Brain Structure of Kidney Donors May Make Them More Altruistic

That’s the finding of a study published in today’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by Georgetown researchers.

Georgetown College psychology professor Abigail Marsh worked with John VanMeter, director of Center for Functional and Molecular Imaging at Georgetown University Medical Center, to scan the brains of 19 altruistic kidney donors.

More Sensitive to Distress

“The results of brain scans and behavioral testing suggests that these donors have some structural and functional brain differences that may make them more sensitive, on average, to other people’s distress,” Marsh explains.

The Georgetown researchers used functional MRI to record the neural activity of the kidney donors and 20 control subjects who had never donated an organ as they viewed faces with fearful, angry or neutral expressions.

Underlying Neural Basis

In the right amygdala, an emotion-sensitive brain region, altruists displayed greater neural activity while viewing fearful expressions than did control subjects.

When asked to identify the emotional expressions presented in the face images, altruists recognized fearful facial expressions relatively more accurately than the control subjects.

“The brain scans revealed that the right amygdala volume of altruists is larger than that of non-altruists,” Marsh says. “The findings suggest that individual differences in altruism may have an underlying neural basis.”

Opposite From Psychopaths?

These findings dovetail with previous research by the professor showing  structural and functional brain differences that appear to make people with psychopathic traits less sensitive to others’ fear and distress.

These differences include amygdalas that are smaller and less responsive to fearful expressions. People who are unusually altruistic may therefore be the opposite in some ways from people who are psychopathic.

To find kidney donors, the researchers reached out to the Washington Regional Transplant Community (WRTC), a federally designated organ procurement organizations.

A Donor’s Story

Harold Mintz, former northern Virginian who volunteered with WRTC and agreed to participate in the Georgetown study, donated a kidney to an anonymous stranger he later learned was an Ethiopian refugee who had settled in Washington, D.C.

Mintz, who now lives in California and speaks to high school students about his 2000 donation, says a series of events over time led him to supply the kidney, including his father dying of cancer diagnosed too late at the age of 56.

One Valentine’s Day in 1988, Mintz and his wife were shopping separately for presents and Mintz noticed parents in a mall with a sign saying “Please Save Our Daughter’s Life.” He walked past them, then turned around and asked what they needed. It turned out the daughter had leukemia and needed a bone marrow transplant.

The couple decided to forget about the holiday and donated blood to see if either of them were a match. But no match was found and Mintz later noticed the daughter’s obituary in the newspaper.

Stories Taken to Heart

Mintz also was surprised to hear that although the couple’s daughter had just died, they thanked everyone who tried to help and expressed hope that they might help someone else.

“All these stories just kind of stuck inside my head and every time I’d see a story about a medical story of distress, it would just kind of get put away in a file inside my heart,” Mintz says.

Marsh notes that kidney disease is now the eighth-leading cause of death in the U.S., and that living kidney donations are the best hope for restoring people to health who have kidney disease.

“Dr. Marsh’s work is a great example of how fMRI can be used to provide insight into how differences in the brain’s response can lead individuals to perform such magnanimous acts,” VanMeter says.

The science behind rewards and punishment

In a neuroimaging study, a UQ psychologist has examined whether having allegiances with someone can affect feelings of empathy when punishing and rewarding others.

An international team of researchers, including Dr Pascal Molenberghs from UQ’s School of Psychology, mapped the brain activity while volunteers where giving electroshocks or money to members within or outside their group.

Dr Molenberghs said the research was a first of its kind and demonstrated that different neural responses were involved when delivering rewards or punishment to others.

“When we reward others we activate similar brain areas as when we receive rewards ourselves,” he said.

“However, these areas become more active when we reward members from our own group.

“Previous research has shown that we prefer to give more money to people from our own group, now we can actually show that this is associated with increased activation in reward-related brain areas, which is really exciting.

“The brain responses for punishing others directly revealed a different pattern of activation, one that was typically associated with receiving and seeing others in pain,” Dr Molenberghs said.

The study also found that personality traits influenced activity in these punishment-related brain areas.

People who did not care as much about others, showed less activation in these areas when shocking others, especially when they were shocking out-group members.

Co-author Professor Jean Decety, from the University of Chicago, said the results provided important insights into why some people don’t care as much when hurting others.

“Empathy and sympathy are necessary abilities to understand the potential consequences decisions will have on the feelings and emotions of others, even if the recipients of those decisions belong to a different group,” he said.

A neurological basis for the lack of empathy in psychopaths

When individuals with psychopathy imagine others in pain, brain areas necessary for feeling empathy and concern for others fail to become active and be connected to other important regions involved in affective processing and decision-making, reports a study published in the open-access journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized by a lack of empathy and remorse, shallow affect, glibness, manipulation and callousness. Previous research indicates that the rate of psychopathy in prisons is around 23%, greater than the average population which is around 1%.

To better understand the neurological basis of empathy dysfunction in psychopaths, neuroscientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) on the brains of 121 inmates of a medium-security prison in the USA.

