Empathy Switch

Clickbait articles that created a myth that won't die...

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If you spend your time searching on Google for information regarding psychopathy you are destined to run into this myth. The so-called empathy switch that was born out of laziness or intentional disinformation. You choose.

First, let’s establish the meaning of empathy as there is more than one type.

There are three types of empathy actually.

Emotional empathy- The ability to understand what a person is experiencing based on personal experience and understanding built from that. This is often referred to as “hot empathy”. When you feel physically along with the other person, as though their emotions were contagious

Compassionate empathy- Understanding a person’s predicament and feel with them, but are spontaneously moved to help, if needed.

Cognitive empathy- simply knowing how the other person feels and what they might be thinking. This can be learned from observation and extrapolation. This is also called “cold empathy”

Psychopaths lack the first two, and we often excel at the third type, cognitive empathy. This is how we learn the ability to manipulate and cajole people to do what we want them to do. We are often so good at it actually that we can put on a perfect display of empathy that even the most attuned observer would miss that it is a performance.

A study came out some time ago that a ton of articles got written about. The study was titled:

“Reduced spontaneous but relatively normal deliberate vicarious representations in psychopathy”.

Apparently, reporters do not know how to read the words that are in front of them because, reduced spontaneous but relatively normal deliberate vicarious representations in psychopathy, magically turned into “empathy switch”.

The study was done on twenty male offenders and twenty-six controls. The so-called “psychopaths” that were included were chosen using the PCL-R. You all know what I think about that checklist, and if you don’t go look in the archive for my three-part series on Hare and his many issues, not the least of which is that stolen list that he banks so much money off of.

Already we have issues with the cohort. Twenty people are not enough to demonstrate something like this, and the people that they used as the “psychopaths” had histories that should have precluded them from being in the study, to begin with. Not to mention that the control group was never given brain scans for comparisons, which begs the question why was there a control group at all? They state in their "Limitations” section of the study:

Our study has a number of limitations. First, because there was a security risk considered unacceptable associated with bringing non-psychopathic incarcerated offenders to our scanning facility, we lack such a control group. Secondary factors linked to criminal lifestyle (e.g. lower level of education, history of drug abuse and length of incarceration) could thus contribute to our group differences. Unfortunately, as these variables were highly correlated with the factor Group [e.g. r(Group, Substance abuse) = 0.86], disentangling their contribution through inclusion of nuisance covariates in our analyses is impossible (Miller and Chapman, 2001)

So… if I’m hearing you correctly… you scanned twenty dudes, that have violent histories, drug, and substance abuse problems, and are institutionalized mentally, and thought to yourselves, YEAH! THIS IS GONNA BE GREAT!!!

Really? That was what you thought? I am starting to think that this was all about securing funding for next year.

You did a study with people that had no business being in the study, with a control group that apparently their entire job is to sit there at home being useless because you aren’t going to bother scanning them in the first place, with a tiny cohort that would have given you nothing in terms of real data at the end of it? Did I mention the part that they included people under the age of twenty-five in this as well? No? Well they did.

How… does this make sense?

Anyway, so the idea was to try and find out if you could activate “empathy” in a psychopath. From the study abstract:

Psychopathy is a personality disorder associated with a profound lack of empathy. Neuroscientists have associated empathy and its interindividual variation with how strongly participants activate brain regions involved in their own actions, emotions and sensations while viewing those of others. Here we compared brain activity of 18 psychopathic offenders with 26 control subjects while viewing video clips of emotional hand interactions and while experiencing similar interactions. Brain regions involved in experiencing these interactions were not spontaneously activated as strongly in the patient group while viewing the video clips. However, this group difference was markedly reduced when we specifically instructed participants to feel with the actors in the videos. Our results suggest that psychopathy is not a simple incapacity for vicarious activations but rather reduced spontaneous vicarious activations co-existing with relatively normal deliberate counterparts.

Did you notice that two of the “psychopaths” are now missing from the test group? We were at twenty, now we are at eighteen. They had them watch different hand interactions on video, while simultaneously recreating what was happening on the video on the so-called psychopath. This included negative stimulation like slapping of the hand with a ruler-type object.

This is where we will take a break from this study and turn our attention to a man named Joesph Newman and his research on psychopaths.

