Several researchers, such as Adrian Raine, have done work studying the brains and neurological responses of children who exhibit traits often found in psychopaths and today we look at another such researcher.

Abigail Marsh is an assistant professor of psychology at Georgetown University who directs the school’s Laboratory on Social and Affective Neuroscience. This lab uses cognitive neuroscience methods to explore, among other things, the roots of empathy.

Marsh’s path to interest in this topic is, as is true for many of us who have been drawn to it, a compelling one. As she explains in her profile on her lab’s website, when she was 20 years old, she was in an accident, after which a stranger saved her life. And, as she explains in another interview, a few years later, a different stranger punched her in the face, breaking her nose.

Events like these led her to wonder why some people help others and some harm others. Her quest for answers led her to earn a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Harvard and to do post-doctoral work with James Blair, another leader in the field who has done great work on these subjects.

As described by Georgetown University News, Marsh’s latest research – which also involved the National Institutes of Health, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and several other researchers including Blair – showed that “young people with conduct problems and psychopathic traits such as callousness and remorselessness show less activity in the regions of the brain associated with empathy.”

Specifically, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to measure brain activity as two different groups of adolescents looked at photographs of other people experiencing pain-inducing injuries while imagining either that the body in the photo was their own or someone else’s.

The first group consisted of adolescents with both:

• Psychopathic Traits
• Conduct Disorder or Oppositional Defiant Disorder

The second group was a control group of youngsters of matched age, gender and intelligence.

The study found that:

• As the injuries depicted became more painful, the youngsters with psychopathic traits showed reduced activity in the rostral anterior cingulate cortex, ventral striatum (putamen), and amygdala, all of which are brain regions associated with the experience of empathic pain.
• Amygdala activity was especially reduced when perceiving the injury as happening to another person rather than oneself.
• Youngsters whose scores on the PCL:YV (the Youth Version of the Hare Psychopathy Checklist) were higher, indicating more severe psychopathic traits, showed less activity in the amygdala and rostral anterior cingulate cortex, specifically.

The researchers also discovered that, in the group with psychopathic traits, lower responsiveness was predictive of psychopathic symptom severity.

The formal title of the study is “Empathic responsiveness in amygdala and anterior cingulate cortex in youths with psychopathic traits.” It is published in the March 12, 2013 issue of the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.

In the Georgetown University News piece, Abigail Marsh says that, in her future work, she hopes to help tease out even more fully the various types of different mechanisms underlying helpful and harmful behavior. She explains, “I will continue to use brain imaging, genetic and behavioral research paradigms in healthy adults and adolescents as well as adolescents with conduct problems to try to understand the origins of empathy, aggression, and altruism.” Such important goals position her work squarely in the realm of ponerology.

Little did I know that, in the course of researching for that post, I would come across an episode of Explorer seemingly even more precisely relevant to ponerology than that. But that is just what happened.

Ponerology is defined as “the science of evil.” And, to my surprise, I came across a 2008 episode of Explorer actually entitled “Science of Evil.”

Just as in “Born to Rage,” the main framework for this episode’s exploration is established by the narrator early on. This time the guiding quote is this:

“Evil. It is blamed for cruelty beyond our mind’s comprehension. Is it a dark force outside of us that we are all vulnerable to, that we must work to resist? Is it inside of us, a stain on the soul, a dysfunction of the brain? Or just a word used to distance ourselves from inherently human behavior?”

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

“Science of Evil” focuses on four stories:

• One of the “usual suspects” when discussing evil, Dr. Philip Zimbardo, gives a detailed chronology of the development of sadistic events in his famous Stanford prison experiment and discusses its relationship to the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, after which he was called as an expert defense witness in the court martial of one of the accused American officers.
• We get a look at notorious serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer through the eyes of Reverend Roy Ratcliff, a minister who met with Dahmer at a maximum security prison in Wisconsin in 1994 to discuss the Bible and ultimately help fulfill Dahmer’s request to be baptized.
• Joshua Greene, an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Harvard, speaks about what defines evil and – along with colleague Jonathan Cohen of Princeton’s Center for the Study of Brain, Mind and Behavior – introduces us to their fMRI research, imaging people’s brains during moral decision-making to determine the sometimes conflicting neurological processes involved in our sense of right and wrong.
• We follow Aya Schneerson of the United Nations’ World Food Program as she reveals through her work some of the atrocities she has witnessed in the course of distributing food in war-torn Eastern Congo that she considers evil.

