New research by scientists at the Research Center Jülich and RWTH Aachen University in Germany have found that psychopaths have different brain structures to people without the condition.
Psychopathy is currently incurable, but by understanding how the brain of a psychopath is structured, it might lead us nearer to a cure.
The researchers found that brains of psychopaths are around 1.45% smaller than people without psychopathy.
But more interestingly, they also had significant reductions in some regions of the brain, particularly the thalamus, basal ganglia, pons and insular cortex. This is interesting, because these regions control our involuntary reactions, motivation, decision making and emotional processing. Basically, these areas of the brain control the way we react to our environments and how we control our behaviour.
This was a small scale study, but it offers an intriguing insight into how antisocial and impulsive behaviour could be affected by the person’s brain structure.
If you are interested in this, you might be interested in our short courses on Behaviour Profiling or The Brain and Behaviour.
