The Fear Factor

by Abigail Marsh

  Chapter 3: The Psychopathic Brain

  James proposed that the mechanism: R. J. Blair, “A Cognitive Developmental Approach to Morality: Investigating the Psychopath,” Cognition 57, no. 1 (1995): 1–29; R. J. Blair, “Applying a Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective to the Disorder of Psychopathy,” Development and Psychopathology 17, no. 3 (2005): 865–891.

  the work of animal behavior experts: Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression (London: Methuen, 1966); Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Love and Hate: The Natural History of Behavior Patterns (Chicago: Aldine, 1996); Rudolf Schenkel, “Submission: Its Features in the Wolf and Dog,” American Zoologist 7 (1967): 319–329.

  Young children are almost always: Sylvana M. Côté, Tracy Vaillancourt, John C. LeBlanc, Daniel S. Nagin, and Richard E. Tremblay, “The Development of Physical Aggression from Toddlerhood to Pre-adolescence: A Nation Wide Longitudinal Study of Canadian Children,” Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology 34, no. 1 (2006): 71–85; Richard E. Tremblay, “The Development of Physical Aggression,” Encyclopedia on Early Childhood Development, January 2012, http://www.child-encyclopedia.com/aggression/according-experts/development-physical-aggression.

  In one study conducted in the 1970s: Linda A. Camras, “Facial Expressions Used by Children in a Conflict Situation,” Child Development (1977): 1431–1435.

  even during negotiations between adults: Marwan Sinaceur, Shirli Kopelman, Dimitri Vasiljevic, and Christopher Haag, “Weep and Get More: When and Why Sadness Expression Is Effective in Negotiations,” Journal of Applied Psychology 100, no. 6 (2015): 1847–1871.

  Here are the full criteria for a conduct disorder diagnosis: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 2013), 469–471.

  these children may not respond appropriately: Robert James R. Blair, “Responsiveness to Distress Cues in the Child with Psychopathic Tendencies,” Personality and Individual Differences 27, no. 1 (1999): 135–145; Amy Dawel, Richard O’Kearney, Elinor McKone, and Romina Palermo, “Not Just Fear and Sadness: Meta-Analytic Evidence of Pervasive Emotion Recognition Deficits for Facial and Vocal Expressions in Psychopathy,” Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 36 (2012): 2288–2304; Abigail A. Marsh and R. J. R. Blair, “Deficits in Facial Affect Recognition Among Antisocial Populations: A Meta-Analysis,” Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 32 (2008): 454–465; Stuart F. White, Margaret J. Briggs-Gowan, Joel L. Voss, Amelie Petitclerc, Kimberly McCarthy, R. James R. Blair, and Lauren S. Wakschlag, “Can the Fear Recognition Deficits Associated with Callous-Unemotional Traits Be Identified in Early Childhood,” Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology 38, no. 6 (2016): 672–684; Patrick D. Sylvers, Patricia A. Brennan, and Scott O. Lilienfeld, “Psychopathic Traits and Preattentive Threat Processing in Children: A Novel Test of the Fearlessness Hypothesis,” Psychological Science 22 (2011): 1280–1287.

  When electricity is sent surging: José Manuel Rodríguez Delgado, Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society (Washington, DC: World Bank Publications, 1969); Marvin Wasman and John P. Flynn, “Directed Attack Elicited from Hypothalamus,” Archives of Neurology 6 (1962): 220–227; Thomas R. Gregg and Allan Siegel, “Brain Structures and Neurotransmitters Regulating Aggression in Cats: Implications for Human Aggression,” Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry 25, no. 1 (2001): 91–140.

  Optogenetic triggering of neurons: Dayu Lin, Maureen P. Boyle, Piotr Dollar, Hyosang Lee, E. S. Lein, Pietro Perona, and David J. Anderson, “Functional Identification of an Aggression Locus in the Mouse Hypothalamus,” Nature 470, no. 7333 (2011): 221–226..

  electrically induced rage will not be directed: Alexander M. Perachio, “The Influence of Target Sex and Dominance on Evoked Attack in Rhesus Monkeys,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 38, no. 2 (1973): 543–547.

