A psychopath is someone who has an antisocial personality disorder characterized by a lack of empathy, remorse, and regard for others. Psychopathy exists on a spectrum, and those on the extreme end are sometimes referred to as “born” psychopaths. This means they exhibit severe psychopathic traits from a very early age, often due to both genetic and environmental factors. While the causes are complex, certain things are known to happen in the brains and development of born psychopaths that contribute to their manipulative, harmful behaviors.
Lack of Empathy and Emotional Depth from Childhood
One of the hallmark characteristics of psychopaths is a severe lack of empathy and inability to feel deep emotions. For born psychopaths, this is something evident early in childhood. While healthy children start exhibiting signs of conscience, compassion, and genuine caring for others at around age 2-4, psychopathic children do not. They show less distress when seeing others in pain, don’t respond to punishment with remorse, and have little interest in bonding.
This is caused by differences in the limbic system of the brain, which handles emotion. fMRI scans show less activity in the amygdala and regions involved in emotional processing. There are also abnormalities in the connections between the emotional and frontal regions. This impairs their ability to understand, process, and respond to the emotions of others. They may learn to mimic emotions they don’t feel in order to fit in. But inside, born psychopaths remain detached and unmoved, even by the suffering of others.
Lack of Fear and High Sensation-Seeking
Healthy children exhibit fear and anxiety of punishment when misbehaving. However, psychopathic children show a marked lack of fear or remorse. This fearlessness is linked to abnormalities in their amygdala and connections to the prefrontal cortex. These regions evaluate threats and trigger fear. With dysfunctional circuitry, psychopaths process threats differently and remain unfazed by fearful stimuli.
This fearlessness manifests as high levels of sensation-seeking and risk-taking, even as children. Born psychopaths are thrill-seekers who act recklessly and impulsively without thinking about consequences. They seek out high intensity, novel and dangerous activities and tend to be very bored by routine. This need for stimulation combined with their emotional detachment often leads them to antisocial behaviors starting early in life.
Callous, Manipulative Behavior
The emotional deficits and fearless temperament of born psychopaths take form in callous, manipulative behaviors that emerge in childhood:
– Lack of guilt – They have no remorse or concern for misbehavior, even when severely punished.
– Lying – They frequently lie to avoid blame or get what they want. It comes easily and feels normal to them.
– Blaming others – They refuse responsibility and deflect it onto others, even for their own actions.
– Aggression – If angered, they lash out verbally and physically with cruelty. They intimidate others.
– Using charm – From an early age they learn to put on a charming mask and use words to deceive and manipulate.
– Rule breaking – They disregard rules, laws and social norms, believing they’re above them. This leads to delinquency.
– Academic issues – They have poor attention and interest in school, authority and academic achievement.
This pattern of behavior causes severe problems at home and school. Parenting born psychopaths is incredibly challenging as they lack empathy, respect, and responsibility. Their manipulative charm makes strict discipline difficult for parents. They also tend to isolate themselves and have trouble forming genuine friendships. Their callousness often leads to bullying. Overall, born psychopathic children demonstrate a profoundly antisocial pattern of thinking and behaving from early on.
Underactive Prefrontal Cortex and Poor Judgment
In addition to limbic system differences, one of the neurological hallmarks of psychopathy is an underactive prefrontal cortex – the brain region controlling complex cognition, reasoning, morality and judgment. fMRI scans show low prefrontal activity in psychopaths, indicating deficiencies in this critical region.
The underdevelopment of their prefrontal cortex impairs born psychopaths’ higher-order cognitive skills like:
– Impulse control – They act recklessly on urges without thinking first.
– Future planning – They live in the moment and make choices for short-term gain.
– Consequences – They don’t consider the impact their actions have on others.
– Morals – They have trouble making moral judgments of right and wrong.
– Violence regulation – They fail to regulate their aggressive, violent tendencies.
Born psychopaths’ immature judgment and difficulty controlling impulses worsen their reckless, antisocial behavior. They make destructive choices and hurt others without remorse or moral understanding of their actions.
Shallow, Short-Lived Emotions
While born psychopaths struggle with major emotions like empathy and fear, they do experience more shallow feelings like excitement, pride, anger, boredom and frustration. However, even these are short-lived and fleeting. Their emotions tend to be totally in-the-moment physiological reactions to what’s happening around them.
