Could little Johnny, that kid who always seems to be in trouble for hurting other children, be a psychopath in the making? Or is he just rambunctious? And if he’s at risk of becoming a future psychopath, could science catch it early, and head off a life of trouble?

A new study from British researchers suggests this may one day be possible. 

Adult psychopaths are known to be unable to place themselves in the position of those they hurt. They have little or no empathy. They can’t “feel your pain."

But “there is a lot of variability among children with conduct problems,” one of the researchers, Essi Viding, professor of psychology at University College London’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, told NBCNews.com. 

The study, published Thursday in the journal Current Biology, gathered a sample of 37 boys verified by surveys completed by teachers and parents to have serious conduct problems such as causing harm to others and uncaring attitudes toward others, and a control group of 18 boys who did not. The boys were aged 10 to 16.

The boys were placed in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine that depicts which areas of the brain are active in response to a stimulus. The boys were shown a series of 192 photos of hands and feet in pain, or no pain, situations. For example, an image might show a hand resting on a table top with a knife laying beside it, or the same hand on the table with the point of the knife blade about to pierce it.

As a group, the boys with serious conduct problems tended to show decreased activation in areas of the brain -- especially the anterior cingulate cortex, and the insula -- that are critical for empathy for pain, in comparison to the control group of boys.

With lower empathy, they were less reactive to others’ pain. This could be the root of what the researchers call “callous traits.”

Reduced response to pain of other people, the researchers wrote, “could reflect an early neurobiological marker indexing risk for empathic deficits seen in adult psychopathy.”

If that sounds a little scary, like the Philip K. Dick novel “Minority Report” (made into a movie by Steven Spielberg in 2002), in which crime is predicted and future wrongdoers labeled and arrested before they offend, Viding and others in the field stress two points: any such future is a long way off, and that’s not the goal of the research.

For one thing, fMRI studies of psychopathy have yielded a variety of results, sometimes conflicting ones. Last month, for example, a study published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry by Jean Decety of the University of Chicago, a leading expert in the field of social neuroscience, found that incarcerated men with psychopathic traits had greater activation of the insula region in response to images of pain – the opposite of what Viding’s group found.

There could be a number of reasons for conflicting results, suggested Abigail Marsh, a Georgetown University professor of psychology. A recent Marsh study published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry tracked with the Viding team’s results – reduced response from brain regions key to empathy. But, she said, “we found a very small change in instructions” – to imagine the person in a picture is one’s self versus another person – “made a very big difference in the patterns of brain activity we observed.”

Plus there are obvious age, developmental and life experience differences between an adult incarcerated population and children.

In order to clear the fog, Decey said, “we really need many more studies of this kind.”   

Meanwhile, whatever the fine details, it is clear that the brains of psychopaths work differently than those of non-psychopaths. Psychopaths, for example, often show dysfunction in the amygdala, where fear is processed. As a result, psychopaths are bad at recognizing fear in others.

Viding agreed that “we are a very long way from reliably predicting future psychopathy by testing children. In fact, I am very skeptical about us ever being able to do so.”

But that’s not necessary to help children because the real goal is treatment, not pinpointing a future serial killer. “We are hoping that, as has been the case for autism, we are able to develop earlier identifiers that will allow us to begin treatment when children are young,” Marsh said.

Research shows that if such children can be identified, behavioral therapy, such as rewarding empathetic behavior toward others, and training parents in adopting a warmer parenting style, can work, though it’s still early and, Viding said, it may always be difficult to parent such children.

No child should ever be labeled a psychopath, Viding said, because their brains and life experiences are still  developing and, especially if given intervention, they may never wind up psychopathic, but callous traits are a real problem.

“Research clearly shows that not all children with conduct problems are alike. It may sound more politically correct not to acknowledge that, but ultimately that stance is not going to be helpful for the children and their families. In my own experience, parents of children with conduct problems and callous traits are often desperate for help.” 

Related links: 

Speech patterns may give psychopaths away

Facebook profile may expose mental illness

U.S. mental health experts urge focus on early treatment

By Wynne Parry
LiveScience

Psychopaths are known to be wily and manipulative, but even so, they unconsciously betray themselves, according to scientists who have looked for patterns in convicted murderers' speech as they described their crimes.

