Psychopathy as Adaptation to Early Life Scarcity:
Childhood Adversity as Risk Factors for Conduct Problems
Emma Heiden
University of Michigan
Author Note
Emma R. Heiden, Weinberg Institute for Cognitive Science and Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Emma Heiden, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48104.
Contact: emheiden@umich.edu
Abstract
This paper evaluates psychopathic and conduct disordered behaviors as normative adaptations to early life scarcity. Three main components of psychopathy involve deficient affective symptoms, narcissistic or manipulative interpersonal styles, and impulsive or irresponsible behaviors (Frick & White, 2008). Due to the potentially harmful consequences of these tendencies, psychologists have rigorously studied the causes of both psychopathy and conduct disorder, the term for antisocial behaviors that present in childhood. Most leading precursors to psychopathy all involve forms of childhood scarcity, from lack of financial resources to lack of emotional support. Societal stigma often attributes psychopathy to abnormal personal choices or mistakes. However, considering typical psychopathic tendencies as responses to early scarcity supports psychopathy as both normative and adaptive.
Keywords: psychopathy, antisocial personality disorder, conduct disorder, scarcity
Many of the risk factors that have been identified as consistent precursors to psychopathy revolve around scarcity in some way. For instance, scarcity of positive parental attention may lead to conduct problems. Parenting styles highly influence child development. Accordingly, multiple studies have shown that children’s antisocial actions are often linked to parenting styles and actions. “Rejecting parenting” refers to hostile, critical, and/or extremely punitive ways of speaking to or acting toward one’s child (Hyde, Shaw, & Moilanen, 2010). Intuitively, rejecting parenting has been shown to lead to child conduct problems (Shaw, Gilliom, Ingoldsby, & Nagin, 2003). The extent to which children are exposed to violence between their parents has also been linked to a lack of social adjustment and other behavioral problems in children (Cummings, Pelligrini, Notarius, & Cummings, 1989).
It is difficult to attribute which early risk factors are responsible for some children’s conduct problems, especially since risk factors like SES and parental disposition are often intertwined. That said, when interacting with their children, parents of lower socioeconomic status tend to use harsher language, act disconnected or disengaged, lash out with anger, and appear less loving. Poor parents tend to help their children with homework less often, and are even less likely to prioritize prenatal care (Mullainathan & Shafir, 2014). The reason that these parenting habits are often problematic for children is that children need consistency. Since it’s already difficult for children to learn new concepts and rules, receiving inconstant feedback or punishment from parents can be confusing and anxiety-inducing (Mullainathan & Shafir, 2014).
According to Schultz and Shaw (2003), maternal depression, often in accordance with SES, also puts children at risk for developing conduct problems. At a baseline level, low socioeconomic status, low maternal education, and single parent status have all been associated with more parental stress and fewer social coping resources. When caregivers are more stressed, they are less likely to exhibit patience and sympathy toward their children, which often means more expressions of anger and an overall more negative family environment. It has also been consistently shown that depressed adults feel and express more anger. Accordingly, mothers who are more depressed tend to control and criticize their children more frequently than non-depressed mothers do (Schultz et al., 2003).
When considering the implications of socioeconomic disadvantage and parenting styles on financial and social resources, these risk factors are clear forms of scarcity that many children face. It has been repeatedly proven that this scarcity of parental attention or financial resources throughout childhood may lead to conduct problems or psychopathy. However, not only does scarcity of positive parental resources trigger conduct issues in children; scarcity may be what impairs parenting in the first place.
While it may seem that low SES parents are simply bad at parenting, their behaviors may be largely due to the scarcity that they face. For example, parents who receive food stamps are likely to run short on food at the end of each month, prior to receiving the next stamp. As a result of this stress, the end of the month is actually when poor parents are most likely to be tough on their children, as well as when children of food stamp families are most often disciplined in school (Mullainathan & Shafir, 2014). In this regard, problematic parenting styles are as much a form of environmental scarcity for children as they are a systematic result of financial scarcity.
