Is There Any Hope At All For Psychopaths?

Bad Decision Makers?

People have argued that psychopaths are not evil at heart but are just really bad decision makers. Joshua Buckholtz, an associate professor of psychology at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA, ran tests on 49 prison inmates where they were asked to choose between getting less money immediately or more money later. The ventral striatum which is a region in the brain became instantly very active in participants who appeared highly sociopathic on the PCR-L scale.

Low Levels Of Love Hormones

Low oxytocin sometimes results in low empathy according to researchers. This problem with having empathy may be correlated to low levels of “love hormone” and the role of the vMPFC in psychopathy. The vMPFC, narrates Buckholtz and his colleagues, is the controller of the reward-processing ventral striatum. In case we are offered $100,000 to kill someone, our vMPFC would inform the ventral striatum, “Hang on a minute! You may want to reassess that trade-off — is it really worth taking someone else’s life for money? And can you bear the consequences of your actions?” But Buckholtz’s research has discovered that the vMPFC and the ventral striatum are not interacting.

Buckholtz Explanation

Buckholtz suggests, “The striatum assigns values to different actions without much temporal context. We need the prefrontal cortex to make prospective judgments [about] how an action will affect us in the future — ‘If I do this, then this bad thing will happen.'” He explains, “[I]f you break that connection in anyone, they’re going to start making bad choices because they won’t have the information that would otherwise guide their decision-making to more adaptive ends. [Psychopaths are] not aliens, they’re people who make bad decisions.” 

Testosterone To Blame?

Most of the research work done by different researchers have all pointed to faulty brain circuits. So what is to blame for this issue in some areas of the brain? Many blame male sex hormone testosterone as the main reason. Prof. Karin Roelofs, at the Donders Institute at Radboud University in the Netherlands, did a study which proved that the amygdala and prefrontal cortex in the brain are not connected.

More Males Than Females

Most studies have in fact found that there are more psychopaths in males than females, so testosterone could be a very heavy factor. “Psychopathic individuals,” the study claims, “are notorious for their controlled goal-directed aggressive behavior. Yet, during social challenges, they often show uncontrolled emotional behavior.” Prof. Roelofs  says this is a “paradoxical aspect of psychopathy.” Researchers hope to prove that there is “a potential imbalance in testosterone function.” So is it treatable?

Incurable But Treatable

If psychopathy is caused by neurons does that mean there is not a therapeutic way to reduce it or treat it? There has been proof in prisons that it can be rehabilitated. It has often been disputed that psychopaths have attentional deficits. If other mental disorders can be treated why can’t psychopathy be treated? One huge difficulty is that psychopaths tend to be immune to any kind of punishment. The disconnection between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex in their brain has left them emotionless.