It is a commonly held opinion that psychopathic individuals experience little empathy or do not manifest it at all. This, of course, makes them cold-blooded and callous, capable even of easily committing murder if there is a reason for it and no significant risks. But besides this, their lack of empathy has long cast doubt on the possibility of providing easy and effective therapy for their condition.
However, a study of psychopathic criminals found that they can experience empathy. Moreover, during the experiment, they exhibited the same level of activation of mirror neurons—which are responsible for the ability to learn through imitation of other people and are believed to be involved in the manifestation of empathy—as healthy individuals.
However, psychopaths have one very important difference. While empathy manifests spontaneously in normal people, regardless of whether the person wishes to experience it, psychopaths can intentionally control this process. Their normal state is switched-off empathy; they manifest it only when they want to. And within the experiment, normal activation of mirror neurons in psychopaths was observed only when the researchers explicitly asked them to show empathy.
The results of this study align with what psychopaths often claim about themselves, for example, on question-and-answer websites like Quora. If you search there for questions asked to psychopaths about whether they are capable of experiencing empathy, you will see many positive answers, but with the note that they can literally turn empathy on and off whenever they want, as if they have a switch for it. However, there are also psychopaths who claim a complete inability to feel empathy. But, given the data already known to us, it can be suggested that they simply do not know how to turn it on within themselves.
Researchers do not yet know how to turn the empathy that psychopaths can manifest intentionally into the spontaneously manifested empathy characteristic of most people. However, the fact that psychopaths can show empathy, at least under certain conditions, gives therapists something to work with.
It is also worth hypothesizing that empathy can be made spontaneous quite easily by using certain agents that activate specific serotonin receptors and favorably influence the function of the serotonin system as a whole. Pharmacological activation of serotonin 1A and 1B receptors in animal experiments often leads to them ceasing aggressive attacks on their peers, or even becoming more predisposed to help them—for example, by sharing food, even if it brings the subject no personal benefit. This effect is linked to the activation of a violence inhibition mechanism, which in humans plays an important role in the development of empathy.
The results of this study provide an answer to another important question. Someone might easily find and point to individuals who, in their ordinary social life, are normal family men, good friends and colleagues, law-abiding citizens—that is, full members of society—despite the fact that under certain conditions, for example, while serving in law enforcement or as a soldier on the battlefield, they easily committed violence and even murder without feeling the slightest repulsion. As is known from a number of studies, including military ones, the ability to easily commit violence and murder in such conditions would still be a manifestation of an individual’s high psychopathy. But there is no contradiction here. For perhaps such cases are precisely explainable by the fact that psychopathic individuals can be empathic when they intentionally want to be, for example, wishing to have a full social life. However, it should not be forgotten that such individuals can decide not to experience empathy at any moment, and this carries certain threats to society.