Clearly, there are causes of psychopathy other than scarcity. One leading theory is that low IQ is a prominent risk factor for conduct problems. Hirschi and Hindelang (1977) found that the average IQ of delinquents is approximately eight points lower than that of non-delinquents. While children with low IQ scores are often also at risk of low socioeconomic advantage, one longitudinal study identified low IQ as a standalone predictor of delinquency. Moffit, Gabrielli, Mednick, & Schulsinger (1981) studied 365 children born in Copenhagen. All children were followed from birth until their early teens, while researchers assessed their IQ, socioeconomic status (SES), and delinquency according to the Danish national police register. Importantly, low IQ was correlated to higher delinquency, independently of socioeconomic status. This finding neither rejects nor confirms IQ as a causal mediator between SES and delinquency, but it does support the prevalence of IQ as an independent risk factor (Moffitt et al., 1981).
Several theories attempt to explain why children with lower IQ scores are more likely to develop conduct problems. If a child’s low IQ manifests in poor verbal abilities, then he or she may engage in delinquent classroom behavior as a result of frustration from poor school performance. As children become more delinquent in the classroom and receive more punishment, they likely adopt a generalized negative attitude toward authority. In addition, a lack of approval from authority may prompt children to seek extra approval from their peers, which may make them particularly vulnerable to peer pressure in engaging in risky behavior (Moffitt et al., 1981). Low IQ may either confound or simply enhance the impact of early life scarcity on conduct problems.
Not all children who grow up in scarce conditions develop conduct disorders or psychopathic behaviors later in life. Therefore, to postulate reasons for which people justify and commit immoral actions, Bandura et al. (1996) developed a theory called Moral Disengagement (MD). This theory combines moral and socio-cognitive domains, suggesting that people feel more comfortable engaging in immoral behavior when the moral values of their community condone or align with such behaviors (Bandura et al., 1996). To investigate whether moral disengagement may facilitate this link between early environmental factors and later individual immoral actions, Hyde, Shaw, & Moilanen (2010) followed an ethnically diverse sample of 187 low-income boys from ages 1.5 to 17. In addition to measuring rejecting parenting, inter-parental aggression, and neighborhood impoverishment in each child’s home environment, Hyde et al. (2010) measured each child’s social information processing, empathy, moral disengagement, antisocial behavior, IQ, and race.
Ultimately, the most predictive factors of antisocial behavior in this sample of children were early rejecting parenting, neighborhood impoverishment, and child empathy. All three of these attributes were strongly associated with signs of moral disengagement. Therefore, this study provided convincing evidence for moral disengagement as the underlying mechanism linking personality and family risk factors to later antisocial behavior (Hyde et al., 2010). If moral disengagement is a valid explanation for psychopathic behaviors, then adolescents who exhibit moral disengagement must have either had experience observing similarly dysfunctional behaviors, and/or inexperience with mainstream societal values (Hyde et al., 2010).
One additional potential mediator between early risk factors and later conduct problems is maladaptive social information processing (SIP). In particular, children who live in family environments with high levels of negative emotion are at risk for maladaptive SIP styles. A child’s emotional environment heavily influences his or her socio-cognitive development, and exposure to abuse or violence has significant implications on emotions like fear and pain. For instance, abused children may be more likely to interpret others as angry, compared to non-abused children (Schultz et al., 2003). Furthermore, children’s cortical synapse generation and development are particularly vulnerable to environmental stress in their early years. Since maladaptive SIP is a common characteristic among many children with behavioral issues, Schultz et al. (2003) studied a sample of 178 economically-disadvantaged boys. Through laboratory parent-child interaction tasks and home visits, the researchers followed the boys from ages 1.5 and 3.5 to ages 5 and 10. Specifically, the tasks and visits focused on two aspects of SIP that have been historically most related to behavioral problems: hostile attribution bias and maladaptive response generation. While hostile attribution bias manifests in a tendency to interpret others’ ambiguous intentions as negative, maladaptive response generation is when children react to conflict with inappropriately aggressive responses (Schultz et al., 2003).
