>>New Scientist has a more in depth article on this subject for those
>>interested at
>>
>>http://archive.newscientist.com/secure/article/article.jsp?rp=1&id=mg18324615.200
>>
>>Snakes in suits
>>New Scientist vol 183 issue 2461 - 21 August 2004, page 40
>>by Laura Spinney
>>if anyone would like, i could post a copy assuming it gets past the size
>>limits.
>>
>>R
part 2:
The future psychopath
Frick's follow-up studies do indeed suggest that the APSD can predict delinquency and other problems. But the studies have not been running long enough to see whether it predicts who will become fully fledged adult psychopaths. And although it has yet to be universally accepted, it should help equip researchers to go out and search for Mike Junior.
At the Institute of Psychiatry in London, Essi Viding has also made attempts to spot the future Mikes. Thanks to the institute's ongoing study on twins, she had access to around 4000 seven-year-old English and Welsh twin pairs whose teachers had rated them on two measures at the end of their first year at school. First was a measure of antisocial behaviour, such as lying and bullying; the second what Viding calls callous-unemotional traits, similar to the categories tested by Frick.
By comparing identical twins, who share 100 per cent of their genes, with fraternal twins, who like other siblings only share 50 per cent on average, she could explore to what extent the two measures were genetically determined. Her findings, which are soon to be published, suggest that genes account for 70 per cent of the individual differences in callous-unemotional traits across the population. In other words, the core symptoms of psychopathy are strongly genetically determined.
She then looked at the top-scoring 10 per cent of the twin pairs in each group in the hope of drawing out extreme examples. Of the twin pairs who were in the top 10 per cent for antisocial behaviour, about half also had high scores for callous-unemotional traits. Antisocial behaviour seemed to fall into two types. When it occurred in combination with callous and unemotional traits, it was far more likely to be the result of genes than when these traits were not apparent. While 70 per cent of the antisocial behaviour in non-psychopathic children was down to environmental causes - a poor home environment, say - only 20 per cent of the callous-unemotional children's antisocial behaviour could be accounted for by environment. The rest was down to their genes. "There is a sub-group of children who seem to be very strongly predisposed to antisocial behaviour," Viding says. For these kids, their genetic predisposition may mean that even a good family influence can't rescue them, or that bad influences have an especially strong effect, she suggests.
If you were to isolate the really extreme cases, the top 1 or 2 per cent of children on scores for psychopathic tendencies, you would see how different these children really are, she says. "They are different from the antisocial children who are impulsively antisocial. They can be very devious, they can manipulate the teachers against each other in a school setting; they lie very fluently; they can be incredibly charming if they want to." Now she is testing the twins on their moral reasoning. So she might ask a child if it was alright to hit another child in the playground. Assuming they said no, she would then ask them why not. The "psychopathic" reasoning tends to be self-referential - the child will say, "Because I'll get into trouble," rather than, "Because it might hurt or upset them."
Damning labels
Not everyone is convinced that future psychopaths - criminal or otherwise - can be spotted at an early age. "I can think of very, very, very few children I have come across, where I can say yes, this is a psychopath or a psychopath-in-waiting," says James Furnell of the Abbey Kings Park Hospital in Stirling, UK, an advocate and clinical forensic psychologist who specialises in children. He says he can point to perhaps one or two cases in his 35-year career where he has "strongly suspected" that the child would behave as a textbook psychopath in adulthood, and remains to be convinced that the term can be applied to children. He also objects that "such a statement early in a child's career might damn him forever".
Only time will tell if and how many of Viding's antisocial, psychopathic-leaning seven-year-olds will go on to commit crimes. But Hare suggests that plenty will blend in and become "successful" - and hence invisible - psychopaths. Or as he calls them, "snakes in suits". He estimates that 1 per cent of the population of North America could be described as psychopaths. And now Babiak and Hare have teamed up to look for them.
For the past two years they have been developing what they call the Business Scan 360, derived from the PCL-R. The "360" refers to the fact that the screen involves interviews with all those people surrounding the individual under scrutiny - secretaries, colleagues and managers. "If you imagine the conscientious employee at one end of a continuum and a prototypical corporate psychopath at the other end, the B-Scan 360 attempts to gauge where the individual is," Babiak says.