  The modern clinical definition of psychopathy: Hervey Cleckley, The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Clarify Some Issues About the So-called Psychopathic Personality (Brattleboro, VT: Echo Point Books & Media, 2015).

  More often than not, the typical psychopath: Ibid., 339.

  Perhaps our resistance to the idea: Although the perception of children as moral patients may be less true for black children, who tend to be perceived as older and physically larger and more likely to be guilty of a crime than white children of the same age; see, for example, Phillip Atiba Goff, Matthew Christian Jackson, Brooke Allison, Lewis Di Leone, Carmen Marie Culotta, and Natalie Ann DiTomasso, “The Essence of Innocence: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 106, no. 4 (2014): 526–545, DOI: 10.1037/a0035663; American Psychological Association, “Black Boys Viewed as Older, Less Innocent Than Whites, Research Finds,” March 6, 2014, http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2014/03/black-boys-older.aspx.

  The title of a widely circulated: Jennifer Kahn, “Can You Call a 9-Year-Old a Psychopath?” New York Times Magazine, May 11, 2012.

  There is a nearly identical 40-point scale: Robert D. Hare, The Hare Psychopathy Checklist—Revised (Toronto: Multi-Health Systems, 1991); Adelle E. Forth, David S. Kosson, and Robert D. Hare, The Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version (Toronto: Multi-Health Systems, 2003).

  in children with psychopathic traits the opposite: Ashley S. Hampton, Deborah A. G. Drabick, and Laurence Steinberg, “Does IQ Moderate the Relation Between Psychopathy and Juvenile Offending?” Law and Human Behavior 38, no. 1 (2014): 23–33; Terrie E. Moffitt, “Adolescence-Limited and Life-Course-Persistent Antisocial Behavior: A Developmental Taxonomy,” Psychological Review 100, no. 4 (1993): 674–701.

  nearly all of these parents had other children: For Ridgeway’s brother’s response to reading about Ridgway’s crimes, see Michael Ko, “Ridgway’s Relatives ‘Mortified by Grief,’” Seattle Times, November 9, 2003.

  different styles of parenting may buffer: Hugh Lytton, “Child and Parent Effects in Boys’ Conduct Disorder: A Reinterpretation,” Developmental Psychology 26, no. 5 (1990): 683–697; Grazyna Kochanska, “Multiple Pathways to Conscience for Children with Different Temperaments: From Toddlerhood to Age 5,” Developmental Psychology 33, no. 2 (1997): 228–240; Rebecca Waller, Frances Gardner, Essi Viding, Daniel S. Shaw, Thomas J. Dishion, Melvin N. Wilson, and Luke W. Hyde, “Bidirectional Associations Between Parental Warmth, Callous Unemotional Behavior, and Behavior Problems in High-Risk Preschoolers,” Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology 42, no. 8 (2014): 1275–1285; Rebecca Waller, Daniel S. Shaw, Erika E. Forbes, and Luke W. Hyde, “Understanding Early Contextual and Parental Risk Factors for the Development of Limited Prosocial Emotions,” Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology 43, no. 6 (2015): 1025–1039.

  very high levels of parental warmth: Luke W. Hyde, Rebecca Waller, Christopher J. Trentacosta, Daniel S. Shaw, Jenae M. Neiderhiser, Jody M. Ganiban, David Reiss, and Leslie D. Leve, “Heritable and Nonheritable Pathways to Early Callous-Unemotional Behaviors,” American Journal of Psychiatry 173, no. 9 (2016): 903–910; Bruce Rosen, “fMRI at 20: Has It Changed the World?” ISMRM Lauterbur Lecture, 2011, uploaded April 9, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edO43AT5GhE.

  the NIMH acquired a 7-Tesla magnet: Jun Shen, “Section on Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy,” National Institute of Mental Health, https://www.nimh.nih.gov/labs-at-nimh/research-areas/clinics-and-labs/mib/smrs/index.shtml; Björn Friebe, Astrid Wollrab, Markus Thormann, Katharina Fischbach, Jens Ricke, Marcus Grueschow, Siegfried Kropf, Frank Fischbach, and Oliver Speck, “Sensory Perceptions of Individuals Exposed to the Static Field of a 7T MRI: A Controlled Blinded Study,” Journal of Magnetic Resonance Imaging 41, no. 6 (2015): 1675–1681.