Reflecting on the method in which maladaptive response generation was tested helps forge the intuitive connection between SIP styles and conduct problems. An experimenter first described 8 short stories involving social interactions to each child. Each story involved the behavior of one character leading to a negative outcome for another character, with the first character’s rationale left purposefully ambiguous. Afterwards, each child was asked how he/she would respond to the leading character’s behavior in these short stories. Responses were coded as “retaliatory” if the child mentioned any kind of intended aggression, or “verbally engaging” (the so-called normative response) if the child requested information about the character’s intentions (Schultz et al., 2003). Children who gave retaliatory responses were most likely to develop conduct problems later on, as well as more likely to come from low SES backgrounds. In fact, socioeconomic disadvantage and maternal depression accounted for 6% and 10% of the children’s variances in conduct problems, respectively (Schultz et al., 2003). When both maternal depression and socioeconomic disadvantage were combined, the children in this study were especially at risk for conduct disorder. Ultimately, these results supported SIP as a potential mediator between environmental risk factors and behavioral development in children.
Impacts of early scarcity often manifest in the brains, behaviors, and emotions of both children and adults. Abnormal amygdala activity, aggression, and a lack of sensitivity are all trademarks of psychopathy that tend to present in response to scarcity. As scarcity increases in severity, so do these various symptoms. This linear relationship suggests a correlation, at the very least, between early scarcity and conduct problems.
As children with conduct problems grow into young adults, their behaviors technically become classified as psychopathic. Beyond social and behavioral adaptations to early environmental scarcity, psychopathic individuals actually exhibit different neural adaptations, compared to non-psychopathic individuals. For instance, Carre, Hyde, Nuemann, Viding, and Hariri (2013) investigated abnormal amygdala reactivity among 200 young adults with self-reported psychopathic tendencies. All adults were shown pictures of angry facial expressions, and depending on the sub-type of psychopathy, the participants showed more or less amygdala reactivity. One critical function of the amygdala is connecting distress cues, such as fearful faces, with possible explanations for those cues, like a physical threat (Carre et al., 2013). When present, amygdala dysfunction tends to occur early in children’s development. Therefore, this inability to understand potential linkages between aggression and consequences of aggression may lead a person to exhibit psychopathic behaviors (Carre et al., 2013). In other words, scarcity of adequate amygdala processing of distress cues may be responsible for the aggressive behavior that some psychopathic individuals show.
Environmental scarcity often creates emotional scarcity. A behavioral thread among children with antisocial behavior is callous-unemotional (CU) traits. Defined by a lack of guilt, absence of empathy, or taking advantage of others for personal gain, these traits are especially predictable among the sub-group of children with the most severe conduct disorders (Frick et al., 2008). In absence of typical coping styles, CU traits are a form of emotional scarcity. Those with CU traits tend to have difficulty processing negative emotions, especially conceptualizing fear and distress in others. Intuitively, then, CU traits are common among antisocial youth with aggressive tendencies, and are also more commonly found in psychopathic adults compared to adults with any other type of antisocial disorder (Frick et al., 2008). Hence, triggered by environmental scarcity, emotional scarcity in childhood may even be what leads to psychopathy in adulthood.
The phenomenon of CU traits suggests that emotional scarcity compounded on environmental scarcity may increase a person’s chances of developing psychopathy. Burke, Loeber, and Lahey (2007) analyzed CU traits in isolation of conduct problems, dysfunctional parenting, IQ, and economic disadvantage. After following clinic-referred 7- to 12-year-old boys until they reached age 18-19, the young boys who showed CU traits were more likely to show adult markers of psychopathy. Ultimately, antisocial children with CU traits comprise a sub-group who is more aggressive, at greater risk for delinquency, and more stable in this aggressive delinquency throughout adulthood. For example, children with CU traits may be less sensitive to threats of punishment, and more likely to expect positive outcomes from aggressive responses (Frick et al., 2008). This phenomenon acts as a vicious cycle, where children with CU traits face emotional scarcity, which hinders their development guilt and empathy, and further increases aggressive behavior and potentially leads to psychopathy.
A behavioral response is adaptive if it develops for the purpose of adjusting to one’s situation. Therefore, if conduct problems or psychopathic behaviors develop to adjust to early life scarcity, as they have been proven to, then these behaviors are technically adaptive. That said, “adaptive” is not always “good.” Clearly, psychopathic or otherwise disordered behaviors are often harmful to the individuals who develop them, let alone to society in general. However, considering these problems as adaptive rather than maladaptive is an important step in developing the empathy necessary to construct appropriate interventions.
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