Research Offers Insight Into Psychopathic Behavior, With The Help Of Some Caring Rats

Neuroscientists at Duke University are looking at how the brain makes empathetic decisions. 

Dr. Jana Schaich Borg started the research years ago where she was studying human psychopaths. She theorizes that if you can find out how the brain makes these judgements, then you can potentially reduce violence inflicted by psycopaths.

It turns out that rats exhibit empathy in ways similar to humans. They even use the same part of the brain. So Schaich Borg conducted an experiment showing that a rat will give up comfort and preference if it means their neighbor rat won't get hurt.

WFDD's Eddie Garcia spoke with Schaich Borg to find out more.

Interview Highlights

On the basics of human psycopathy:

So human psychopaths make up somewhere between one to five percent of the general population but they cause 50 to 70 percent of all violent crime...

Most people thought that the reason that psychopaths had this bad behavior was because they weren't good at making moral judgments. Surprisingly over time what we learned is that they actually are pretty good at making moral judgments. They usually can tell you exactly what's right or wrong to do in a given situation. But for some reason they just don't care.

So despite the fact they can tell you a judgment there's still something going wrong in their moral and empathic decision making process that ultimately leads them to still harm and hurt people in both violent ways and emotional ways when understand what causes that because if we can understand what causes that maybe we can help fix that.

On the experiment, and why rats were good for the study:

I had a test chamber and there were always two rats – an observer rat and a receiver rat. So what we wanted to know was how much time does the observer rat spend in the dark versus the light chamber. And what we've found is, as expected, they prefer the dark chamber by quite a bit.

So during testing everything was exactly the same, except now whenever the observer went into the dark chamber, the other rat would get an electrical shock. So the question was: would the observer rat avoid the dark chamber, even though that was the chamber they prefered, in order to prevent their buddy from getting shocked? And the answer is, yes, they will. And I saw this in rat after rat, in rats in California and rats from the east coast and North Carolina. So this is really something that's ingrained in them. They do it to different amounts. Not all rats are the same. But overall all rats seem to care what happens to the other rat.

On what's next for this realm of research:

[We're] taking two parallel paths. One is to dig in deeper to what's happening in the rats and what's happening in the brains of the rats so that we can get more and more information and make better hypotheses about what we would want to do if we wanted to do something in the brain that would make the rats more empathic.

Simultaneously, we're also reanalyzing neuroimaging data we have from humans and human psychopaths to see if we can get some hints of some of the things we're seeing in rats even though the data are very different. And as we learn more from this the ultimate goal is to try to develop treatments that would help psychopaths be less violent. And I also hope the rest of us to learn how we might be able to make decisions that are a little bit more empathic as well.