As these stories play out, we are led to consider how situational and neurological factors can both play roles in the development of behavior often deemed evil and the implications of what we may discover as we continue teasing apart their relative contributions to the harm and suffering in our world.

National Geographic Explorer’s “Science of Evil” provides a rather cursory overview of some of the questions involved in ponerology. It doesn’t do nearly as much to provide answers to those questions as some of the other resources featured on this site do. But it may, nonetheless, inspire curiosity in a newcomer to these issues.

I write frequently about the fact that, despite the increased level of attention to it that we document here, this topic, the science regarding malicious and neglectful activity – a.k.a. the “science of evil” – is vastly under-discussed and under-promoted in our society. The fact that even I, having researched and written about this topic for years, was unaware until now that this episode of Explorer even existed offers just one more illustration of that. But hopefully, sharing it here will enable it to reach a few more people who will share it with those they know and so on.

Dr. Kent Kiehl of the Mind Research Network has been one of the more active researchers investigating what we can learn from brain imaging of psychopaths. And he and colleagues have recently published, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, a study entitled “Neuroprediction of future rearrest.”

The study involved having 96 soon-to-be-released male prisoners perform computer tasks that required quick decision-making and inhibition of impulsive responses, while their brains were observed using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The researchers focused in on the brain region known as the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and found that, when controlling for other known risk factors, those prisoners with less ACC activity than their fellow study participants were about twice as likely to be rearrested within 4 years of release as those with higher ACC activity.

We’ve already mentioned, in previous stories, that reduced cingulate cortex function is associated with psychopathy and has been identified in some violent criminal offenders.

The question is, as we zero in on markers like this – whether they be certain anatomical or functional characteristics of the brain, particular genetic features or anything else – what is the most ethical way in which to use this knowledge?

On one hand, it could be considered highly unethical and dangerous to discriminate against, detain or punish anybody – even a previous offender – simply because they happen to exhibit particular biological markers if those markers have not expressed themselves in a specific behavior for which they are being criminally charged. Beginning to do so could open the door to frightening abuses by authorities.

Most of the commenters on the Daily Mail’s story about this study fell on this side of the issue and raised such concerns.

For example, “Dunnyveg” said:

“Actually, low IQ, high testosterone, and a record of previous convictions are the best indicators for recidivism; there is no need for fancy technology. But none of these absolve society from our time-honored principle of innocent until proven guilty. Talk about a potential totalitarian nightmare, this is it….”

“Percival” said:

“Still like technology gullible science fans? Little do you realise these are not to benefit you but to control you, all of it is too control and watch and report back and have you slaves to the system.”

Martin said:

“Well that fills the biggest gap left in achieving the full ’1984 infrastructure’ now they’re rolling out internet TVs that watch you and listen to you (and that some mugs are actually buying) – welcome to the world of ‘thought crime’ ….”

The very idea of predicting and preemptively acting to prevent crimes before they are committed reminds many of the brilliant Philip K. Dick story, later made into a movie by Steven Spielberg, “The Minority Report.”

On the Daily Mail article, “Jeff Pringle” commented:

“Minority Report anyone?”

And Nature began their story on the study with “In a twist that evokes the dystopian science fiction of writer Philip K. Dick…” and, later in the article, mentioned “The Minority Report.”

But, on the other hand, it could be considered unethical not to use our improving predictive ability if failing to do so allows offenders to cause harm and suffering to others that could have, with minimal collateral damage, been prevented. How would you feel if a loved one was harmed by a person who we knew ahead of time, based on various markers and indicators, had an extremely high likelihood of offending but did nothing to stop?

Some may take comfort in the fact that we can, for the moment, postpone fully grappling with these dilemmas. Our predictive ability based on markers like those in Kiehl’s study is still poor enough that it seems clearly unreasonable, at the present time, to base highly consequential legal actions on it alone. Even Kiehl himself concedes as much.

But as our knowledge and technology improve, there may well come a day when the gap between the pros and cons of applying them to predict and prevent crime narrows. Eventually, we may have to decide at exactly which threshold level of predictive reliability it becomes more unethical, even in the face of potential unintended consequences, to allow a person marked as extremely likely to cause harm to act freely than to take action to reduce the threat they pose. The decision about where to draw such a line could arouse furious debate.

One commenter on the Nature article, “Mitch Trachtenberg,” offered a nice middle ground where many of us, despite different viewpoints on the matter, may frequently find ourselves able to meet, when he said:

“This knowledge could be abused by someone refusing to release someone on parole or probation due to “unacceptable-ACC-levels.” But it could really be helpful if the results were used to get someone additional help or even monitoring. Helping people with problems controlling their impulses could be beneficial, and it would be great to have a way of discovering which people in our prison system might well be there for exactly that reason.”

