Bad Seed: Child Psychopathy Emerges
Volume 1, Issue 10 -- Published: Monday, Sep 1, 1997 -- Last Updated: Monday, Mar 11, 2002

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"A recent study that adapted an adult scale of psychopathy to the childhood level indicates that psychopathy has a childhood manifestation which can be measured reliably (J. Abnormal Psychology 1997, Vol. 106, No. 3, 425-438). The study demonstrated that children with psychopathic personalities, like their adult counterparts, were serious and stable offenders, impulsive, and prone to externalizing disorders. The scale was also predictive of serious stable antisocial behavior in adolescence.


The Psychopathy Checklist (PCL), the state-of-the-art scale for adult psychopathy, was translated into a Childhood Psychopathy Scale (CPS). Certain constructs had no childhood counterparts and could not be included, for example, 'promiscuous sexual behavior" and "many short-term marital relationships." The operational validity of the CPS was dependent on identifying characteristics of adult psychopathic behavior in 430 at-risk boys ages 12 and 13. Each boy, his main caregiver, and a teacher were interviewed to identify those children at risk for delinquency and criminal behavior."

Continued:

http://echo.forensicpanel.com/1997/9/1/badseed.html

Childhood Disorders

"Psychopathy -- mostly as APD -- has been related to conduct problems in children, but there are so many overlapping conduct disorders that the concept gets muddled. Specialists realize that, given a child’s developing and changing personality, it is difficult to diagnose mental disorders among adolescents. Additionally, some common behavioral manifestations of youth, such as anger, mood instability, and defiance, match symptoms of disorders, and thus it is difficult to know when this behavior in a specific individual is a passing stage or a serious concern.

The real problem is a persistent pattern of antisocial behavior during childhood and adolescence, such as violating social rules, aggression toward animals or other children, destruction of property, deceitfulness, theft, and serious rule violations. The risk factors for repeat offenses are 50% from childhood to adolescence, and 40-75% continued from adolescence into adulthood. There are six different diagnoses used in the DSM-IV for childhood antisocial behaviors:"

Continued:

http://www.akpcep.com/?pid=art02

WHY ARE CHILDREN DIFFERENT?
(lecture)
V.Antonov
Translated by T. Danilevich

"Two children have just come to my mind.

Once I was one of the guests among a lot of people including families with children - some kind of celebration was going to take place.

So I was sitting on the sofa. A baby climbed onto the sofa, crawled up to me and kissed me on the cheek sincerely, powerfully! He just poured his love over me! He kissed me with such a cordial love! If I was not familiar with his biography, I'd thought he had been a student of our school. For I never had seen such kids in our school.

And here is another child. I met him some times in the streets of Petersburg. He was about five, probably. His look was that of hatred - dreadful, piercing look of hatred towards everything and everyone. And this look and this devilish inner state were present constantly.

I met him first when he was tearing a hat of one of the boys of his age. Our glances met and he poured his hatred over me and ran away. Next time I saw him scratching someone's car with his knife. Our glances met again, there was the same hatred in his and he ran away again.

These are two extremes.

I heard such an idea that all children are little angels, we have to become like children and so on. So what kind of children?

When Jesus said: "Become like children" He meant a quite concrete, specific quality of the best of children "wide openness of the soul" (this is understandable from the context as well as from other - apocryphal-gospels). He calls up those listening to Him to "open up", to "undress" their souls before each other in emotional love. For he who is not able of doing this before his friend, he is not able of doing it before God.

Jesus spoke of kind, tender, sincere children. But there are also children that are spiteful, rude, extremely egoistic, lying, looking at other people as caged wild animals.

So why are children so different?"

Continued:

http://www.swami-center.org/en/text/Why_Children_Different.html

The importance of callous-unemotional traits for extending the concept of psychopathy to children.

Barry, C. T., Frick, P. J., DeShazo, T. M., McCoy, M. G., Ellis, M., & Loney, B. R. (2000). The importance of callous-unemotional traits for extending the concept of psychopathy to children. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 109(2), 335-340.

"This study focused on the use of callous–unemotional (CU) traits to identify a subgroup of children with both attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and a conduct problem diagnosis (oppositional defiant disorder [ODD] or conduct disorder [CD] who show characteristics similar to adults with psychopathy. In a clinic-referred sample of children aged 6 to 13 years (N = 154), those with diagnoses of both ADHD and ODD/CD were divided on the basis of teacher ratings of CU traits. Children high on these traits showed features typically associated with psychopathy, such as a lack of fearfulness and a reward-dominant response style. Furthermore, children with CU traits seemed less distressed by their behavior problems. These findings are consistent with research on adults showing that impulsivity and antisocial behavior alone are insufficient to document persons who fit the construct of psychopathy."

From:

http://www.hare.org/abstracts/barry1.html

Responsiveness to distress cues in the child with psychopathic tendencies.

Blair, R. J. R. (1999). Responsiveness to distress cues in the child with psychopathic tendencies. Personality and Individual Differences, 27(1), 135-145.

"This study investigates the psychophysiological responsiveness of children with emotional and behavioral difficulties, divided according to their Psychopathy Screening Device (PSD) scores (Frick & Hare, in press) to distress cues, threatening and neutral stimuli. From this population 16 high PSD scoring children and 16 low scoring controls were shown slides of these three types of stimuli and their electrodermal responses were recorded. An additional 16 normal developing children in mainstream education were also presented with these stimuli. The high PSD scoring children showed, relative to the controls, reduced electrodermal responses to the distress cues and threatening stimuli. In contrast, the two groups did not differ in their electrodermal responses to the neutral stimuli. The results are interpreted within the Violence Inhibition Mechanism model (Blair, 1995) of Psychopathy."

From:

http://www.hare.org/abstracts/blair1.html

The Childhood Psychopath: Bad Seed or Bad Parents?
Risk Assessment

An excerpt:

"Hare and some of his colleagues went on to develop the Psychopathy Screening Device (PSD) for children as a 20-item, 0-2 rating scale similar to the PCL-R. It has a similar two-factor structure (Callus/Unemotional and Impulsive/Conduct problems), and was completed by teachers who interviewed each child assessed. Researchers Fisher and Blair used the PSD in the context of reinforcement sensitivity with 39 children aged 9-16. They found that poor performance on a card-playing task and on the moral/conventional distinction tasks were significantly correlated with behavioral disturbances. That is, those children who played cards badly and also made little distinction between moral and conventional transgressions (like cheating) had higher ratings on the PSD. Since adult psychopaths had similar results, this indicates that the PSD may be a reliable device for prediction of adult psychopathy."

More at:

http://www.crimelibrary.com/criminology/psychopath/4.htm