Are psychopathic children 'blind' to fearful, sad expressions?

Crime Times
Vol. 7, No. 3, 2001 Page 3&4

Children with psychopathic tendencies have difficulty recognizing sadness and fear, according to a new British study.

D. Stevens and colleagues studied nine children who exhibited symptoms of psychopathy, and nine control children. Each child viewed sad, fearful, happy, and angry facial expressions, and listened to voices expressing these emotions. "The children with psychopathic tendencies showed selective impairments in the recognition of both sad and fearful facial expressions and sad vocal tone," the researchers say. In contrast, they did not have difficulty recognizing happy or angry expressions, or fearful, happy, and angry vocal tones.

The researchers suggest that the impairment of their psychopathic subjects may reflect early dysfunction of the amygdala, a structure located within the temporal lobes of the brain. Previous research indicates that individuals with amygdala damage due to strokes or viral infections have difficulty identifying facial expressions of fear.

The findings of Stevens et al. correlate with an earlier study by British researchers (including one member of Stevens' team). In that study last year, Derek Mitchell and James Blair showed films of people expressing different emotions to psychopathic children and adults. Both young and adult psychopaths had difficulty recognizing fearful expressions.

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QUOTABLE: Robert Hare, Ph.D.

"It is hard to imagine any parent of a psychopath who has not asked the question, almost certainly with a sense of desperation, `What have I done wrong as a parent to bring this about in my child?'

"The answer is, possibly nothing. To summarize our sparse data, we do not know why people become psychopaths, but current evidence leads us away from the commonly held idea that the behavior of parents bears sole or even primary responsibility for the disorder."

Robert Hare, Ph.D., in
Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us, 1993

Source: Crime Times

The Childhood Psychopath: Bad Seed or Bad Parents

Bad Seed
The Fledgling Psychopath

Crime Library

In 1979, sixteen-year-old Brenda Spencer received a rifle for her birthday. She used it to shoot kids at an elementary school near her San Diego home, wounding nine and killing two. A reporter asked her later why she had done it. Her answer: "I don't like Mondays. This livens up the day."

In 1993, two bodies were found on a country road in Ellis County, Texas. One was male, one female. The boy, 14, had been shot, but the 13-year-old girl had been stripped, raped, and dismembered. Her head and hands were missing. The killer turned out to be Jason Massey, who had decided he was going to become the worst serial killer that Texas had ever seen. He tortured animals, stalked another young woman, and revered killers like Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, and Henry Lee Lucas. He was nine years old when he killed his first cat. He added dozens more over the years, along with dogs and even six cows. He had a long list of potential victims and his diaries were filled with fantasies of rape, torture, and cannibalism of female victims. He was a loner who believed he served a "master" who gave him knowledge and power. He was obsessed with bringing girls under his control and having their dead bodies in his possession.

Nine-year-old Jeffrey Bailey, Jr. pushed a three-year-old friend into the deep part of a motel pool in Florida in 1986. He wanted to see someone drown. As the boy sank to the bottom, Jeffrey pulled up a chair to watch. When it was finished, he went home. When he was questioned, he was more engaged in being the center of attention than in any kind of remorse for what he had done. About the murder he was nonchalant.

On April 13, 2000, three first-graders in north-western Indiana were apprehended in the act of plotting to kill a classmate. They had formed a "hate" club and were trying to recruit other girls to join them in the planned slaughter. They were not yet sure whether they would shoot their target victim, stab her with a butcher knife or hang her. Their plan was interrupted, but another victim in similar circumstances was not so lucky.

Jessica Holtmeyer, 16, hanged a learning-disabled girl in Pennsylvania and then bashed in her face with a rock. Afterward, a witness reported Holtmeyer to say that she wanted to cut the girl up and keep one of her fingers as a souvenir.

These children have a character disturbance. They devalue others and lack a sense of morality. Such incidents as those described above have made it increasingly clear that psychopathy is not exclusively an adult manifestation. In fact, some child development experts believe that childhood psychopathy is increasing at an alarming rate. In the research, these children are regarded as "fledgling psychopaths" who will become increasingly more dangerous as they get older. They might not become killers but they will learn how to manipulate, deceive and exploit others for their own gain. It is generally believed that they have failed to develop affectional bonds that allow them to empathize with another's pain. What they have developed are traits of arrogance, dishonesty, narcissism, shamelessness, and callousness.

