This article has received a lot of attention because it reverses some commonly held beliefs about psychopaths, namely that they are incapable of empathy. I have long believed that they do possess empathy but that they use it to control and manipulate people.

Is there a difference between psychopaths and sociopaths? It seems the answer is yes.

Leading modern researchers in this area believe that psychopathy is biological in origin and that the psychopath may or may not engage in criminal behavior, and that the sociopath is the product of adverse environmental conditions interacting with genetic traits and will inevitably engage in criminal behavior (Hare, Clark, Grann, & Thornton, 2000; Pitchford, 2001). Psychopaths constitute a small group of individuals whose numbers remain fairly stable across cultures and time periods. They can come from any social class, family type, or racial or ethnic group. The number of sociopaths, on the other hand, fluctuates with environmental conditions and they tend to come primarily from the lower social classes, from dysfunctional families, and from disadvantaged minority groups (Lykken, 1995). [Walsh & Wu, 2008].

So it seems that psychopath has an organic brain disorder while the sociopath comes from adverse social and environmental conditions (abuse, neglect, molestation, abandonment, etc.) with a genetic predisposition (epigenetic triggers).

Psychopaths may engage in criminal behavior, but sociopaths will engage in criminal behavior.

Psychopaths represent a fixed percentage of the population, and can be from any social class, family type, or ethnic heritage. Sociopaths represent a fluctuating percentage of the population, dependent on environmental conditions, but they tend to come from lower social classes, dysfunction families, and disadvantaged minority groups.

This new research may bridge the gap in helping researchers understand how psychopaths can be found among successful entrepreneurs, CEOs, lawyers, religious leaders, cult leaders, and politicians. These people may exploit and manipulate others (and having the option of empathy makes this easier), but they may never commit a criminal act.

Reference:

1. Walsh, A., & Wu, H.H. (2008, Jun 1). Differentiating antisocial personality disorder, psychopathy, and sociopathy: Evolutionary, genetic, neurological, and sociological considerations. Criminal Justice Studies, 2, 135-152.

Here is the abstract for the original article, which is free to view online, and then a summary of the research from Science Daily:

Reduced spontaneous but relatively normal deliberate vicarious representations in psychopathy

Harma Meffert [1,2,3], Valeria Gazzola [1,3], Johan A. den Boer [4], Arnold A. J. Bartels [5], and Christian Keysers [1,3]

Author Affiliations

1. Department of Neuroscience, University of Groningen, University Medical Centre Groningen, The Netherlands2. Forensic Psychiatric Clinic Dr. S. van Mesdag, Groningen, The Netherlands3. Social Brain Laboratory, Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Amsterdam, The Netherlands4. Department of Psychiatry University Medical Centre Groningen, The Netherlands5. Dr. Leo Kannerhuis, Doorwerth, The Netherlands

Summary

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.

Full Citation:
H. Meffert, V. Gazzola, J. A. den Boer, A. A. J. Bartels, C. Keysers. (2013). Reduced spontaneous but relatively normal deliberate vicarious representations in psychopathy. Brain; 136 (8): 2550-2562. DOI: 10.1093/brain/awt190

Here is a summary of the research from Science Daily - but you can also read the original study online for free - Oxford Journals (publisher of Brain) has made this article Open Access. At the bottom there are some related articles.

Brain Research Shows Psychopathic Criminals Do Not Lack Empathy, but Fail to Use It Automatically

July 24, 2013 — Criminal psychopathy can be both repulsive and fascinating, as illustrated by the vast number of books and movies inspired by this topic. Offenders diagnosed with psychopathy pose a significant threat to society, because they are more likely to harm other individuals and to do so again after being released. A brain imaging study in the Netherlands shows individuals with psychopathy have reduced empathy while witnessing the pains of others. When asked to empathize, however, they can activate their empathy. This could explain why psychopathic individuals can be callous and socially cunning at the same time.

