Harvard: Psychopaths feel regret, they just can’t predict it

We generally think of psychopaths as cold, emotionless people, but a new research study has shown that might not necessarily be true.

According to a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, psychopathy might be driven by the pathological inability to accurately predict the outcomes of actions.

“The assumption has always been that they make these bad choices because they can’t generate negative emotions like fear, or appropriately respond to emotional signals generated by other people … but we turned that idea on its head,” the study team said, according to a news release.

Using a financial game, study researchers found that while psychopaths have normal, or even heightened emotional reactions in situations that normally bring about regret, they have trouble pulling information from their surroundings that would reveal an action they’re going to take will lead to regret.

“There are two components to regret,” explained study author Joshua Buckholtz, associate professor of psychology at Harvard University. “There is retrospective regret, which is how we usually think about regret — the emotional experience after you learn you could have received a better outcome if you had made a different choice.

“But we also use signals from our environment to make predictions about which actions will or won’t result in regret,” Buckholtz added.

Planning for the Future

The Harvard professor said what differentiated psychopaths from other people in his study was their inability to use information about the choices they were given to anticipate how much regret they were going to experience, and adjust their decision-making accordingly.

“It’s almost like a blindness to future regret,” he said. “When something happens, they feel regret, but what they can’t do is look forward and use information that would tell them they’re going to feel regret to guide their decision-making.”

The study findings indicate psychopathic individuals are not merely incapable of feeling sorry about or any other emotions, but that there is a far more nuanced disorder that affects their adaptive functioning. After reaching this finding, the study team said they hope to develop more precise processes for projecting the costly behavior of psychopathic individuals.

Using their conclusion about the inability to anticipate regret, the study team was able to predict if and how often study participants with psychopathy had been incarcerated.

“Contrary to what you would expect based on these basic emotional-deficit models, their emotional responses to regret didn’t predict incarceration,” Buckholtz said. “We know psychopathy is one of the biggest predictors of criminal behavior, but what we found was that behavioral regret sensitivity moderated that, raising the suggestion that intact behavioral regret sensitivity could be a protective factor against incarceration in psychopathic individuals.”

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Image credit: Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

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