Hare and Babiak have almost finished assessing 100 economic criminals in the US, people who have been convicted of fraud or embezzlement, to provide a benchmark of the ultimately undesirable employee. Next they will assess a "normal" business population of managers. And finally, they will test a group of high-flyers in an attempt to see whether they can distinguish promising future bosses from potential disasters like Mike.
Their mission, as Babiak sees it, is to warn employers that apparent leadership skills could mask something more sinister. That is not to say that people like Mike might not also prove valuable employees in certain capacities. As Raine says, psychopathic traits could prove useful on the front line, or even in a US president. But bosses might think twice about promoting a high-risk individual to a position of power from which he or she could cause great damage. Remember the disgraced British media tycoon Robert Maxwell, who stole from his own company pension fund? "I'm not saying Maxwell was a psychopath," Hare says, "But he sure had psychopathic tendencies."
Viding, too, hopes that her research will pick out those who show strong psychopathic tendencies. But she is also interested in intervention. There is a tendency to assume that psychopathy is untreatable on the basis of limited success with adults. A recent study suggested that a programme designed to improve the empathy skills of sex offenders in some cases made them more dangerous, by improving their ability to groom their victims. But a better understanding of their genetic vulnerability could translate into novel interventions, psychological and even pharmacological, just as it has done for anxiety and depression, Viding says.
Viding even has a gene in mind, whose expression she wants to investigate in twins. Ahmad Hariri of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, implicated a serotonin transporter gene in various forms of neuroticism and psychopathology, especially anxiety traits. Viding wants to find out if some mutation here could contribute to psychopathic antisocial behaviour. If so, there is every chance of finding a way to intervene. Lorraine Johnstone, a clinical forensic psychologist at Glasgow Caledonian University, UK, says that it is important to look for the childhood precursors of psychopathy, because it is possible that vulnerable children could be identified early on and deflected from a life of crime. She agrees it is a minefield, however. "Children are unreasonable, they're selfish, they test out lots of antisocial behaviours and then most of them think, well actually that doesn't work, so I won't bother doing it again." Only when those traits are stable over time do they become suggestive. But over how long, and who decides what is stable?
But if Viding's findings, bolstered by others in the future, convince the scientific community that psychopaths-in-waiting can be reliably spotted among children, they also suggest something else that may be even harder to swallow: "Prevention efforts need to begin in the preschool years," Viding says. Once a child starts school, it may already be too late to save him from Wormwood Scrubs, or the White House.
A brief history of antisocial behaviour
In the 18th century French doctor Philippe Pinel described a patient who defied all existing categories. He showed no remorse or personal restraint. Pinel labelled his condition "manie sans délire" (madness without delirium).
The term "psychopath" was coined in the 19th century. But until 1941, there were no clear diagnostic criteria and the syndrome was also referred to as "moral insanity" and "psychopathic inferiority".
In 1941, Hervey Cleckley wrote The Mask of Sanity, in which he defined a set of clinical symptoms that distinguished psychopaths. This description, notable for the absence of criminal or antisocial behaviour, comes from the 1964 edition of his book: "...superficial charm and good intelligence; absence of delusions and other signs of irrational thinking; absence of 'nervousness' or other psychoneurotic manifestations; unreliability, untruthfulness, and insincerity; lack of remorse or shame; inadequately motivated antisocial behaviour; poor judgement and failure to learn by experience; pathologic egocentricity and incapacity for love; general poverty in major affective reactions; specific loss of insight; unresponsiveness in general interpersonal relations; fantastic and uninviting behaviour with drink and sometimes without; suicide rarely carried out; sex life impersonal, trivial and poorly integrated; and failure to follow any life plan."
From 1952, "psychopath" and "sociopathic personality" came to be used interchangeably by psychiatrists, under the heading "personality disorder".
With the second edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-II), published in 1968, "sociopathic personality" yielded to "personality disorder, antisocial type". The third edition of DSM, published in 1980, listed antisocial personality disorder (APD), the diagnosis of which relies almost exclusively on antisocial and criminal behaviour, and no longer on personality traits.
At the moment psychopathy is not recognised as a formal mental disorder. But the issue of psychopathy versus APD is still hotly debated in psychology and legal circles.
Laura Spinney Laura Spinney is a writer based in London and Paris