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The Childhood Psychopath: Bad Seed or Bad Parents?
Born or Made?
Theories of Psychopathy

Crime Library

According to Canadian theorist Dr. David Lykken, psychopaths are set apart. They differ in temperament from other children and are at greater risk for delinquency. He has looked at the statistics on juvenile crime and concludes that only a few children with antisocial tendencies were born with such a predisposition. They are fearless and probably have a weak behavioral inhibition system. However, Lykken contends that most antisocial behaviors in children are caused by poor parenting—absent fathers and inadequate mothers who fail to properly socialize their child. Perhaps the child frustrates them or perhaps their parenting skills are subnormal. Either way, the child acts out. Lykken calls these children sociopaths and he believes that we can decrease their numbers with better social skills. He does acknowledge the twin studies that support the view that criminality has a substantial heritability factor, but claims that traits like fearlessness, aggressiveness, and sensation seeking, all of which contribute to antisocial behavior, can be properly channeled toward better things. It is up to parents to do this, and where parenting fails, the child with those traits may express them through violence. In other words, in his opinion, even the child most prone to psychopathy via inherited traits can be guided through good parenting toward using those traits in prosocial ways.

Some brain studies suggest that psychopaths have abnormal brain activities. They make certain connections more slowly than other children, show less fear of punishment, and seem to need to do things that excite their nervous system, such as thrill-seeking behaviors.

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CAN "FLEDGLING PSYCHOPATHS"
BE SPOTTED IN CHILDHOOD?

Crime Times
Vol. 3, No. 3, 1997 Page 3

New research (See related article, Crime Times, Vol. 3, No. 3, Page 1) indicates that childhood hyperactivity, even in the absence of childhood conduct disorder (CD), is a risk factor for behavioral pathology in adults. But researcher Donald Lynam believes that children with both hyperactivity and conduct problems have a far greater risk of becoming serious criminals, and that these children in fact may have "a subtype of CD best described as fledgling psychopathy." It is this group of children, Lynam speculates, w w w who become the hard core five or six percent of offenders who commit more than half of all crimes.

Lynam cites extensive evidence linking the combination of childhood hyperactivity and conduct problems to adult psychopathology. Among the research findings:

*Children with both hyperactivity and conduct problems have higher rates of antisocial behavior in adulthood than children with either problem alone.

*Children with both hyperactivity and conduct problems exhibit antisocial behavior at an earlier age, and exhibit more frequent and severe behavior problems, than children with either problem alone. When conduct problems occur with other disorders such h h h as s anxiety, however, there is no similarly elevated level of deviancy.

*Children with hyperactivity and conduct problems show deficits on laboratory, psychophysiological, and performance tests that are suggestive of deficits seen in adult psychopaths.

Lynam hypothesizes that children with both hyperactivity and conduct problems have a cognitive defect he calls the "psychopathic deficit." "This deficit," he says, "is a failure to inhibit... goal-directed behavior, in the face of changing environmental contingencies." He calls this "deficient P [for psychopathic] constraint," and notes that it is also seen in animals whose levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin are depleted. (In humans and animals both, low serotonin levels are linked to impulsivity a a a a and aggression.)

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WHY KIDS KILL

Experts debate nature, nurture

The Cincinnati Enquirer
BY B.G. GREGG
June 3, 1998

America's search for answers to why its disgruntled children are killing their classmates has led to a desperate question: Are some people natural-born killers?

There is a growing belief in the scientific community that some children are predestined to violent behavior due to genetic or biological abnormalities.

Yet most believe that biology has to be accompanied by other factors to cause violent behavior, and shootings like those that have occurred in the nation's school hallways only happen after all of the factors align in just the right way.

''I think it is unfair to pit nature versus nurture -- I think it is nature and nurture,'' said Charles Ewing, a professor of law and psychology at the State University of New York at Buffalo who has written several books on kids who kill.