The dominant features of his research involve looking at what the brain of a psychopath is doing in terms of emotional response given certain stimuli. He does this by setting up very controlled tests in which they can measure response cues. One of these tests would be a series of letters, upper and lower case, printed in red or green lettering. Red lettering will elicit a punishment cue, while green has no such cue. If you have a neurotypical brain and a psychopathic brain run this test and ask them to solely focus on the letter coloration with the foreknowledge that for every red letter, there are negative consequences, such as being shocked with electricity, they will perform nearly identically on the test. This indicates that if you can get a psychopath to turn their attention to and focus on negative reinforcement, they will respond very similarly to a neurotypical brain.

However, if you then use the same series of letters and only ask for the focus to be on whether they are upper or lowercase—mind you, the conditions of punishment are still in place based on coloration—the neurotypical brain will have the same response as before. There is marked hesitation to answering because they are aware they will be punished on the red lettering. In the psychopathic brain, now having something new to focus on, they show no response to the punishment of any kind. The same test, just a different focus, shows the very different way the two brains work from each other.

Let’s think about this in terms of the methodology of study that we are examining. Psychopaths can be directed to pay attention to unpleasant cues, but if they are disinclined to do so, they can ignore them. When you are able to get them to focus on the negative thing their brain lights up in the same area that neurotypicals apparently demonstrate empathy.

What this study, what most studies on psychopathy fail to do is to remove the neurotypical experience from it and focus on what that means for a psychopathic brain to light up. In neurotypicals, the response to the hand stimulation when there is negative input when asked to focus on the actor they are watching would be empathy for the actor.

In psychopaths, it’s self-preservation. I don’t care what that other person is going through, but I am gauging my experience about what I am going to have happen and am being informed of that experience by watching it occur to someone else. If I am being called to focus on that information, and I know that negative things come from certain images, I am going to have a self-focused response.

Joseph Newman has something that he calls the “attention theory” and a great deal of it was the basis of this study. I think that the study constructors either didn’t really understand the attention theory, or they didn’t really put a lot of effort into this study.

One of the most controversial aspects of his contributions would be introducing the idea of psychopathic emotions. This has caused some issues in the understanding of psychopaths and what they do and don’t feel. Since it has been shown that provided appropriate stimuli, psychopaths can turn attendance to some kind of emotion, the limitations of that response are not clearly understood. What this has done in some people’s minds is make them believe that psychopaths have the same emotional makeup and wiring as a neurotypical and that we choose to ignore it. This is a misinterpretation of the research.

The way to understand psychopathic emotional cues is much like the volume knob of a radio. Neurotypicals have theirs set at varying degrees of volume, but generally, it is set above seven or an eight out of ten. In a psychopathic brain, that volume knob is at zero for our missing emotions. We don’t have any background noise from those emotions that say, “Pay attention to me, I’m important.” What we have instead is nothing in its place. When given the right circumstances, especially in the instance of self-preservation, there are responses]. They are not at seven or eight on the scale as they would be for a neurotypical; they are now around a one.

If it concerns our personal experience, such as a pain stimulus, and we are coaxed to pay attention to that stimulus, it can register. Instead of it sticking in our minds for further use, once another focus is introduced, it is once again ignored. We can learn cognitive empathy, meaning we can observe emotions in others and respond with appropriate, albeit hollow responses, but learning to focus on these things for a short time is not a lasting lesson. It does not change who or what we are. We can behave differently, but our ability to learn cues is completely hampered by the lack of connectivity or lack of structural integrity of the sections of our brains that are responsible for such things.

So, for the psychopathic community, it puts another misconception on our heads, making us seem even more callous and cruel than we are. That we have the emotions and the access to them and choose to ignore them. Not the case. Professor Newman is not making this argument, either. Instead, he is the first to state that psychopaths have significant emotional deficits.

