I discussed these studies briefly with Kent when I attended one of his
workshops sponsored by the MIND Institute. The imaging work they do is
first class. The only reservation I have about psychopathy (and many
areas like this in Psychiatry) is the determination of the independent
variable. They use an elaborate interview, self-report questionnaire
and records review. They are as thorough as possible. Unfortunately,
they still can't partial out psychopathy from correlated factors that
may produce brain imaging differences, in particular, drug use and
traumatic brain injury. The patterns they find are also essentially
random areas roughly within the limbic system. The pattern doesn't
explain psychopathy. If they examined a random sample of TBI patients,
they would get similar results.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2608003/Study-Half-jailed-NYC-youths-brain-injury.html
Although many people on this list are disparaging of neuroimaging, this
is a good example of how its done well and how complex it is. In
contrast to virtually every other area of psychological research, the
investigator and the subjects are unable to manipulate the dependent
measure: What you get is what you see. It's very hard for a subject who
knows the hypothesis to manipulate his grey matter density; it's very
easy to endorse a lower level of depression if I don't want more ECT.
Mike Williams
On 4/19/14 2:00 AM, Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) digest
wrote:
The website for Wired has an interesting interview with the researcher
Kent Kiehl who has studied psychopaths for 20 years; the interview
is here:
http://www.wired.com/2014/04/psychopath-brains-kiehl/
The interview is partly a shill for Kiehl's new book "The Psychopath
Whisperer" which is geared for the general public (i.e., it is a
"money book", that is, a book a scientist writes not for a limited
scientific or academic audience but to appeal to a broad audience
and is expect to make a fair amount of money -- most popular
science books are money books though not all of them make a
lot of money). Anyway, Kiehl has his own mobile MRI scanner
(there is a picture of him next to trailer that contains the scanner)
so he's not doing too badly.
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