Do you find yourself failing to strike a balance between aggression and your emotional background? Are your urges far removed from empathy? Most likely not. Researchers approximate that psychopaths make up only one per cent of the general population and are three times more likely to be men. However, this average value goes ‘dangerously’ high in a prison setting. For example, around 20 per cent of the prisoners in America have been identified as psychopaths. Their shallow emotions and strong ‘misinformed’ urges make them unsuitable to function socially, hence the sociopath behaviour, ranging from agreeable idiosyncrasies to heinous crimes.
Recent research based on the brain scans of jailed psychopaths, revealed the neuro-anatomy of the disorder suggesting their brains are fundamentally different. They were marked with the abnormal structural weakening of the white tract matter or the neuron superhighway, connecting the prefrontal cortex (part of the brain that makes decisions and governs self-control) and the almond-shaped amygdala (the part that processes emotions).
It becomes clear that inefficient communication between these brain regions ends with uncontrolled impulses, the problem worsened by the person’s apparent blindness to complex emotions. Such a mental landscape also makes them tone-deaf and manipulative. Their psychosis is completely independent of the classic signs of mental illness like hallucinations, anxiousness, etc. This helps them put on a ‘mask of sanity’. Psychopathy is not a recipe for a dangerous criminal, often it simply leads to pre-emptive social understanding — something that prevails in office spaces, classrooms and other communal circuits.
The authors of the new study explained, “Psycho-paths lie and manipulate yet feel no compunction or regrets — in fact, they don’t feel particularly deeply about anything at all.” The line of thought propagating the inability to ‘feel’ has been challenged by a big-wig in psychopathy, Joseph Newman, who claims that psychopaths suffer from an attention deficit instead. “Emotions have no power if you don’t attend to them. Psycho-paths don’t pay attention to them. Emotional deficit comes from attention deficit,” he says. This understanding, he believes, can also form the basis of treating psychopaths, something that has been considered impossible for ages. And it is best to attend to suspicions during childhood while the brain connections are still being established.
Researchers agree and maintain that the disorder surfaces as a result of both genetic disposition and environmental factors. The condition is yet to be fully understood, the triggers remain unknown but the hallmark of psychopathy re-mains, as Newman puts it, “weaker urges breaking through even weaker restraints”
