Dr Adrian Raine is the Richard Perry University Professor in the Departments of Criminology, Psychiatry, and Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Raine answered the following questions:
1. How did you get involved in the area of psychopathy research?
I was given psychopathy as an essay topic for a tutorial I had, and
that really was the start of my interest in the field. I then applied for a PhD
to study antisocial behavior in children and got accepted. After finishing,
the only job I could get was working in prison as a psychologist. It was
1980, and I saw Robert Hare’s paper published that year on the PCL in Personality and Individual Differences. It was an eye-opener, and the minute I saw it, I began to assess my prisoners on it. Things went from there.
2. Are there differences in the brains of psychopathic versus
nonpsychopathic murderers?
Yes. Many brain areas are implicated, including the ventrolateral
prefrontal cortex, amygdala, striatum, but also extending to temporal and
parietal cortex. In some ways it is bewildering – how are we to make
sense of a complex construct like psychopathy from so many bits and
pieces of the brain. It’s a daunting challenge, but one I feel that will be at
least partly resolved in the next decade or two.
3. Do you believe that the differences in brain structure and
brain connectivity in individuals with psychopathic traits
should be taken into account when determining sentencing?
I don’t think that there is a simple answer to this question as a lot
depends on the case in question – not so much “should” but “could.” In
theory at least, such evidence could be used as a mitigating factor – and
potentially an aggravating factor. As soon as you invoke the concept of
“psychopathy” in a legal setting, the lay person automatically jumps to
“dangerous.” We lock dangerous people up, don’t we, whether or not
their brains are bad? And indeed, if their brains are bad, there will not be an easy solution to fixing their brains — for sure they will remain dangerous. So let’s play it safe – lock them up for life. That’s a narrative that clinicians and researchers alike have to contend with in determining sentencing.
4. You have been involved with the Mauritius Child Health Project, that uses a longitudinal design. What are the strengths of longitudinal designs and what are their implications for studying psychopathy?
The key strength is the ability to tease apart the temporal ordering of variables and show that some risk factors precede the onset of psychopathic behavior. Yet we still do not get at causality – we are only one step better towards that than cross-sectional studies. The only way we can really determine causality is by manipulating variables, and showing a consequent change in psychopathy. So in some ways the best that longitudinal studies can do is to firm up findings from cross-sectional studies – or better still discover new risk factors – and give firmer ground in arguing for interventions.
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?
More efforts to design new interventions to reduce the psychopathic-like behavior in children and adolescents. We have to start early when the individual is more malleable. Yet is it wrong to interfere with the lives of adolescents before they really have gone off the rails in a major way? Should we screen and intervene early in life and design new interventions to help those children in greatest need, and to prevent the development of psychopathy? Psychopathy research raises more questions than it answers I feel.