Participants were shown visual scenarios illustrating physical pain, such as a finger caught between a door, or a toe caught under a heavy object. They were by turns invited to imagine that this accident happened to themselves, or somebody else. They were also shown control images that did not depict any painful situation, for example a hand on a doorknob.

Participants were assessed with the widely used PCL-R, a diagnostic tool to identify their degree of psychopathic tendencies. Based on this assessment, the participants were then divided in three groups of approximately 40 individuals each: highly, moderately, and weakly psychopathic.

When highly psychopathic participants imagined pain to themselves, they showed a typical neural response within the brain regions involved in empathy for pain, including the anterior insula, the anterior midcingulate cortex, somatosensory cortex, and the right amygdala. The increase in brain activity in these regions was unusually pronounced, suggesting that psychopathic people are sensitive to the thought of pain.

But when participants imagined pain to others, these regions failed to become active in high psychopaths. Moreover, psychopaths showed an increased response in the ventral striatum, an area known to be involved in pleasure, when imagining others in pain.

This atypical activation combined with a negative functional connectivity between the insula and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex may suggest that individuals with high scores on psychopathy actually enjoyed imagining pain inflicted on others and did not care for them. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex is a region that plays a critical role in empathetic decision-making, such as caring for the wellbeing of others.

Taken together, this atypical pattern of activation and effective connectivity associated with perspective taking manipulations may inform intervention programs in a domain where therapeutic pessimism is more the rule than the exception. Altered connectivity may constitute novel targets for intervention. Imagining oneself in pain or in distress may trigger a stronger affective reaction than imagining what another person would feel, and this could be used with some psychopaths in cognitive-behavior therapies as a kick-starting technique, write the authors.

Study finds night owls more likely to be psychopaths

People who stay up late at night are more likely to display anti-social personality traits such as narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathic tendencies, according to a study published by a University of Western Sydney researcher.

Dr Peter Jonason, from the UWS School of Social Sciences and Psychology, assessed over 250 people’s tendency to be a morning- or evening-type person to discover whether this was linked to the ‘Dark Triad’ of personality traits.

The results, published in Personality and Individual Differences, found students who were awake in the twilight hours displayed greater anti-social tendencies than those who went to bed earlier.

“Those who scored highly on the Dark Triad traits are, like many other predators such as lions and scorpions, creatures of the night,” he says.

"For people pursuing a fast life strategy like that embodied by the Dark Triad traits, it’s better to occupy and exploit a lowlight environment where others are sleeping and have diminished cognitive functioning."

Dr Jonason says there may be an evolutionary basis for the link between anti-social behaviour and a preference to being awake late at night.

“There is likely to be a co-evolutionary arms race between cheaters and those who wish to detect and punish them, and the Dark Triad traits may represent specialized adaptations to avoid detection,” he says.

“The features of the night - a low-light environment where others are sleeping - may facilitate the casual sex, mate-poaching, and risk-taking the Dark Triad traits are linked to.”

“Indeed, most crimes and most sexual activity peak at night, suggesting just such a link.”

Dr Jonason adds that far more work is needed, but these results represent an important advance in behavioural ecological and evolutionary psychological models of the Dark Triad, as well as ‘darker’ aspects of human nature and personality.

Brain research shows psychopathic criminals do not lack empathy, but fail to use it automatically

Criminal psychopathy can be both repulsive and fascinating, as illustrated by the vast number of books and movies inspired by this topic. Offenders diagnosed with psychopathy pose a significant threat to society, because they are more likely to harm other individuals and to do so again after being released. A brain imaging study in the Netherlands shows individuals with psychopathy have reduced empathy while witnessing the pains of others. When asked to empathize, however, they can activate their empathy. This could explain why psychopathic individuals can be callous and socially cunning at the same time.

Why are psychopathic individuals more likely to hurt others? Individuals with psychopathy characteristically demonstrate reduced empathy with the feelings of others, which may explain why it is easier for them to hurt other people. However, what causes this lack of empathy is poorly understood. Scientific studies on psychopathic subjects are notoriously hard to conduct. “Convicted criminals with a diagnosis of psychopathy are confined to high-security forensic institutions in which state-of-the-art technology to study their brain, like magnetic resonance imaging, is usually unavailable”, explains Professor Christian Keysers, Head of the Social Brain Lab in Amsterdam, and senior author of a study on psychopathy appearing in the Journal Brain this week. “Bringing them to scientific research centres, on the other hand, requires the kind of high-security transportation that most judicial systems are unwilling to finance.”

The Dutch judicial system, however, seems to be an exception. They joined forces with academia to promote a better understanding of psychopathy. As a result, criminals with psychopathy were transported to the Social Brain Lab of the University Medical Center in Groningen (The Netherlands). There, the team could use state of the art high-field functional magnetic resonance imaging to peak into the brain of criminals with psychopathy while they view the emotions of others.

