Cognitive Neuroscience, Group D

Do you have commitment issues? Do many of your friends and peers consider you irresponsible or immature for your age? Are you impulsive? If you have answered yes to all of these questions you might be a sociopath…but hey, at least you aren’t a psychopath!

What is sociopathy?

“Sociopathy is a personality disorder associated with irresponsible and unreliable behavior that is not personality advantageous; an inability to form lasting commitments or relationships; egocentric thinking; and a marked degree of impulsivity.”

— (Ward, 2015)

Psychopath verses sociopath

The hyenas from the classic film “Lion King” are Disney characters that display psychopathic tendencies

Scar from the classic film “Lion King” is a Disney character that is an exemplary illustration of a sociopath

How do people become sociopaths/psychopaths?

Research indicates that specific genes predispose people to psychopathy and sociopathy; however, these genes are usually dormant.  The chances of these predisposed genes actually being expressed greatly increases in the presence of environmental triggers. However, genes are not always necessary to “turn” a person into a sociopath. Often times, an abusive or rough childhood or a traumatic head injury is all that is needed (Bree, et al., 1998). Once in a while though, a serious head injury to a specific part of the brain is all that is needed to turn an average, well-functioning member of society into an out of control, impulsive sociopath with no regards for others.

Acquired sociopathy refers to a person who was “normal” that, after a traumatic brain injury, “turned” into a sociopath.

Cases of acquired sociopathy

Phineas Gage’s Accident

The most well-known case of acquired sociopathy is that of Phineas Gage. Before Phineas Gage had a metal rod pass through his left cheek and out the top of his head, he was denoted as a serious, industrious, and energetic person who was responsible and smart. Yet after the incident, his peers claimed that he was childish, irresponsible, and thoughtless of others. This was a drastic change of personality. Although Gage was considered lucky to be alive, the metal rod damaged his left orbitofrontal/ventromedial region and the left anterior region. Severe trauma to specific regions of the brain can cause a person to undergo marked personality changes, as seen with Phineas Gage (Damasio, 1994). Another example of a similar case is the J.S case in 1996. This incident also supports the idea that brain trauma alone can lead to acquired sociopathic behaviors.

J.S. is a 56-year-old man who worked as an electrical engineer. In November 1996, he was found collapsed and unconscious with evidence of trauma to the right frontal region. It was noted that his behavior was abnormal. He behaved bizarrely; riding around on a hospital gurney, being uncooperative, and having unpredictable episodes of aggression such as when he assaulted and wounded a staff member, threw objects and furniture at people, and behaved aggressively towards other patients. However he had no psychiatric history prior to his accident and before the incident, he was described by a relative as being a quiet, rather withdrawn person who was never aggressive (Blair, 2000).

Behind the scenes of executive functioning

The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) plays an important role in emotional reactions. This region communicates with the dorsomedial thalamus, temporal cortex, ventral tegmental area, olfactory system, amygdala, cingulate cortex, lateral hypothalamus, and other regions of the frontal cortex, including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. People with ventromedial prefrontal lesions show impulsive behavior and often display outbursts of inappropriate anger. They are able to explain the implications of complex social situations but often respond inappropriately when they find themselves in these situations. Evidence indicates that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is involved in making moral judgments (Ward, 2015) (Damasio, et al., 1994).

In summation

Neuroscientists have identified areas of the brain related to sociopathic behaviors. Subtle damage to the amygdala, a brain region that helps us process our emotions, may explain why sociopaths cannot read or express emotions properly. Sociopathic behaviors are also associated with injury to the ventromedial region of both frontal lobes. This is where the umbrella term  for the management of cognitive processes, executive functioning, comes into play. Executive function is associated with the prefrontal cortex (PFC) which is what tends to be damaged in patients with acquired sociopathy.

References

Bree, M. B., Svikis, D. S., & Pickens, R. W. (1998). Genetic influences in antisocial personality and drug use disorders. Drug and Alcohol Dependence,49(3), 177-187. doi:10.1016/s0376-8716(98)00012-x

Blair, R. J. (2000). Impaired social response reversal: A case of `acquired sociopathy’ Brain,123(6), 1122-1141. doi:10.1093/brain/123.6.1122

Carlson, N. R. (2012). Emotion. In Physiology of behavior (11th ed., pp. 360-376). Pearson.

Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain. New York: Putnam.

