Psychopath and Narcissist Survivors Support Group

Violent, Vindictive, Sadistic, and Psychopathic Narcissists

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The Stalker as Antisocial Bully

http://samvak.tripod.com/abusefamily16.html

Bully at Work Interview with Tim Field

http://samvak.tripod.com/pp114.html

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http://www.world-science.net/othernews/081107_bullies

Bullies may enjoy others’ pain

Nov. 7, 2008
Courtesy University of Chicago
and World Science staff

Un­u­su­ally ag­gres­sive youth may en­joy in­flict­ing pain, re­search­ers at the Uni­ver­s­ity of Chi­ca­go have found in a study us­ing brain scans. Vid­eos of peo­ple get­ting hurt were found to trig­ger flur­ries of ac­ti­vity in a brain ar­ea as­so­ci­at­ed with re­ward in ag­gres­sive youth, the sci­en­tists said; oth­er kids did­n’t re­act that way.



For ag­gres­sive ad­o­les­cents, see­ing some­one in pain trig­gered strong ac­tiva­t­ion in a brain ar­ea called the ven­tral stria­tum, which re­sponds to pleas­ur­a­ble events, re­search­ers said. (Im­age cour­tesy Open Uni­ver­sity, U.K.)


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The re­search shows some ag­gres­sive youths’ nat­u­ral em­pa­thet­ic im­pulse may be dis­rupted, said the uni­ver­s­ity’s Jean De­cety, who led the re­search. “This work will help us bet­ter un­der­stand ways to work with ju­ve­niles in­clined to ag­gres­sion and vi­o­lence,” he added.

The sci­en­tists com­pared ad­o­les­cent boys with no un­usu­al signs of ag­gres­sion to eight 16- to 18-year-old boys who had shown dis­rup­tive be­hav­ior, such as start­ing a fight, us­ing a weap­on or steal­ing af­ter con­fronting a vic­tim.

Par­ti­ci­pants un­der­went brain scans while watch­ing videos of peo­ple hav­ing their foot stepped on, hav­ing a heavy bowl fall on their hands, or the like. The scan­ning sys­tem was of a widely used type known as func­tion­al Mag­net­ic Res­o­nance Im­ag­ing, which meas­ures brain ac­ti­vity based on where blood is flow­ing.

Ag­gres­sive ad­o­les­cents showed a “spe­cific and very strong ac­tiva­t­ion” in a brain ar­ea called the ven­tral stria­tum, known from pre­vi­ous stud­ies to re­spond to pleas­ur­a­ble events, De­cety said. Un­like the con­trol group, he added, the more ag­gres­sive youth did­n’t ac­tivate brain ar­e­as in­volved in self-con­trol, called the me­di­al pre­fron­tal cor­tex and the tem­poropari­etal junc­tion.

The find­ings are re­ported in the cur­rent is­sue of the re­search jour­nal Bi­o­log­i­cal Psy­chol­o­gy.

The more nor­mal youth, De­cety said, acted si­m­i­larly to youth in a study re­leased ear­li­er this year, in which his group used scans to show 7- to 12-year-olds are nat­u­rally em­pa­thet­ic to­ward peo­ple in pain. The scans showed that when the chil­dren saw an­i­ma­t­ions of some­one get hurt, the same part of the brain that reg­is­tered pain when they hurt be­came ac­tive up­on see­ing some­one else hurt, he ex­plained. When they saw some­one in­ten­tion­ally hurt, the part of the brain as­so­ci­at­ed with un­der­standing so­cial in­ter­ac­tion and mor­al rea­son­ing be­came ac­tive.