Dr. Abigail Marsh is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience at Georgetown University. Dr. Marsh is also the director of the Laboratory on Social and Affective Neuroscience. Her research focus is on the cognitive and neural bases of social and emotional processes, centering on empathy and the nonverbal communication of emotion.
Question 1. How did you get involved in psychopathy research?
It was a number of factors. I started out researching the cognitive and social processes that underlie care and compassion, which got me interested in populations that lack care and compassion, and of course people with psychopathic traits are exactly such a population. As I detail in my recent book (THE FEAR FACTOR) I was also assaulted by a stranger on New Year’s Eve 2000 in Las Vegas when I was in my early twenties.The incident really drove home for me that there are people in the world who are willing to harm others in ways that the average person couldn’t even contemplate, and it solidified my interest in understanding such people.
Question 2. What role does fear (or lack thereof) play in psychopathic behavior?
We’ve known for some time, based on behavioral research, that people with psychopathic traits tend to have fearless personalities (that may not be true for people with what is sometimes called secondary psychopathy, I should note). People with primary psychopathy tend not to respond to punishment or show physiological, behavioral, or subjective indications of fear in response to threat — although they do ap-pear to experience other emotions like disgust, anger, or happiness fairly normally. In addition to this fairly specific deficit in fear responding, people who are psychopathic have difficulty recognizing when others are afraid. This is true whether they are considering fearful faces, voices, or bodies. One of my favorite stories was originally related by my colleague Essi Viding, who was testing a psychopathic inmate in a UK prison on his ability to recognize facial expressions. He missed every single fearful face, which is pretty poor performance even for someone who is psychopathic. When he got to the last fearful expression he stared at it a while and then said, “I don’t know what that expression is called, but I know that’s what people look like right before you stab them.” That is such a striking remark! It suggests that even though he knew he’d seen such an expression before, and could even remember he saw the expression when people are under threat, he could not connect that expression and that context to the emotion fear. That, plus the deficits in fear responding in this population, suggest that inability to understand others’ fear is a fundamentally empathic deficit in psychopathy–they can’t understand this emotion in others that they don’t feel strongly them-selves, so it makes sense they don’t really grasp why it would be bad to make someone feel that way.
Question 3. How do the brains of psychopathic individuals differ from the general population?
The most consistent (although definitely not the only) abnormality observed in the brains of people who are psychopathic is in a structure called the amygdala, which is involved in a variety of social and emotional processes, including coordinating fear responses. In people who are psychopathic, it tends to be smaller than average and hypoactive in response to threats or fearful facial expressions. Most likely, deficits in this structure — and in its connections to various other brain regions — are the reason people who are psychopathic show deficits in fear responding and in under-standing others’ fear.
Question 4. How do psychopathic individuals differ from altruists?
In my work, I’ve also been interested in understanding people at the opposite end of the so-called “caring continuum” from psychopaths. We know psychopathic traits are continuously distributed in the population, which suggests that there must be such a thing as an “anti-psychopath” who is more caring and compassionate than average. I have studied people who are extraordinarily altruistic–who have donated a kidney to a stranger — and I learned that they do indeed seem to be anti-psychopaths in some ways. They are better at recognizing others’ fear, for example, and their amygdalas are more responsive to this expression, and are physically larger as well. They also have lower levels of certain kinds of psychopathic traits and tend to be quite humble, whereas people who are psychopathic tend to be narcissistic.
Question 5. Considering research is generally ahead of application in the field, what is one improvement in the field of psychopathy that you hope to see take place over the next five to ten years?
In the next 5 years, I hope the various groups of people studying psy-chopathy reach more agreement on what it actually is. I think we’re getting closer, but we’ll be able to make more progress once that issue is resolved. Right now various disagreements linger on and on in part because people who take, for example, a forensic perspective tend to focus on different issues than people who are clinical psychologists. This is one reason interdisciplinary re-search is always difficult, and psychopathy research is quite interdisciplinary (which is a good thing!).
In the next 10 years, I hope we get better at identifying children at high risk for psychopathy in early childhood and developing interventions that reduce their risk. It’s one of the big success stories in autism research that something similar has been done–early identification and intensive behavioral therapy that really improves outcomes. But of course for us to have similar success we absolutely must have more funding than we do now. To the extent interest groups can help get the word out that psychopathy research is mas-sively underfunded relative to other clinical disorders–and even better, really lobby and push for more federal funding–we will be able to make much faster progress.