  a group of researchers, led by Daniel Tranel: Daniel Tranel and Bradley T. Hyman, “Neuropsychological Correlates of Bilateral Amygdala Damage,” Archives of Neurology 47, no. 3 (1990): 349–355.

  photographs of people who looked frightened: Ralph Adolphs, Daniel Tranel, Hanna Damasio, and Antonio Damasio, “Impaired Recognition of Emotion in Facial Expressions F
ollowing Bilateral Damage to the Human Amygdala,” Nature 372, no. 6507 (1994): 669–672.

  revealed her knack for portraiture: Ralph Adolphs, Daniel Tranel, Hanna Damasio, and Antonio R. Damasio, “Fear and the Human Amygdala,” Journal of Neuroscience 15, no. 9 (1995): 5879–5891.

  in a teenage Urbach-Wiethe patient: Morteza Pishnamazi, Abbas Tafakhori, Sogol Loloee, Amirhossein Modabbernia, Vajiheh Aghamollaii, Bahador Bahrami, and Joel S. Winston, “Attentional Bias Towards and Away from Fearful Faces Is Modulated by Developmental Amygdala Damage,” Cortex 81 (2016): 24–34.

  including vocal utterances, body postures: For a review, see Abigail A. Marsh, “Understanding Amygdala Responsiveness to Fearful Expressions Through the Lens of Psychopathy and Altruism,” Journal of Neuroscience Research 94, no. 6 (2016): 513–525.

  Hundreds of studies have now been conducted: Paolo Fusar-Poli, Anna Placentino, Francesco Carletti, Paola Landi, Paul Allen, Simon Surguladze, Francesco Benedetti, Marta Abbamonte, Roberto Gasparotti, Francesco Barale, Jorge Perez, Philip McGuire, and Pierliugi Politi, “Functional Atlas of Emotional Faces Processing: A Voxel-Based Meta-Analysis of 105 Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Studies,” Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience 34, no. 6 (2009): 418–432.

  A firefighter once got sucked into an MRI: J. K. Bucsio, “MRI Facility Safety: Understanding the Risks of Powerful Attraction,” Radiology Today 6, no. 22 (2005): 22.

  The simple act of labeling an emotion: Matthew D. Lieberman, Naomi I. Eisenberger, Molly J. Crockett, Sabrina M. Tom, Jennifer H. Pfeifer, and Baldwin M. Way, “Putting Feelings into Words: Affect Labeling Disrupts Amygdala Activity in Response to Affective Stimuli,” Psychological Science 18, no. 5 (2007): 421–428.

  the region of the brain that is critical: Abigail A. Marsh, Elizabeth C. Finger, Derek G. V. Mitchell, Marguerite E. Reid, Courtney Sims, David S. Kosson, Kenneth E. Towbin, Ellen Leibenluft, Daniel S. Pine, and R. James R. Blair, “Reduced Amygdala Response to Fearful Expressions in Children and Adolescents with Callous-Unemotional Traits and Disruptive Behavior Disorders,” American Journal of Psychiatry 165, no. 6 (2008): 712–720; Alice P. Jones, Kristin R. Laurens, Catherine M. Herba, Gareth J. Barker, and Essi Viding, “Amygdala Hypoactivity to Fearful Faces in Boys with Conduct Problems and Callous-Unemotional Traits,” American Journal of Psychiatry 166 (2009): 95–102; Essi Viding, Catherine L. Sebastian, Mark R. Dadds, Patricia L. Lockwood, Charlotte A. M. Cecil, Stephane A. De Brito, and Eamon J. McCrory, “Amygdala Response to Preattentive Masked Fear in Children with Conduct Problems: The Role of Callous-Unemotional Traits,” American Journal of Psychiatry 169, no. 10 (2012): 1109–1116; Stuart F. White, Abigail A. Marsh, Katherine A. Fowler, Julia C. Schechter, Christopher Adalio, Kayla Pope, Stephen Sinclair, Daniel S. Pine, and R. James R. Blair, “Reduced Amygdala Response in Youths with Disruptive Behavior Disorders and Psychopathic Traits: Decreased Emotional Response Versus Increased Top-Down Attention to Nonemotional Features,” American Journal of Psychiatry 169, no. 7 (2012): 750–758; Leah M. Lozier, Elise M. Cardinale, John W. VanMeter, and Abigail A. Marsh, “Mediation of the Relationship Between Callous-Unemotional Traits and Proactive Aggression by Amygdala Response to Fear Among Children with Conduct Problems,” JAMA Psychiatry 71, no. 6 (2014): 627–636.

