This week, Dr. Dave Kosson, Professor of Psychology at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science and co-author of The Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version, discusses psychopathy in children and adolescents.
In our opening segment, we resurrected our once-popular feature, “Psychopathy: Fact or Fiction,” with real-life interview material brought in by the very streetwise Aftermath Radio Research Team (Chantal Fahmy and Gigi Brar). What does the general public know about psychopathy? Sadly, our mission to spread the word about this disorder to the masses—based on these responses—appears to be far from over! We also checked in with survivor Sally, who updated us on her ongoing situation involving a psychopathic individual from a previous relationship.
According to Dr. Kosson, psychopathy (like other personality disorders in general) is a longstanding maladaptive pattern of thinking, feeling, and behavior—thus we would expect to see signs of psychopathic-like traits even in childhood. These traits are different from the acting out often seen in children and adolescents, and even different from youth syndromes such as Conduct Disorder. Though various measures are available for the assessment of psychopathy in youth, Dr. Kosson feels that diagnosing children as psychopaths is currently not a good idea… given the smaller amounts of “data” available from children (having not yet lived as long as adults), our uncertainty about the stability of psychopathic-like traits in youth, and the fact that psychopathy is a very pejorative label.
Dr. Kosson also talked about the variety of methods available for assessing psychopathic traits in youth, ranging from self-report measures, to parent and teacher rating scales, to expert rating scales (such as the Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version) and some of the pros and cons of the different approaches. He also noted that there is a great deal of research suggesting that psychopathy in youth is largely similar to psychopathy in adults, although the evidence is much stronger for boys with psychopathic traits than for girls with psychopathic traits. In both youth and adults, psychopathy is associated with antisocial and violent behavior, cognitive and emotional deficits, and physiological anomalies. However, one key exception is that among youth psychopathic features are often associated with a tendency to report more negative emotion, an association that we do not typically see in adults. Dr. Kosson speculated that this positive association could mean either that there is a weakness in our assessment of psychopathic features in youth (and that youth expressing more negative emotion may be less likely to grow up to be psychopathic adults) or that this difference may provide valuable clues to the development of psychopathy. Finally, some very exciting research evidence is emerging which suggests that certain treatment approaches may be effective in reducing the violent behavior of youth with psychopathic traits. This is an important area, and much more research in this area is warranted.