The researchers interviewed 52 convicted murderers, 14 of them ranked as psychopaths according to the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised, a 20-item assessment, and asked them to describe their crimes in detail. Using computer programs to analyze what the men said, the researchers found that those with psychopathic scores showed a lack of emotion, spoke in terms of cause-and-effect when describing their crimes, and focused their attention on basic needs, such as food, drink and money.

While we all have conscious control over some words we use, particularly nouns and verbs, this is not the case for the majority of the words we use, including little, functional words like "to" and "the" or the tense we use for our verbs, according to Jeffrey Hancock, the lead researcher and an associate professor in communications at Cornell University, who discussed the work on Monday (Oct. 17) in Midtown Manhattan at Cornell's ILR Conference Center.

"The beautiful thing about them is they are unconsciously produced," Hancock said.

These unconscious actions can reveal the psychological dynamics in a speaker's mind even though he or she is unaware of it, Hancock said.

What it means to be a psychopath

Psychopaths make up about 1 percent of the general population and as much as 25 percent of male offenders in federal correctional settings, according to the researchers. Psychopaths are typically profoundly selfish and lack emotion. "In lay terms, psychopaths seem to have little or no 'conscience,'" write the researchers in a study published online in the journal Legal and Criminological Psychology.

Psychopaths are also known for being cunning and manipulative, and they make for perilous interview subjects, according to Michael Woodworth, one of the authors and a psychologist who studies psychopathy at the University of British Columbia, who joined the discussion by phone.

"It is unbelievable," Woodworth said. "You can spend two or three hours and come out feeling like you are hypnotized."

While there are reasons to suspect that psychopaths' speech patterns might have distinctive characteristics, there has been little study of it, the team writes.  

How words give them away

To examine the emotional content of the murderers' speech, Hancock and his colleagues looked at a number of factors, including how frequently they described their crimes using the past tense. The use of the past tense can be an indicator of psychological detachment, and the researchers found that the psychopaths used it more than the present tense when compared with the nonpsychopaths. They also found more dysfluencies — the "uhs" and "ums" that interrupt speech — among psychopaths. Nearly universal in speech, dysfluencies indicate that the speaker needs some time to think about what they are saying.

With regard to psychopaths, "We think the 'uhs' and 'ums' are about putting the mask of sanity on," Hancock told LiveScience.

Psychopaths appear to view the world and others instrumentally, as theirs for the taking, the team, which also included Stephen Porter from the University of British Columbia, wrote.

As they expected, the psychopaths' language contained more words known as subordinating conjunctions. These words, including "because" and "so that," are associated with cause-and-effect statements.

"This pattern suggested that psychopaths were more likely to view the crime as the logical outcome of a plan (something that 'had' to be done to achieve a goal)," the authors write.

And finally, while most of us respond to higher-level needs, such as family, religion or spirituality, and self-esteem, psychopaths remain occupied with those needs associated with a more basic existence.

Their analysis revealed that psychopaths used about twice as many words related to basic physiological needs and self-preservation, including eating, drinking and monetary resources than the nonpsychopaths, they write.

By comparison, the nonpsychopathic murderers talked more about spirituality and religion and family, reflecting what nonpsychopathic people would think about when they just committed a murder, Hancock said.

The researchers are interested in analyzing what people write on Facebook or in other social media, since our unconscious mind also holds sway over what we write. By analyzing stories written by students from Cornell and the University of British Columbia, and looking at how the text people generate using social media relates to scores on the Self-Report Psychopathy scale. Unlike the checklist, which is based on an extensive review of the case file and an interview, the self report is completed by the person in question.

This sort of tool could be very useful for law enforcement investigations, such as in the case of the Long Island serial killer, who is being sought for the murders of at least four prostitutes and possibly others, since this killer used the online classified site Craigslist to contact victims, according to Hancock.      

Text analysis software could be used to conduct a "first pass," focusing the work for human investigators, he said. "A lot of time analysts tell you they feel they are drinking from a fire hose."

Knowing a suspect is a psychopath can affect how law enforcement conducts investigations and interrogations, Hancock said.

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