  Ours was not the only study: Abigail A. Marsh, Elizabeth E. Finger, Julia C. Schechter, Ilana T. N. Jurkowitz, Marguerite Reid Schneider, and Robert James R. Blair, “Adolescents with Psychopathic Traits Report Reductions in Physiological Responses to Fear,” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 52, no. 8 (2011): 834–841; Alice Jones Bartoli, Francesca G. Happe, Francesca Gilbert, Stephanie Burnett Heyes, and Essi Viding, “Feeling, Caring, Knowing: Different Types of Empathy Deficit in Boys with Psychopathic Tendencies and Autism Spectrum Disorder,” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 51, no. 11 (2010): 1188–1197; Rebecca Waller, Christopher J. Trentacosta, Daniel S. Shaw, Jenae M. Neiderhiser, Jody M. Ganiban, David Reiss, Leslie D. Leve, and Luke W. Hyde, “Heritable Temperament Pathways to Early Callous-Unemotional Behaviour,” British Journal of Psychiatry 209, no. 6 (2016): 475–482; Ida Klingzell, Kostas A. Fanti, Olivier F. Colins, Louise Frogner, Anna-Karin Andershed, and Henrik Andershed, “Early Childhood Trajectories of Conduct Problems and Callous-Unemotional Traits: The Role of Fearlessness and Psychopathic Personality Dimensions,” Child Psychiatry and Human Development 47, no. 2 (2016): 236–247; Kostas A. Fanti, Georgia Panayiotou, C. Lazarou, R. Michael, and Giorgos Georgiou, “The Better of Two Evils? Evidence That Children Exhibiting Continuous Conduct Problems High or Low on Callous-Unemotional Traits Score on Opposite Directions on Physiological and Behavioral Measures of Fear,” Development and Psychopathology 28, no. 1 (2016): 185–198.

  Similar fearlessness has been observed: Justin S. Feinstein, Ralph Adolphs, Antonio Damasio, and Daniel Tranel, “The Human Amygdala and the Induction and Experience of Fear,” Current Biology 21 (2011): 34–38; Justin S. Feinstein, “Lesion Studies of Human Emotion and Feeling,” Current Opinion in Neurobiology 23, no. 3 (2013): 304–309: Michael Davis, “The Role of the Amygdala in Fear and Anxiety,” Annual Review of Neuroscience 15 (1992): 353–75.

  As one psychopathic sex offender interviewed: Robert D. Hare, Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us (New York: Guilford, 1993), 44.

  these aberrant judgments correspond: Abigail A. Marsh and Elise M. Cardinale, “Psychopathy and Fear: Specific Impairments in Judging Behaviors That Frighten Others,” Emotion 12, no. 5 (2012): 892–898; Abigail A. Marsh and Elise M. Cardinale, “When Psychopathy Impairs Moral Judgments: Neural Responses During Judgments About Causing Fear,” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 9 (2014): 3–11; Elise M. Cardinale and Abigail A. Marsh, “Impact of Psychopathy on Moral Judgments About Causing Fear and Physical Harm,” PLoS One 10, no. 5 (2015): e0125708.

