Child Psychopathy?

This does not surprise me. I have known a psychiatrist, a client, who has told me that personality is completely formed in children at around three months of age. (I think I am remembering that time frame correctly. I know it’s very, very young.)

The psychopathy testing could possibly fall in like with the testing that Adrian Raine did in Guam, looking for biological roots of crime. He tested the heart rates of children at 3 years of age and then followed them. Those children that became problem children or drifted into anti-social behavior as they became older, all had low resting heart rates when they were 3 years old.

Raine believes low resting heart rate is the best biological marker as an indicator of future criminal activity/psychopathy.

I’m not surprised at all. I think the psychological community has been responsible in deferring judgment on a diagnosis like psychopathy until later in life, but I also think it’s been pretty clear to them all along that the signs of it still show up early in life.

I remember reading in one of the books on psychopathy that the percentages of violent psychopaths was significantly less in some countries than it was in other countries. In the U.S., the incidence was something like 1 in 100, to 1 in 25. In some other countries (Japan, China, I believe were two of them), the incidence was 1 in 400, to 1 in 100. When I thought about the cultural differences between the U.S. and the countries listed that I was familiar with, it seemed to me that the difference was probably not one of genetics, but one of culture and environment. I suspect that the actual incidence of psychopathy itself isn’t different, but the difference is the kind of anti-social behavior they engage in. Those countries where the incidence is lower are countries where social engagement and community identity are more important than individual identity, whereas the countries with higher incidences like the U.S. are more individual-focused, which tends to cause other people to take a back seat to ourselves.

That suggests to me that, while there’s probably no cure for psychopathy, there are ways to work with it that would reduce the damage it causes and improve the outcomes for the people who have it, and that could benefit everyone.