The study, which will appear on the 25th of July in the journal Brain (published by Oxford University Press) and is entitled “Reduced spontaneous but relatively normal deliberate vicarious representations in psychopathy”, included 18 individuals with psychopathy and a control group, and consisted of three parts. “All participants first watched short movie clips of two people interacting with each other, zoomed in on their hands. The movie clips showed one hand touching the other in a loving, a painful, a socially rejecting or a neutral way. At this stage, we asked them to look at these movies just as they would watch one of their favourite films”, Harma Meffert, the first author of the paper, explains. Meffert was a graduate student in the Social Brain Lab while the study was conducted, and is now a post-doctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Mental Health in Bethesda.

Next, the participants watched the same clips again. This time, however, the researchers prompted them explicitly to “empathise with one of the actors in the movie”, that is, they were requested to really try to feel what the actors in the movie were feeling.

"In the third and final part, we performed similar hand interactions with the participants themselves, while they were lying in the scanner, having their brain activity measured", adds Meffert. "We wanted to know to what extent they would activate the same brain regions while they were watching the hand interactions in the movies, as they would when they were experiencing these same hand interactions themselves."

Our brains are equipped with what scientists call a “mirror system”. For example, the motor cortex of the brain normally allows you to move your own body. Your so called somatosensory cortex, when activated, makes you to feel touch on your skin. Your insula, finally, when activated makes you feel emotions like pain or disgust. In the last decades, brain scientists have discovered that when people watch other people move their body, or see those people being touched, or have emotions, these same brain regions are activated. In other words, the actions, touch or emotions of others become your own. This “mirror system” possibly constitutes a crucial part of our ability to empathize with other people, and it has been previously shown, that the less you activate this system, the less you report to empathize with other people. It has been suggested that individuals with psychopathy might somehow suffer from a broken “mirror system”, resulting in a diminished ability to empathize with their victims.

As it turns out, however, the picture seems to be more complex. When asked to just watch the film clips, the individuals with psychopathy indeed did activate their mirror system less. “Regions involved in their own actions, emotions and sensations were less active than that of controls while they saw what happens in others”, summarizes Christian Keysers. “At first, this seems to suggest that psychopathic criminals might hurt others more easily than we do, because they do not feel pain, when they see the pain of their victims.”

As the second part of the study revealed, however, it’s not quite so simple. Instead of generally activating their mirror system less, individuals with psychopathy rather seem not to use this system spontaneously, but they can use it when asked to. “When explicitly asked to empathize, the differences between how strongly the individuals with and without psychopathy activate their own actions, sensations and emotions almost entirely disappeared in their empathic brain”, explains Valeria Gazzola, Assistant Professor at the UMCG and second author of the paper. “Psychopathy may not be so much the incapacity to empathize, but a reduced propensity to empathize, paired with a preserved capacity to empathize when required to do so”. The brain data suggests, that by default, psychopathic individuals feel less empathy than others. If they try to empathize, however, they can switch to ‘empathy mode’.

There might be two sides to these findings. The darker side is that reduced spontaneous empathy together with a preserved capacity for empathy might be the cocktail that makes these individuals so callous when harming their victims and at the same time so socially cunning when they try to seduce their victims. Whether individuals with psychopathy autonomously switch their empathy mode on and off depending on the requirements of a social situation however remains to be established. The brighter side is that the preserved capacity for empathy might be harnessed in therapy. Instead of having to create a capacity for empathy, therapies may need to focus on making the existing capacity more automatic to prevent them from further harming others. How to do so, remains at this stage uncertain.

Study suggests that a poor sense of smell may be a marker for psychopathic traits.

People with psychopathic tendencies have an impaired sense of smell, which points to inefficient processing in the front part of the brain [orbitofrontal cortex]. These findings by Mehmet Mahmut and Richard Stevenson, from Macquarie University in Australia, are published online in Springer’s journal Chemosensory Perception.

Psychopathy is a broad term that covers a severe personality disorder characterized by callousness, manipulation, sensation-seeking and antisocial behaviors, traits which may also be found in otherwise healthy and functional people. Studies have shown that people with psychopathic traits have impaired functioning in the front part of the brain – the area largely responsible for functions such as planning, impulse control and acting in accordance with social norms. In addition, a dysfunction in these areas in the front part of the brain is linked to an impaired sense of smell.

Mahmut and Stevenson looked at whether a poor sense of smell was linked to higher levels of psychopathic tendencies, among 79 non-criminal adults living in the community. First they assessed the participants’ olfactory ability as well as the sensitivity of their olfactory system. They also measured subjects’ levels of psychopathy, looking at four measures: manipulation; callousness; erratic lifestyles; and criminal tendencies. They also noted how much or how little they emphasized with other people’s feelings.

The researchers found that those individuals who scored highly on psychopathic traits were more likely to struggle to both identify smells and tell the difference between smells, even though they knew they were smelling something. These results show that brain areas controlling olfactory processes are less efficient in individuals with psychopathic tendencies.