This image shows the movies shown to the participants (left) and brain activation of the participants with psychopathy without instructions (behind) and with instructions to empathize (front). (Credit: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences)

Why are psychopathic individuals more likely to hurt others? Individuals with psychopathy characteristically demonstrate reduced empathy with the feelings of others, which may explain why it is easier for them to hurt other people. However, what causes this lack of empathy is poorly understood. Scientific studies on psychopathic subjects are notoriously hard to conduct. "Convicted criminals with a diagnosis of psychopathy are confined to high-security forensic institutions in which state-of-the-art technology to study their brain, like magnetic resonance imaging, is usually unavailable," explains Professor Christian Keysers, Head of the Social Brain Lab in Amsterdam, and senior author of a study on psychopathy appearing in the journal Brain this week. "Bringing them to scientific research centres, on the other hand, requires the kind of high-security transportation that most judicial systems are unwilling to finance."

The Dutch judicial system, however, seems to be an exception. They joined forces with academia to promote a better understanding of psychopathy. As a result, criminals with psychopathy were transported to the Social Brain Lab of the University Medical Center in Groningen (The Netherlands). There, the team could use state of the art high-field functional magnetic resonance imaging to peak into the brain of criminals with psychopathy while they view the emotions of others.

The study, which will appear on the 25th of July in the journalBrain (published by Oxford University Press) and is entitled "Reduced spontaneous but relatively normal deliberate vicarious representations in psychopathy," included 18 individuals with psychopathy and a control group, and consisted of three parts. "All participants first watched short movie clips of two people interacting with each other, zoomed in on their hands. The movie clips showed one hand touching the other in a loving, a painful, a socially rejecting or a neutral way. At this stage, we asked them to look at these movies just as they would watch one of their favourite films," Harma Meffert, the first author of the paper, explains. Meffert was a graduate student in the Social Brain Lab while the study was conducted, and is now a post-doctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Mental Health in Bethesda.

Next, the participants watched the same clips again. This time, however, the researchers prompted them explicitly to "empathise with one of the actors in the movie," that is, they were requested to really try to feel what the actors in the movie were feeling.

"In the third and final part, we performed similar hand interactions with the participants themselves, while they were lying in the scanner, having their brain activity measured," adds Meffert. "We wanted to know to what extent they would activate the same brain regions while they were watching the hand interactions in the movies, as they would when they were experiencing these same hand interactions themselves."

Our brains are equipped with what scientists call a "mirror system." For example, the motor cortex of the brain normally allows you to move your own body. Your so called somatosensory cortex, when activated, makes you to feel touch on your skin. Your insula, finally, when activated makes you feel emotions like pain or disgust. In the last decades, brain scientists have discovered that when people watch other people move their body, or see those people being touched, or have emotions, these same brain regions are activated. In other words, the actions, touch or emotions of others become your own. This "mirror system" possibly constitutes a crucial part of our ability to empathize with other people, and it has been previously shown, that the less you activate this system, the less you report to empathize with other people. It has been suggested that individuals with psychopathy might somehow suffer from a broken "mirror system," resulting in a diminished ability to empathize with their victims.

As it turns out, however, the picture seems to be more complex. When asked to just watch the film clips, the individuals with psychopathy indeed did activate their mirror system less. "Regions involved in their own actions, emotions and sensations were less active than that of controls while they saw what happens in others," summarizes Christian Keysers. "At first, this seems to suggest that psychopathic criminals might hurt others more easily than we do, because they do not feel pain, when they see the pain of their victims."

As the second part of the study revealed, however, it's not quite so simple. Instead of generally activating their mirror system less, individuals with psychopathy rather seem not to use this system spontaneously, but they can use it when asked to. "When explicitly asked to empathize, the differences between how strongly the individuals with and without psychopathy activate their own actions, sensations and emotions almost entirely disappeared in their empathic brain," explains Valeria Gazzola, Assistant Professor at the UMCG and second author of the paper. "Psychopathy may not be so much the incapacity to empathize, but a reduced propensity to empathize, paired with a preserved capacity to empathize when required to do so." The brain data suggests, that by default, psychopathic individuals feel less empathy than others. If they try to empathize, however, they can switch to 'empathy mode'.

There might be two sides to these findings. The darker side is that reduced spontaneous empathy together with a preserved capacity for empathy might be the cocktail that makes these individuals so callous when harming their victims and at the same time so socially cunning when they try to seduce their victims. Whether individuals with psychopathy autonomously switch their empathy mode on and off depending on the requirements of a social situation however remains to be established. The brighter side is that the preserved capacity for empathy might be harnessed in therapy. Instead of having to create a capacity for empathy, therapies may need to focus on making the existing capacity more automatic to prevent them from further harming others. How to do so, remains at this stage uncertain.