For example, they get very excited in pursuit of a reward or bored when an activity becomes dull. But these passions quickly switch on and off based on their situation. Psychopaths struggle with deeper, long-lasting emotions and moods. They don’t feel bad about hurting others long after the event, experience lasting depression or dwell on past regrets. Without stronger emotions, it’s difficult for them to make deeper human connections. Their relationships tend to stay superficial, transient and centered around their own desires.
Early Neurological Differences
Many of the emotional and cognitive differences in psychopaths have origins early in neurodevelopment. Longitudinal brain scans show that psychopathic traits correlate with structural differences detectable in childhood and adolescence. Regions that end up abnormal in psychopathic adults, like the prefrontal cortex, show atypical growth and thinning during development. This suggests neonatal neurological factors derail normal moral and emotional circuitry from forming in utero and during early childhood.
Potential factors that contribute to early psychopathic brain differences include:
– Genetics – Gene variants involved in brain growth are linked to psychopathic traits.
– Prenatal environment – Exposure to toxins, malnutrition or maternal stress in the womb can affect fetal brain development.
– Childhood trauma – Early abuse, neglect, or brain injury can impact moral processing regions.
– Hormones – Testosterone and stress hormones like cortisol influence the developing limbic system.
A combination of hereditary factors and early environmental exposures likely interact to establish psychopathic brain abnormalities from an early age in born psychopaths.
Parents Often Share Similar Traits
When looking at why certain children develop into psychopaths, it’s important to consider their parents. Research shows psychopathic traits in children are correlated with similar antisocial or psychopathic features in their parents. This is likely due to both genetic heritability and environmental influences.
Parents of psychopaths tend to exhibit some of the following traits:
– Lack of empathy
– Irresponsibility
– Impulsivity
– Superficial charm
– Disregard for rules and obligations
– Hostility and aggression
– Substance abuse
– Criminal behavior or legal issues
Because psychopathy is inherited genetically, children may simply inherit a predisposition from parents with psychopathic genes. However, parents also shape their child’s environment. Parental psychopathic traits can lead to dysfunctional parenting that fails to provide needed affection, discipline, supervision and care. This parenting further disrupts healthy development of moral processing and emotional regions. The combination of genetic risk and poor environment stacks the odds against psychopathic children learning empathy and impulse control.
Presence of Callous-Unemotional Traits
One specific cluster of psychopathic childhood traits that designates particularly severe antisocial behavior is callous-unemotional (CU) traits. Children with high CU traits show acallous lack of remorse, uncaring attitudes, lack of empathy, and shallow or deficient emotion.
Research shows that children with CU traits, sometimes categorized as having “childhood-onset conduct disorder,” account for the most violent and aggressive subgroup of antisocial youth. Those with CU traits show earlier and more severe conduct problems, delinquency, substance abuse risk, and aggression. They are also more resistant to treatment.
Assessing for CU traits helps identify children at highest risk for chronic psychopathy and serious violence into adulthood. The presence of CU traits alongside conduct disorders signifies a uniquely dangerous and pathological profile that warrants early intervention.
Higher Rates of Childhood Conduct Disorders
Antisocial personality disorders like psychopathy are classified as disruptive, impulse control and conduct disorders in childhood. Children who go on to become psychopathic adults exhibit severe conduct disorder symptoms early on, including:
– Aggression to people and animals
– Destruction of property
– Deceitfulness or theft
– Serious rule violations
Research shows that children with conduct disorders have high rates of psychopathy as adults. In one study, 45% of youth with conduct disorder were rated as psychopathic at age 28. Other work finds children with conduct problems have brain abnormalities in emotion and behavior regulation regions that mirror psychopathic neurology.
Childhood conduct disorder symptoms directly reflect the callous, aggressive, deceitful traits central to psychopathy. Their presence predicts more severe antisocial outcomes.
Higher Rates of ADHD
Children who develop into psychopaths also tend to show high rates of ADHD symptoms early in life. These include hyperactivity, impulsivity, and attention difficulties.
One study found that adults with psychopathy were five times more likely to have a childhood ADHD diagnosis. ADHD children also show some similar brain abnormalities in the amygdala, prefrontal cortex, and reward pathways.
The impaired impulse control and hyperactivity of ADHD coupled with psychopathic callousness amplifies tendencies toward recklessness, dangerous behavior, and remorseless harm of others. The combination of ADHD symptoms and psychopathic traits in children signals high severity.
