When it comes to committing violent crime, psychopaths may not be bad to the bone, but a new brain study suggests they may lack key neural structures—literally less gray matter—involved in empathy, moral reasoning, and feelings of guilt.
And that gives grounds for optimism about the potential to rehabilitate nonpsychopathic offenders, according to a British neuroscientist who studies the brains of the violent.
Those neural deficiencies seem to set psychopaths’ brains apart from the brains of other violent offenders without psychopathic traits, says Dr. Nigel Blackwood. The King’s College, London researcher led a study on violent offenders published in the Archives of General Psychiatry.
“The headline for me would be that we should be more hopeful about the treatability of [nonpsychopaths] than perhaps we are,” he says. “Lumping them all together with the psychopathic group and being therapeutically pessimistic about them isn’t justified.”
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