Related articles:

• A Psychopath Lacks Empathy Just Like a Person With Frontal Head Injury, Jan. 25, 2011
• Psychopathy: A Misunderstood Personality Disorder, Dec. 7, 2011
• Psychopathy Linked to Specific Structural Abnormalities in the Brain, May 7, 2012
• Psychopaths Are Not Neurally Equipped to Have Concern for Others, Apr. 24, 2013

Epigenetics is a rapidly growing field of study that examines how genetic changes can occur from one generation to the next as a result of environment, experience, and even diet. Epigenetics completely overturns the evolutionary maxim that random chance and "genetic drift" are the primary drivers of evolution. Sorry, Richard Dawkins, but Darwin is not the final word on evolution.

This article, from The Week, is a basic introduction to the field of epigenetics.

Epigenetics: How our experiences affect our offspring

New research suggests that people's experiences, not just their genes, can affect the biological legacy of their offspring

By The Week Staff | January 20, 2013

In this new science of "epigenetics," researchers are exploring how nature and nurture combine to cause behavior, traits, and illnesses that genes alone can't explain.

Isn't our genetic legacy hardwired?
From Mendel and Darwin in the 19th century to Watson and Crick in the 20th, scientists have shown that chromosomes passed from parent to child form a genetic blueprint for development. But in a quiet scientific revolution, researchers have in recent years come to realize that genes aren't a fixed, predetermined program simply passed from one generation to the next. Instead, genes can be turned on and off by experiences and environment. What we eat, how much stress we undergo, and what toxins we're exposed to can all alter the genetic legacy we pass on to our children and even grandchildren. In this new science of "epigenetics," researchers are exploring how nature and nurture combine to cause behavior, traits, and illnesses that genes alone can't explain, ranging from sexual orientation to autism to cancer. "We were all brought up to think the genome was it," said Rockefeller University molecular biologist C. David Allis. "It's really been a watershed in understanding that there is something beyond the genome."

What is epigenetics?
The word literally means "on top of genetics," and it's the study of how individual genes can be activated or deactivated by life experiences. Each one of our cells, from skin cells to neurons, contains an identical DNA blueprint, yet they perform vastly different functions. That's because epigenetic "tags" block developing fetal cells from following any genetic instructions that don't pertain to their intended roles. That biochemical process, scientists have discovered, occurs not just during gestation and early development but throughout adulthood, switching genes on or off and altering our mental and physical health.

How does that affect who we are?
We're only beginning to find out. A woman's diet during pregnancy seems to have a major impact on her baby's epigenetic tags. Prenatal diets that are low in folic acid, vitamin B-12, and other nutrients containing "methyl groups" — a set of molecules that can tag genes and cause epigenetic changes — have been linked to an increased risk of asthma and brain and spinal cord defects in children. Stress, too, can alter fetal epigenetic tags. Pregnant women who were traumatized at the World Trade Center on 9/11 were far more likely than other women to give birth to infants who reacted with unusual levels of fear and stress when faced with loud noises, unfamiliar people, or new foods.

Can changes occur later in life?
Absolutely. Young children who are abused are more likely to have epigenetic changes that make coping with stress more difficult. Twins may inherit a gene that predisposes them to cancer, but only one will develop the disease because diet, toxins, or smoking turn on that gene, while the other has different habits and goes cancer-free. "We're not completely at the mercy of our genes," writes health journalist Alice G. Walton. "In many ways, they are at the mercy of our health and lifestyle decisions and habits."

Are epigenetic changes hereditary?
To the consternation of strict Darwinists, they can be. Researchers used to think that when a sperm and egg combined, all their epigenetic tags were erased, leaving the resulting embryo with a clean slate. Now they know that about 1 percent of our epigenetic tags escape erasure and pass directly to our offspring — and potentially their offspring and beyond. Scientists have discovered, for instance, that a group of children conceived during the Netherlands' desperate wartime famine of 1944–45 tended themselves to have smaller-than-usual offspring. That suggests that what men and women eat and smoke, and what toxins and traumas they're exposed to, can affect their children and even grandchildren. University of Texas zoologist David Crews has done multigenerational studies with rats that led him to speculate that soaring obesity and autism rates could be due to our grandparents' exposure to "the chemical revolution of the 1940s," including the introduction of new plastics, fertilizers, detergents, and pesticides.

