THE EYES MAY OFFER A WINDOW INTO THE ORIGINS OF PSYCHOPATHY

Psychopaths, who are among the most dangerous of criminals, have little or no empathy for the people they hurt. A new study, which investigates how psychopaths look at faces, provides a clue about this callousness and suggests a possible early intervention as well.

Impaired fear recognition occurs both in psychopaths and in people who suffer damage to a brain area called the amygdala. Some research also links amygdala dysfunction to psychopathic behavior.

A recent study found that patients with amygdala dysfunction miss signs of fear because they fail to pay attention to other people's eyes. Scientists successfully corrected this behavioral deficit by instructing patients to focus on the eyes when interacting with others. To see if a similar anomaly in visual behavior occurs in psychopaths, Mark Dadds and colleagues organized a two-part study involving 33 schoolboys in the first phase and 65 boys in the second phase. The age range for the combined groups was 8 to 17 years.

The researchers measured antisocial and callous-unemotional traits in the children and then analyzed the ability of three different groups-antisocial, callous, or typical children-to recognize emotions. Initially, the students received no instruction as they viewed pictures of faces displaying happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, fear, or a neutral expression. Next, the researchers specifically asked the children to look into the eyes of the people in the images. Last, participants were asked to look at the mouths of subjects in the photos.

The researchers found that:

• Children who exhibited antisocial behavior tended to see neutral faces as angry, which is consistent with other studies.
• Children with callous-unemotional behavior (typical of psychopaths) exhibited a very different impairment, commonly identifying fearful faces as neutral or disgusted.
• When participants looked directly at the eyes of the people in the photos, children with callous-unemotional traits recognized fear as efficiently as other children. Their fear-recognition deficit returned when the researchers asked them to look at the mouths of the people in the photos rather than at their eyes.

Moreover, they say, the fact that callous- unemotional children improved in their ability to recognize fear when they looked at the subjects' eyes "may have wide-reaching implications for understanding and intervening with high-risk children at developmentally sensitive periods." The findings hint that helping young at-risk children to pay attention to other people's eyes could make these children more responsive to others and help to modify psychopathic traits.

The researchers also say that an inability to recognize fear in other people may be a marker for problems in developing a "theory of mind"-that is, the awareness that other people have thoughts and feelings. This skill, they say, is crucial to the development of empathy.

Editor's note: These findings are particularly interesting in light of educational interventions now used for autistic children, who have an aversion to making eye contact and are impaired in developing a "theory of mind." These interventions, which typically start with intensive efforts to teach children to look into other peoples' eyes, are often remarkably successful in ameliorating the social deficits seen in autism.

"Attention to the eyes and fear-recognition deficits in child psychopathy," Mark R. Dadds, Yael Perry, David J. Hawes, Sabine Merz, Alison C. Riddell, Damien J. Haines, Emel Solak, and Amali I. Abeygunawardane, British Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. 189, 2006, 280-1. Address: Mark R. Dadds, School of Psychology, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia, m.dadds@unsw.edu.au.