May 10th, 2009
Others’ Pain = Pleasure for Some
Bullies may get kick out of seeing others in pain
By Julie Steenhuysen
Fri Nov 7, 2008
CHICAGO (Reuters) – Brain scans of teens with a history of aggressive bullying behavior suggest that they may actually get pleasure out of seeing someone else in pain, U.S. researchers said on Friday.
While this may come as little surprise to those who have been victimized by bullies, it is not what the researchers expected, Benjamin Lahey of the University of Chicago, who worked on the study, said in a telephone interview.
“The reason we were surprised is the prevailing view is these kids are cold and unemotional in their aggression,” said Lahey, whose study appears in the journal Biological Psychology (the abstract from the article and MRI picture can be read here).
“This is looking like maybe they care very much,” said Lahey, who worked on the study with Jean Decety, also of the University of Chicago.
The researchers compared eight boys ages 16 to 18 with aggressive conduct disorder to a group of eight adolescent boys with no unusual signs of aggression.
The boys with the conduct disorder had exhibited disruptive behavior such as starting a fight, using a weapon and stealing after confronting a victim.
They showed both groups video clips of someone inflicting pain on another person and tracked brain activity with a type of imaging called functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI.
In the aggressive teens, areas of the brain linked with feeling rewarded — the amygdala and ventral striatum — became very active when they observed pain being inflicted on others.
But they showed little activity in an area of the brain involved in self-regulation — the medial prefrontal cortex and the temporoparietal junction — as was seen in the control group.
“It is entirely possible their brains are lighting in the way they are because they experience seeing pain in others as exciting and fun and pleasurable,” Lahey said.
“We need to test that hypothesis more, but that is what it looks like,” he said.
Lahey said the differences between the two groups were strong and striking, but cautioned that the study was small and needs to be confirmed by a larger study.
(Editing by Will Dunham)
The scientific article abstract:
Atypical empathic responses in adolescents with aggressive conduct disorder: A functional MRI investigation
Jean Decety, Kalina J. Michalska, Yuko Akitsuki, Benjamin B. Lahey
Biological Psychology, 80 (2), 203-211
Abstract
Because youth with aggressive conduct disorder (CD) often inflict pain on others, it is important to determine if they exhibit atypical empathic responses to viewing others in pain. In this initial functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, eight adolescents with aggressive CD and eight matched controls with no CD symptoms were scanned while watching animated visual stimuli depicting other people experiencing pain or not experiencing pain. Furthermore, these situations involved either an individual whose pain was caused by accident or an individual whose pain was inflicted on purpose by another person. After scanning, participants rated how painful the situations were. In both groups the perception of others in pain was associated with activation of the pain matrix, including the ACC, insula, somatosensory cortex, supplementary motor area and periaqueductal gray. The pain matrix was activated to a specific extent in participants with CD, who also showed significantly greater amygdala, striatal, and temporal pole activation. When watching situations in which pain was intentionally inflicted, control youth exhibited signal increase in the medial prefrontal cortex, lateral orbitofrontal cortex, and right temporo-parietal junction, whereas youth with CD only exhibited activation in the insula and precentral gyrus. Furthermore, connectivity analyses demonstrated that youth with CD exhibited less amygdala/prefrontal coupling when watching pain inflicted by another than did control youth. These preliminary findings suggest that youth with aggressive CD exhibit an atypical pattern of neural response to viewing others in pain that should be explored in further studies.
fMRI images
This entry was posted on Sunday, May 10th, 2009 at 6:12 pm and is filed under Bullying Tutorials, Health Care, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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