M. Thomas: Confessions of a Sociopath

I’ve discovered that children are aware that they are slaves to their emotions and are a little embarrassed about it the same way twelve-year-old boys are a little embarrassed about their erections. They can’t really control them and the last thing they want is more attention being drawn to it. Asking about erections is not good. Tears should have the same rule. Or maybe it’s just that the children in my family prefer emotional detachment because that’s more what they’re used to. Either way, the esteem and affection that my nieces and nephews show me is perhaps proof that I wouldn’t be a horrible parent to an empath child after all.

Or maybe I would have little sociopath children. Because of my own success as a sociopath, I know that if I had equally remorseless, unfeeling children they would have just as much a chance to thrive in life as other children, if provided with the right kind of structure and opportunities to learn how to succeed. They’d be fine. In Steinbeck’s description of the sociopath Cathy he explains that “just as a cripple may learn to utilize his lack so that he becomes more effective in a limited field than the uncrippled, so did Cathy, using her difference, make a painful and bewildering stir in her world.” I know that any sociopath children of mine would be able to turn their weaknesses into strengths. I would hope that with the proper guidance they could use those strengths not to make a painful and bewildering stir, but for the benefit of their family and the greater world.

My most salient worry would not be how they would treat the world, but how the world would treat them. Would they be outsiders or outcasts? I would hate for them to feel compelled to go underground, never to find acceptance for who they are, to be regarded as hollow, unfinished people—or even the embodiment of evil.

It’s hard to parse out the root causes of this disorder. What it would be to know what genes flip which chemical levers that set these subtlest of mental tendencies in early childhood into motion. How do these incipient chemical yearnings mature into full-fledged sociopathy? Geneticists, neurologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and criminologists are beginning to knit together, from bits and pieces of studies and observation, a complex portrait of a complex human experience.

Budding sociopaths are often categorized as “callous-unemotional” by psychologists who are reluctant to diagnose children as sociopaths or psychopaths too early, feeling that applying that diagnostic label can unfairly affect how the kids and their families are treated. The traits in children are very similar to those in adults: a distinct lack of affect, empathy, and remorse. Callous-unemotional children don’t respond to the usual negative cues that teach most people how to behave well. Paul Frick, a psychologist at the University of New Orleans, says, “They don’t care if someone is mad at them. They don’t care if they hurt someone’s feelings. If they can get what they want without being cruel, that’s often easier, but at the end of the day, they’ll do whatever works best.”

That was certainly my experience growing up. I had revelation after revelation that I could get more of what I wanted more easily if I learned how to accommodate the desires of other people. On the playground, you can keep a toy longer if another kid willingly gives it to you than if you take if from him; in high school, you win more popularity by fitting in than by lording your superior intelligence over everyone; in the workplace, you advance more by making your supervisor look good to the boss than you do by undermining your supervisor. As one blog commenter put it:

Having worked in major corporations for about 3 decades, I know that no matter how you choose to rise through the ranks, there have still got to be people higher who promote you, and they aren’t going to do it unless you bring value—to either themselves or the company. If all socios left nothing but a path of carnage and destruction along their career paths, do you think that’s hidden from those with the power to move them upward? Even I know that benefiting others in the short term is often what will benefit me most in the long term—just like any normal person.

Despite sociopaths’ being largely ruled by impulses (or perhaps because they are), they are incredibly sensitive to incentive structures and actively consider both actual costs and opportunity costs in their decision-making. But there are certain consequences that I do not care as much about, particularly the moral judgment of others.

I presumably feel this way because of the wiring of my brain. Magnetic resonance imaging on the brains of psychopathic adults has shown significant differences in the size and density of regions of the brain associated with empathy and social values and active in moral decision-making. These areas are also critical for reinforcing positive outcomes and discouraging negative ones. In callous-unemotional children, negative feedback like a parent’s frown, a teacher’s chiding, or a friend’s yelp of pain may not register the way it would in a normal brain.

The lack of interest in other people’s negative emotions could, interestingly, be a matter of attention. Researchers gave a group of callous-unemotional boys a visual test that measures unconscious emotional processing. They flashed a rapid sequence of pictures of faces—fearful, happy, disgusted, and neutral—and measured the boys’ preattentive, or unconscious, recognition of the meaning of the emotion behind the faces. When compared with normal kids, the boys were less able to quickly detect fear or disgust, indicating that these callous-unemotional kids are not automatically assimilating threatening or negative cues in their world. They are lacking a fundamental social skill that most other people are born with, and it affects the way their whole emotional palette develops.

A recent study came to the surprising conclusion that children with a certain variation of a gene that affects brain serotonin are more likely to have these callous-unemotional traits if they are also raised poor. In contrast, kids with the same gene who had high socioeconomic status scored very low on sociopathic traits. The lead researcher on the study pointed out that although sociopathy is considered abnormal, these traits may be useful in certain circumstances. “For example, these folks tend to have less anxiety and are less prone to depression,” she said, qualities that might be useful in dangerous or unstable environments. It seems possible that kids in bad neighborhoods develop their inborn sociopathic traits as a defense mechanism against a chaotic and unpredictable world.

But these kids aren’t doomed to a life of prison or misanthropy. Psychiatrist Lee Robins investigated the roots of sociopathy by conducting a series of cohort studies tracking children with behavioral problems into adulthood. She discovered two important facts. First, nearly every adult who fit the criteria for sociopathy had been deeply antisocial as a child. And second, about 50 percent of the antisocial children who started in her study grew to be fairly normal adults. In other words, all sociopaths were antisocial children, but not all antisocial children become sociopaths. One has to wonder: Did some of those antisocial children simply grow up to be high-functioning, successful sociopaths who were then counted among the “fairly normal adults”? And if so, what in their childhoods made some children take one path, and the others another?

The general consensus has held that sociopathy is an untreatable disorder, but as evidence mounts that the brain is more plastic, or changeable, than we thought, researchers are beginning to propose that young sociopaths might be susceptible to early intervention. Perhaps children can be trained to develop their vestigial sense of empathy or learn to react appropriately to the emotions of people around them.