Psychopaths may not learn from punishment, study finds

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Among violent offenders, psychopaths have the highest rate of recidivism, and a new study has found a potential reason for this: the brain of a psychopath may not be wired to understand punishment.

The new study, published in The Lancet Psychiatry journal, could have implications for how society treats incarcerated psychopaths, as well as childhood interventions to prevent violent behavior.

“Psychopathic offenders are different from regular criminals in many ways,” said study author Nigel Blackwood, a psychiatry lecturer at King’s College London. “Regular criminals are hyper-responsive to threat, quick-tempered and aggressive, while psychopaths have a very low response to threats, are cold, and their aggressively is premeditated.”

“Evidence is now accumulating to show that both types of offenders present abnormal, but distinctive, brain development from a young age,” Blackwood added.

In the study, researchers used Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to analyze brain framework and function in a group of violent offenders in England, one group diagnosed as having psychopathy and one without the condition. Researchers also imaged the brains of healthy non-offenders.

While their brains were being scanned, participants played an image-matching game that determined their ability to change their behavior when responses began producing negative feedback instead of positive feedback the responses had generated earlier.

“When these violent offenders completed neuropsychological tasks, they failed to learn from punishment cues, to change their behavior in the face of changing contingencies, and made poorer quality decisions despite longer periods of deliberation,” Blackwood explained.

“Offenders with psychopathy may only consider the possible positive consequences and fail to take account of the likely negative consequences,” said study author Sheilagh Hodgins, a psychiatrist from the University of Montreal. “Consequently, their behavior often leads to punishment rather than reward as they had expected.”

“Punishment signals the necessity to change behavior,” he added. “Clearly, in certain situations, offenders have difficulty learning from punishment to change their behavior.”

The team also discovered structural irregularities in both gray matter and particular white matter fiber areas among the group with psychopathy. Abnormalities were seen in brain regions linked to empathy, the processing of emotions such as guilt and embarrassment, and moral reasoning. These brain regions are also linked to reward and punishment.

“These results suggest the violent offenders with psychopathy are characterized by a distinctive organization of the brain network that is used to learn from punishment and from rewards,” Blackwood said.

The study team noted that their results should be considered when dealing with interventions for violent behavior throughout life.

“Programs that teach parents optimal parenting skills lead to significant reductions in conduct problems among their children, except among those who are callous and insensitive to others. As our studies and those of others show, the abnormalities of brain structure and function associated with persistent violent behavior are subtle and complex,” Blackwood explained. “Our results also provide hypotheses about the abnormal development of violent offenders to be tested in studies of children.”

“Since most violent crimes are committed by men who display conduct problems from a young age, learning-based interventions that target the specific brain mechanisms underlying this behavior pattern and thereby change the behavior would significantly reduce violent crime,” Hodgins said.

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