Trouble in School
Psychopathic children tend to have chronic academic and behavioral problems in school. They struggle to follow rules, control outbursts, complete work, focus in class, and refrain from bullying. This leads to:
– Poor grades
– Negative feedback from teachers
– Classroom disruptions
– Frequent discipline referrals
– Suspensions or expulsions
– Dropping out
The difficulties born psychopaths have in school reflect impairments in their frontal lobe functioning that hamper learning, following structure, controlling impulses, and behaving appropriately with peers. Their manipulative, callous nature also clashes with an educational environment that expects cooperation, learning, and kindness.
Presence of Other Mental Health Disorders
Because psychopathy reflects broad developmental brain abnormalities, children who become psychopaths often meet criteria for other related mental health disorders:
– Depression – Lack of emotion can manifest as depression.
– Anxiety – The amygdala’s poor fear processing can create irregular anxiety.
– Substance abuse – Seeking stimulation coupled with poor impulse control increases risk of early substance problems.
– Narcissism – Their grandiosity and lack of empathy mirrors some narcissistic traits.
– Borderline personality – Impulsivity and anger common in borderline personality disorder also occurs.
There is much symptom overlap between psychopathy and various mood, impulse-control and personality disorders. Comorbidity increases with psychopathy severity and worsens outcomes.
Brain Structure Differences
Brain scans of youth with conduct disorders or psychopathic traits reveal structural and functional abnormalities in core areas:
– Smaller amygdala – The emotional processing center is underdeveloped. This impairs empathy, fear, and emotional learning.
– Poor connections between limbic system and prefrontal cortex – This reduces communication between emotional and regulatory centers.
– Underactive frontal and temporal lobes – The executive functioning and moral processing regions lag behind in growth and activity.
– Overlarge striatum – The reward center is enlarged, increasing sensitivity to rewards which drives impulsive behavior.
You can actually see the emotion, empathy, and impulse control centers of the brain failing to properly develop in budding psychopaths. These areas continue to dysfunction into adulthood in severe psychopathy.
Lack of Response to Treatment
The neurocognitive deficits psychopathic children exhibit make their behavior highly resistant to intervention and treatment. Research on treatments like psychotherapy, behavior modification, family therapy and medications shows improvement is limited in youth with psychopathic features:
– They respond poorly to punishment-based discipline intended to induce guilt, remorse, or improved behavior. The reward-center of their brains doesn’t process punishment signals normally.
– Talk therapy does little to improve empathy and morality in those lacking neurological structure for such complex processing.
– Medications may help reduce accompanying ADHD, anxiety, and other symptoms but don’t treat the psychopathy directly.
– Parenting training often fails because parents have psychopathic traits themselves. The child’s genetic predisposition remains.
– Even intensive, comprehensive interventions see high recidivism rates, though some small improvements occur.
The challenges treating born psychopaths highlight the importance of early identification and using multiple evidence-based interventions, even if prospects remain bleak.
What We Can Do
While true born psychopathy is not fully treatable, researchers recommend the following steps to mitigate harm:
Early Identification
Use personality assessments, neuropsychological testing, and diagnostic tools to identify CU traits, psychopathic features, and comorbid disorders as early as possible in problematic children. Prioritize those with multiple risk markers.
Family Interventions
Provide parents with therapy and training tailored to managing a psychopathic child’s manipulation, lack of empathy, and violence. Teach alternative discipline techniques and ways to set concrete rewards/consequences.
School Accommodations
Inform teachers of the child’s neurocognitive deficits impacting learning. Make academic accommodations like minimizing stimulation, using interactive instruction, individual tutoring, and refocusing energy into sports/clubs.
Treatment Combinations
Use evidence-based psychosocial treatments plus medications to improve attention, anxiety, anger, and impulse control as much as neurologically possible. Cognitive-behavioral therapy, family therapy, and social skills training should be integrated.
Restrict Freedoms Judiciously
Use appropriate consequences like electronic monitoring, never leaving child unsupervised, or residential programs to prevent violence and criminal activity during especially high-risk periods like adolescence.
Prepare for Ongoing Management
Work with mental health professionals experienced with psychopathy to adapt to the child’s chronic condition and treat secondary issues as they emerge over time. Expect that they may require structure, supervision, and judicious restrictions well into adulthood to prevent offending.