Hopefully Mitch’s idea will prove prescient and we can find a way, at least much of the time, to use this knowledge and these tools in a compassionate way that aims to authentically help people, not just stigmatize or harass them. But it’s hard to imagine a future where we aren’t sometimes faced with incredibly difficult decisions about cases that just don’t allow for any easy middle ground where we can hide.

What are your thoughts on the subject?

How do you weigh the danger of authorities abusing these predictive abilities against the threat posed by individuals with biological markers associated with harming others?

What do you think is the most ethical way to deal with the dilemmas these predictive abilities may one day pose?

Let us know in the comments below.

Well there is actually a research journal by that very name. And that journal, Social Neuroscience, has recently honed in on topics at the very heart of ponerology. Its latest issue – Volume 8, Issue 2 – is a special issue focusing on aggression and violence.

It features an editorial entitled “The social cognitive neuroscience of aggression, violence, and psychopathy” followed by six studies that consider the links between neurological markers and responses and harmful behavior.

Here is a summary of the six studies in this special issue.

Affective startle potentiation in juvenile offenders: The role of conduct problems and psychopathic traits

• Exposed male juvenile offenders and controls to aversive sounds to compare emotion processing via measuring their startle reflexes.
• Found that juvenile offenders have fewer blinks in response to the startling sounds and the number of blinks decreases as their level of conduct disorder symptoms and psychopathic traits increases.

The neural signatures of distinct psychopathic traits

• Looked at and documented a relationship between young adults’ measures in several categories of psychopathic traits, their amygdala reactivity in response to threats and their ventral striatum reactivity in response to potential rewards.

Neural correlates of risk taking in violent criminal offenders characterized by emotional hypo- and hyper-reactivity

• Had antisocial criminals and healthy non-criminals make financial decisions involving different levels of risk while under functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
• Found that offenders with lower emotional reactivity had less rostral anterior cingulate cortex activity than healthy people when uncertain, as well as less prefrontal cortex activity when trying to control their responses accordingly so as to make safe choices.
• This indicates that the offenders have difficulty emotionally representing uncertainty or anticipating punishment.

Vasopressin modulates neural responses during human reactive aggression

• Administered vasopressin, which is known to modulate mammalian aggressive behavior, or placebo to healthy men, who then performed in a competitive reaction time task while under fMRI.
• The men who received vasopressin displayed more activity in the right superior temporal sulcus while making decisions under threat of punishment if they lost the competition, but no behavioral differences were recognized between the two groups.

Endogenous testosterone and cortisol modulate neural responses during induced anger control

• Healthy Asian males were asked to control their anger while being insulted under fMRI monitoring to study the relationship and influence of testosterone and cortisol levels.
• Found that testosterone level correlated positively with dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and thalamus activity when cortisol levels were low, but not when cortisol levels were high.
• Also found greater functional connectivity between the amygdala and a top-down prefrontal cortical control network while subjects tried to control their anger and that this connectivity was greatest in those with high testosterone and low cortisol.
• All of this suggests a possible mechanism where testosterone and cortisol modulate anger control neurally.

Asymmetry in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and aggressive behavior: A continuous theta-burst magnetic stimulation study

• Randomly applied vs. did not apply continuous theta-burst magnetic stimulation (cTBS), an inhibitory procedure, to study the role of the right and left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) – which typically help inhibit impulse control – in aggression. After real or sham cTBS application, subjects engaged in a monetary task designed to assess proactive and reactive aggression.
• Found that targeting the left DLPFC with cTBS increased both proactive and reactive aggressive responses more than targeting the right, indicating the left DLPFC is more involved in modulating aggression.

As the introductory editorial describes, this issue is a reflection of the shift in the mid-90’s from a focus on attentional differences in the aggressive and psychopathic to a focus on their neurobiological and emotional dysfunctions, even though attentional differences also play an important role. It says the included studies, as a whole, demonstrate three themes:

1. “That there are different neurobiological risk factors for an increased risk for aggression and antisocial behavior.” – The risk factors associated with psychopathy differ from those associated with threat/frustration based reactive aggression, for example.
2. A relationship between reinforcement processing – processing of potential risk and rewards – and psychopathy
3. A potential relationship between brain areas associated with top-down attention and response control and “an increased risk for predominantly reactive aggression.”