory and add to a growing body of evidence linking the impulsive-antisocial facet of psychopathy to the broader construct of externalizing proneness. Findings are discussed in terms of current initiatives directed at incorporating neuroscientific concepts into psychopathology classification. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).
This book argues that recent work in philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology supports two radical hypotheses about the nature of morality: moral values are based on emotional responses, and these emotional responses are inculcated by culture, not hard-wired through natural selection. In the first half of the book, the hypothesis that morality has an emotional foundation is defended. Evidence from brain imaging, social psychology, and psychopathology suggest that, when we judge something to be right or wrong, we are merely expressing our emotions. The book claims that these emotions do not track objective features of reality; rather, the rightness and wrongness of an act consists in the fact that people are disposed to have certain emotions towards it. In the second half of the book, it turns to a defence of moral relativism. Moral facts depend on emotional responses, and emotional responses vary from culture to culture. The book surveys the anthropological record to establish moral variation, and draws on cultural history to show how attitudes toward practices such as cannibalism and marriage change over time. It also criticizes evidence from animal behaviour and child development that has been taken to support the claim that moral attitudes are hard-wired by natural selection. The book concludes that there is no single true morality, but also argues that some moral values are better than others; moral progress is possible.
Empathy has become a common point of debate in moral psychology. Recent developments in psychiatry, neurosciences and social psychology have led to the revival of sentimentalism, and the ‘empathy thesis’ has suggested that affective empathy, in particular, is a necessary criterion of moral agency. The case of psychopaths – individuals incapable of affective empathy and moral agency, yet capable of rationality – has been utilised in support of this case. Critics, however, have been vocal. They have asserted that the case of autism proves the empathy thesis wrong; that psychopathy centres on rational rather than empathic limitations; that empathy is not relevant to many common normative behaviours; and that rationality is required when empathy fails. The present paper analyses these four criticisms. It will be claimed that they each face severe difficulties, and that moral agency ought to be approached via a multi-tier model, with affective empathy as a baseline.
Facial expressions play a critical role in social interactions by eliciting rapid responses in the observer. Failure to perceive and experience a normal range and depth of emotion seriously impact interpersonal communication and relationships. As has been demonstrated across a number of domains, abnormal emotion processing in individuals with psychopathy plays a key role in their lack of empathy. However, the neuroimaging literature is unclear as to whether deficits are specific to particular emotions such as fear and perhaps sadness. Moreover, findings are inconsistent across studies. In the current experiment, 80 incarcerated adult males scoring high, medium, and low on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning while viewing dynamic facial expressions of fear, sadness, happiness, and pain. Participants who scored high on the PCL-R showed a reduction in neuro-hemodynamic response to all four categories of facial expressions in the face processing network (inferior occipital gyrus, fusiform gyrus, and superior temporal sulcus (STS)) as well as the extended network (inferior frontal gyrus and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC)), which supports a pervasive deficit across emotion domains. Unexpectedly, the response in dorsal insula to fear, sadness, and pain was greater in psychopaths than non-psychopaths. Importantly, the orbitofrontal cortex and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), regions critically implicated in affective and motivated behaviors, were significantly less active in individuals with psychopathy during the perception of all four emotional expressions.
Few mental disorders are the source of as much fascination on one hand and confusion on the other hand as psychopathy, also known as psychopathic, antisocial or dissocial personality disorder. This review focuses first on conceptual issues, clarifying the nature of psychopathic personality disorder. It then focuses on operational issues, reviewing some of the most commonly used procedures for measuring features of the disorder in adult clinical-forensic settings. It concludes by discussing a 'hot topic' in the field: the nature of the association between antisocial behavior and psychopathic personality disorder.
A revised and abridged version of the authors' "Psychopathy and Delinquency," (1956). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This landmark book on the psychodynamics of psychopathy is divided into four sections. Part I, "Origins," explores the history of the dynamic understanding of psychopathy and its psychobiological foundations. It offers an object-relational developmental theory to explain the gensis of psychopathy. Part II, "Structure and Dynamics," probes the conscious and unconscious mind of the psychopath along the dimensions of affective experience and defensive operations. . . . "Violence, Psychosis, and Related States," Part III, develops a differential model of human aggression as either affective or predatory and hypothesizes that the psychopathic process is partucarly suited to predatory violence. . . . The last section, "Treatment," focuses on resistances encountered in the patient and countertransference threats to successful treatment.
Clinicians will find this book helpful because it goes beyond description of behavior into the structure and functioning of the psychopathic mind. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This study examined the relationship between psychopathy and two components of empathy including a cognitive component (e.g., perspective-taking ability) and an affective component (e.g., compassion) in a community sample. The Psychopathic Personality Inventory Short Form was used to assess psychopathy and several psychological measures were used to test empathy including the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy-2, and the Test of Self Conscious Affect -3. Across instruments, psychopathy (as a unitary construct) appeared to be negligibly correlated with perspective-taking scales and negatively correlated with the affective components of empathy. Findings indicated that the emotional deficits were noted most prominently for the behavioral component of psychopathy. Results also showed that higher psychopathy scores in community participants were linked to higher levels of antisocial conduct.