  Chapter 4: The Other Side of the Curve

  my student Joana Vieira and others: Yaling Yang, Adrian Raine, Katherine L. Narr, Patrick M. Colletti, and Arthur W. Toga, “Localization of Deformations Within the Amygdala in Individuals with Psychopathy,” Archives of General Psychiatry 66, no. 9 (2009): 986–994; Dustin A. Pardini, Adrian Raine, Kurt Erickson, and Rolf Loeber, “Lower Amygdala Volume in Men Is Associated with Childhood Aggression, Early Psychopathic Traits, and Future Violence,” Biological Psychiatry 75, no. 1 (2014): 73–80; Joana B. Vieira, Fernando Ferreira-Santos, Pedro R. Almeida, F. Barbosa, João Marques-Teixeira, and Abigail A. Marsh, “Psychopathic Traits Are Associated with Cortical and Subcortical Volume Alterations in Healthy Individuals,” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 10, no. 12 (2015): 1693–1704; Moran D. Cohn, Essi Viding, Eamon McCrory, Louise Pape, Wim van den Brink, Theo A. H. Doreleijers, Dick J. Veltman, and Arne Popma, “Regional Grey Matter Volume and Concentration in At-Risk Adolescents: Untangling Associations With Callous-Unemotional Traits and Conduct Disorder Symptoms,” Psychiatry Research 254 (2016): 180–87.

  a 2014 study of amygdala activity: Leah M. Lozier, Elise M. Cardinale, John W. VanMeter, and Abigail A. Marsh, “Mediation of the Relationship Between Callous-Unemotional Traits and Proactive Aggression by Amygdala Response to Fear Among Children with Conduct Problems,” JAMA Psychiatry 71, no. 6 (2014): 627–636.

  perhaps 30 percent of the population registers: Jeremy Coid, Min Yang, Simone Ullrich, Amanda Roberts, and Robert D. Hare, “Prevalence and Correlates of Psychopathic Traits in the Household Population of Great Britain,” International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 32, no. 2 (2009): 65–73.

  the remaining 61 percent were generous: Ziv G. Epstein, Alexander Peysakhovich, and David G. Rand, “The Good, the Bad, and the Unflinchingly Selfish: Cooperative Decision-Making Can Be Predicted with High Accuracy Using Only Three Behavioral Types,” paper presented to the Seventeenth ACM Conference on Economics and Computation, June 3, 2016, https://ssrn.com/abstract=2737983.

  “All the friendly feelings are derived”: Aristotle, Ethics, part 5, http://www.fullbooks.com/Ethics5.html.

&n
bsp; belief that human nature is fundamentally selfish: Dale T. Miller, “The Norm of Self-Interest,” American Psychologist 54, no. 12 (1999): 1053–1060.

  A nearly identical percentage of people: Robert Wuthnow, Acts of Compassion: Caring for Others and Helping Ourselves (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). See results of New York Times/CBS News poll, conducted July 17–19, 1999, at: https://partners.nytimes.com/library/national/101799mag-poll-results.html. To explore the GSS data, visit GSS Data Explorer, “Can People Be Trusted,” https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/variables/441/vshow.

  Most traits, from height to cholesterol levels: For population distributions, see Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “Anthropometric Reference Data for Children and Adults: United States, 2007–2010,” Vital and Health Statistics 11, no. 252 (October 2012), https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_11/sr11_252.pdf.

  what is called a half normal curve: Coid et al., “Prevalence and Correlates of Psychopathic Traits.”

  People with this condition represent: Jeremy B. Wilmer, Laura Germine, Christopher F. Chabris, Garga Chatterjee, Mark Williams, Eric Loken, Ken Nakayama, and Bradley Duchaine, “Human Face Recognition Ability Is Specific and Highly Heritable,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 107, no. 11 (2010): 5238–5241; Nicholas G. Shakeshaft and Robert Plomin, “Genetic Specificity of Face Recognition,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 112, no. 41 (2015): 12887–12892.

  individuals who are extraordinarily good: Richard Russell, Brad Duchaine, and Ken Nakayama, “Super-Recognizers: People with Extraordinary Face Recognition Ability,” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 16, no. 2 (2009): 252–257.

  Both of these altruists were unaware: Nicole Lyn Pesce, “New Yorker Gives Barefoot Homeless Woman Her Shoes on the Subway,” New York Daily News, November 19, 2015, http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/new-yorker-barefoot-homeless-woman-shoes-subway-article-1.2440107; Lucy Yang, “Good Samaritan Gives Shivering Man His Shirt, Hat on Subway,” ABC Eyewitness News, January 10, 2016, http://abc7ny.com/society/exclusive-good-samaritan-who-gave-homeless-man-shirt-on-subway-speaks-out/1153750/.