''It is biology and environment and then you have a third factor: circumstance. I've evaluated plenty of kids who have two strikes against them, but there was still some type of odd circumstance that put that gun in their hand.''

Fledgling psychopaths

Murderers and other violent offenders have long been thought to be products of cruel or neglectful environments. New research has led to a belief that the country is full of ''fledgling psychopaths.''

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Studies reveal background to
Sex murders

Dispatch.com
Mike Earl-Taylor reports.
May 17, 2000

Recent studies conducted in the US on 14 male juveniles convicted of sexual homicide indicate a linked pattern of criminal and antisocial behaviour closely aligned to that of adult sex killers, particularly the psychopathic serial killer.

CRIMINOLOGISTS, psychologists and allied professionals in mental health, law enforcement and penal institutions have more recently become aware of how dysfunctional childhood and adolescent development patterns can and sometimes do lead to a propensity to the commission of violent crimes.

But nowhere is this more apparent than in a seminal and comprehensive American study of juveniles incarcerated for sexual homicide.

Researchers found that, although juvenile sexual murderers comprise less than one percent of juvenile murderers, they are likely to be an emotionally and behaviourally disturbed population with "serious familial, academic, and environmental vulnerabilities".

Sexual homicide is defined as the fusion of "sexual assault and murder and contains a sexual element or activity as the basis of the sequence of events leading to the death of the victim".

In addition to the murderous behaviour, the crime will also either include an overt sexual assault such as rape or sodomy, (in the South African context the latter would be legally defined as aggravated indecent assault) or sexually symbolic behaviour.

This could include lack of clothing on the victim, sexualised positioning of the body, evidence of semen on or near the body, or mutilation of sexual organs.

Another aspect indicative of the sexual homicide in both juveniles and that of adult psychopaths is "overkill", the infliction of excessive trauma beyond that which is necessary to cause the victim's death.

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SAVAGE SPAWN: REFLECTIONS ON VIOLENT CHILDREN
Dr. Jonathan Kellerman
(Ballantyne Publishing)

Amid all the breast-beating and finger-pointing that have followed recent mass shootings by American schoolboys, best-selling novelist and child clinical psychologist Jonathan Kellerman sounds a note of reason.

In this powerful tract about the origins of violent crime in children, Kellerman shines a light on the beginnings of psychopathy -- kids who kill without remorse -- and states that psychopathic tendencies begin very early in life, as young as three, and that they endure.

It's not our "morally bankrupt society," or violent movies that are to blame, Kellerman claims; it's the kids themselves who need to be examined, very carefully and very early.

Kellerman worked with disturbed children for two decades at a major urban hospital, and in private practice for many years. Along the way, he has written three books on psychology, two books for children, and 14 best-selling novels, many based on his practice.

In that time, he encountered only a few very disturbing young boys who all displayed emotional flatness, lack of conscience, bravado, inflated self-esteem and ambitious seeking of gratification. All disparaged those who loved them. All had engaged in criminal behaviour.

None cared to change, he warns. None changed.

Young psychopaths comprise a substantial proportion of children who evolve into serious habitual criminals, he says. They can become tomorrow's Mafia don, cult leader or genocidal dictator. Violent psychopathic youths possess an overriding need for control, power and stimulation, and all display a complete lack of regard for the humanity of others.

Book Review Continues...

QUOTABLE: MARTIN SMEDLEY
"People are going to say, if you've been abused as a child, if you've been deprived, if your environment's been so shocking, then inevitably that's going to have consequences in the way that you impact on your environment and on other people. But it's just not enough. It's an inadequate answer. If you look at areas of deprivation in the world, if you look at Third World countries, if you look at children who've got nothing, who've been abused, they don't turn automatically into psychopaths. This is something that is innate to the child, which the child is born with — not, I would stress, directly inherited. It's not that if your dad's a psychopath then you're a psychopath but it's much more to do with a combination of genes working together or not working properly together that creates a predisposition for this."
Martin Smedley, a specialist in
caring for seriously disturbed
children, cited on Equinox,
Channel 4 (Britain),
December 7, 2000

Source...

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.

Abstract continues....