Are these insights yielding medical therapies?
Over the past five years, evidence that epigenetics plays a major role in cancer has become "absolutely rock solid," says Robert A. Weinberg, a biologist at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass. Andrew Feinberg, director of Johns Hopkins University's Epigenetics Center, thinks it's a factor in autism and diabetes as well. Drugs are in the works aimed at undoing cancerous epigenetic changes. Even eating foods rich in gene-altering methyl groups — such as soybeans, red grapes, and green tea — might protect against disease by silencing detrimental genes. In one famous experiment, researchers fed a methyl-rich diet to pregnant female mice that carried a gene that made them fat, yellow, and prone to cancer and diabetes. Though their offspring carried the same gene, they were born slim, brown, and disease-free. But researchers are still trying to work out how to use this powerful tool to address specific health problems. "Did this change in diet increase cancer risk?" asks McGill University pharmacologist Moshe Szyf. "Did it increase depression? Did it increase dementia or Alzheimer's? We don't know yet, and it will take some time to sort it out."

Darwin vs. Lamarck
Before Darwin laid out the principles of natural selection in On the Origin of Species, an 18th-century French naturalist, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, proposed a very different theory of evolution. Organisms, he thought, could pass on traits they'd acquired over their lifetime. Lamarckism — typified by the (incorrect) idea that giraffes have long necks because they're constantly stretching them to reach high leaves — faced ridicule after Darwinism took hold. At the turn of the 20th century, August Weismann debunked the theory by chopping off the tails of mice to prove that their pups would not inherit their taillessness. But even though "Darwin was 100 percent right" about how creatures evolve, said Swiss bioengineer Renato Paro, epigenetics suggests that the Frenchman may have been on to something after all. "Passing on gained characteristics," he said, "fits more to Lamarck's theory of evolution."

Divisive gene splits brain and brawn

Well, this puts a new spin on family genes and heredity. From Futurity - A new gene has different functions when it comes from the father or the mother:

"the maternal copy is involved in fetal growth, metabolism and fat storage, and the paternal one regulates social behavior in adults."

One Step closer to making sense of some genetic traits.

Divisive gene splits brain and brawn

In a newly discovered gene, the copy from the father is only active in the brain and the copy from the mother is active everywhere else. (Credit: iStockphoto)

CARDIFF U. (UK) — A newly discovered gene defies conventional rules, with the copies inherited from the mother and father working in different ways.

In most cases, both copies are active, but in some one copy is switched off, a process called imprinting.

A gene called Grb10 takes things a step further with the copy from the father only active in the brain and the maternal copy active in all other parts of the body.

The study, published in the journal Nature, shows the two copies also have very different functions: the maternal copy is involved in fetal growth, metabolism and fat storage, and the paternal one regulates social behavior in adults.

The research is expected to give scientists a better understanding of how genes involved in metabolism work, shedding light on the causes of obesity in humans.

“This is the first example of where the copy of a gene has two very different functions depending on which parent it is inherited from,” says Anthony Isles, who led the research at Cardiff University.

“It seems that the mother and father are using different strategies to influence their offspring, one focused on the body and the other on the brain. Imprinted genes are proving to be important for many aspects of human health, and are very important for brain function.

“Here is a single gene that may link growth in the womb with both physical and mental health in later life. In future research we’d like to investigate how this single gene might have evolved to serve such distinct purposes.”

“Grb10 is the first example of an imprinted gene that regulates social behavior in adults,” says Alastair Garfield, who carried out the work at Bath and Cardiff but is now working at the University of Cambridge.

“Asserting your dominance over others in your social group can be risky behavior, and this gene appears to keep that behavior in check. Many genes that are imprinted in mice are also similarly imprinted in humans, so we predict Grb10 could work in a similar way in people.”

The work was funded in part by the Biotechnology & Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), Medical Research Council, and a Wellcome Trust “Value in People” award.

More news from Cardiff University: www.cardiff.ac.uk/news/

Tags: genetics, heredity, biology, Divisive gene splits brain and brawn, Futurity, genes, Grb10, father, mother, brain, body, maternal, paternal