Damasio, H., Grabowski, T., Frank, R., Galaburda, A., & Damasio, A. (1994). The return of Phineas Gage: Clues about the brain from the skull of a famous patient. Science,264(5162), 1102-1105. doi:10.1126/science.8178168

Ward, J. (2015). The executive brain. In The student’s guide to cognitive neuroscience (3rd ed., pp. 345-371). Psychology Press.

Crime and Memory 

Eyewitness testimony is paramount in determining the outcome of judicial proceedings. This makes sense considering how much we rely on our memory on a day-to-day basis. However, we’ve all forgotten where we parked the car, and we’ve all found ourselves walking into a room without remembering what our intentions were. While these are minor slip-ups, which we can write off, some of us may know what it’s like to be accused of saying or doing something we don’t believe we said or did. This might cause a bit of tension between or in groups of people, but being accused and convicted of a crime we did not commit is something that very few people have experienced.

According to Innocent Project – a non-profit organization that uses DNA testing to help exonerate wrongly convicted criminals – over 70% of 239 convictions based on eyewitness testimony have been overturned using genetic testing. (1) This makes us question why we use eyewitness testimony at all, and more importantly, makes us think about the accuracy of our own memories.

List of people exonerated using DNA testing

Click here if you would like to see part 2 of this documentary or here if you would like to view another documentary regarding crime and memory.

How the Brain Lies

As medical advancements and psychological research continues to progress, society (particularly the judicial system) is obligated to keep up, and we the people will eventually be left wondering: can you read my mind? While technology hasn’t progressed to mind-reading levels, scientists have made a few discoveries regarding the brain and what it looks like when someone is lying, even if they truly believe they are telling the truth.  Researchers have discovered two different brain regions that may respond differently to true and false recognition. Apparently, our medial temporal lobe (MTL): parahippocampal gyrus shows greater activity during true recognition than false recognition. However, our hippocampus reacts equally to both. (2) Similar results have also been shown in other regions of the brain including the bilateral occipital cortices and the right parahippocampal gyrus. (3)

With that being said, science is still too far away to implement brain scanning lie detectors, and judges are far from accepting fMRIs as legitimate evidence for a crime. Hence, it’s at least safe to say that we can’t exactly read anyone’s mind yet. But if technology could help us detect our own lies, then one has to wonder what he or she would want to know or find out, if anything.

Why the Brain Lies

Although we get mad at ourselves for misplacing our keys, forgetting may be an adaptation rather than a design fault, and it may be a design fault that we actually want to have. After all, we don’t want or care to know where we parked the car last week. We need to know where we parked it today, and we don’t want to have to sift through all of our memories to do so. It’s efficient to have prioritized memories. However, when we forget we often question how or why this happens. From a cognitive point of view, neuroscientists tend to group causes of forgetting into three categories involving encoding, storage, and retrieval. Within each category there are many hypotheses that explain how forgetting can occur. Maybe we’re not in the correct setting to remember something, or perhaps similar memories are overlapping and are hard to tell apart. Whatever the case, the fact that our brain can drop the ball at so many levels should tell us something about the power of forgetting. In fact, sometimes people don’t want to know a particular piece of information, or they intentionally block out memories. (4)

Furthermore, even if forgetting is unintentional, and we fully believe in the accuracy of our memories, then why has criminology proven us wrong, and why do we tell different versions of the same story? If humans can make eyewitness errors regarding the most horrendous crimes and forget where their phones are, then who are we to not question everything in between? Humans do use past experiences to judge how the future will turn out, but if our past experiences can only be so accurate, then how do we know we’re making the right choices going forward? Looking back, it’s interesting to think about what we do and do not remember. However, the more important question is if we would want to remember everything when we do reminisce.

References

(1) Arkowitz, H., & Lilienfeld, S. O. (2009, January 8). Why Science Tells Us Not to Rely on Eyewitness Accounts. Retrieved from                                                   http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-the-eyes-have-it

(2) Cabeza, R., Rao, S. M., Wagner, A. D., Mayer, A. R., & Schacter, D. L. (2001). Can medial temporal lobe regions distinguish true from false? An event-related functional MRI study of veridical and illusory recognition memory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98(8), 4805-4810. doi:10.1073/pnas.081082698

(3) Okado, Y., & Stark, C. (2003). Neural processing associated with true and false memory retrieval. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 3(4), 323-334. doi:10.3758/cabn.3.4.323

(4) Ward, J. (2015). The remembering brain. In The student’s guide to cognitive neuroscience (3rd ed., pp. 195-230). Hove, East Sussex: Psychology Press.