“Let me be clear about one thing, is that some people look at my attention theory and think that I’m denying that there’s an emotion deficit in psychopaths, but that’s not the case. I mean their emotion deficit is what really does distinguish them from other criminals. And so, where does that come from? Are they really incapable of fear, or is it a matter of attention? And in order to really answer that question you have to do well-controlled experiments in the laboratory, is my view of it. The way you can do this is you can present threatening information, information that means they have to inhibit a response or they’re going to be punished. And you can look at their ability to learn that inhibition under different conditions. What we have done over the years is if the threat cues are something they are paying attention to, then they show that they care about it. They’re motivated to learn about those cues and they’ll inhibit behavior and regulate behavior quite well. But if you redirect their attention, if you get them focused on getting some reward and then periodically if they do the wrong thing, you also punish them, now you’ve set up a division where the threat cues or the emotion-related cues are peripheral to what they’re focusing on and that’s where they look deficient.”

[Dr. Joseph Newman]

Let’s get back to the study. First and foremost, this study is based on Newman’s research, but they didn’t include him in it. I think that was a mistake. Second, the cohort isn’t of psychopaths. It is made up of criminals that have used substances that have altered their brain function, are too young to be considered in the first place, is entirely too small to mean anything even if they had nothing but “A-Listers” in it, and who have led violent lives. Let’s not forget the statistics on head injuries for those in prison:

• According to jail and prison studies, 25-87% of inmates report having experienced a head injury or TBI 17-19 as compared to 8.5% in a general population reporting a history of TBI.20

• Inmates who reported head injuries are more likely to have disciplinary problems during incarceration.21

• Inmates with head injuries may have seizures19 or mental health problems such as anxiety22 or suicidal thoughts and/or attempts.22,23

• Studies of inmates’ self-reported health indicated that inmates with one or more head injuries have significantly higher levels of alcohol and/or drug use during the year preceding their current incarceration.22

• The U.S. Department of Justice has reported that 52% of female and 41% of male offenders were under the influence of drugs, alcohol, or both at the time of their arrest,24 and that 64% of male arrestees tested positive for at least one of five illicit drugs (cocaine, opioids, marijuana, methamphetamines, or PCP).25

• Although more than half of prison inmates have a lifetime history of drug use disorders,26 fewer than 15% receive substance abuse treatment services while in prison.27

That… is a lot of head injuries, and head injuries alter emotional capability, impulse control, ability to predict the consequences of actions, lack of empathy, and increased propensity to violence, among other problems. How, praytell, are you going to separate these aspects from the tiny cohort and arrive at any conclusions at all?

Here is where the media and the study have a deep divide. The study addresses and admits this:

Secondly, although we included one of the largest group of psychopathic offenders ever scanned at 3 T, it is difficult to ascertain that our findings generalize to all incarcerated psychopathic offenders, making a replication study in a different country particularly important. Third, incarcerated psychopaths are a subgroup of psychopaths. It is unclear whether those psychopaths that have never been incarcerated would show the same pattern of brain activity.

I disagree that they scanned the highest number of psychopaths in history. Their cohort was trash, and due to how it was constructed they have removed any possibility to consider any of the men psychopathic. If you poison the cohort, the study is worthless. However, even they admit that this was not possible to even extrapolate what they think the study suggests to even other psychopathic offenders, let alone to noncriminal psychopaths. In reality, they couldn’t extrapolate it out to anyone due to their shoddy work, but I digress.

Now we get to the media and their loud and proud declaration of the “EMPATHY SWITCH!!!” How did they arrive at this conclusion from reading this study? Well. there are two possibilities.

1. It was one author that didn’t bother reading the actual study, decided that this made for a great clickbait article, wrote it, and then had several other authors follow suit, write very similar articles themselves, but also didn’t read the study. Or…

2. They did read the study and knew that isn’t what it showed, but wrote the articles anyway, knowing that they were not representing what the study showed in the slightest, but really wanted those clicks.

Either one is ridiculous, and it spawned a myth that so far cannot be stamped out. If you hear someone say, psychopaths can feel empathy if they choose to, this is what they are referring to. They are referring to eighteen people (not psychopaths), sitting in a room, watching and experiencing hand interaction, and having their brains light up when they are asked to focus on the stimulation. There was no control study done, there was nothing to compare it to, the cohort was terrible, and the results were not conclusions, simply interesting asides.

Keep this methodology in mind when you see similarly certain proclamations from media sources. They don’t actually do any research to know if what they are saying is true or if the study had any merit or value, they just want the ad revenue from you clicking on their site.