Bullying and the brain

From Scientific American:

The brains of bullies–kids who start fights, tell lies, and break stuff with glee–may be wired to feel pleasure when watching others suffer pain, according to a new brain scanning study.

The finding was unexpected, noted Benjamin Lahey, a psychologist at the University of Chicago and co-author of the study, which appears in the new issue of the journal Biological Psychology. Jean Decety, a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago, is lead author of the study.

The researchers had expected that the bullies would show no response when they witnessed pain in somebody else—that they experience a sort of emotional coldness that allows them to steal milk money with no remorse, for example.

…

In addition to revealing activity in pleasure- and pain-related areas of the brain, the scans also showed that a portion of the brain that helps regulate emotion is inactive in bullies.

In other words, bullies lack a mechanism to keep themselves in check when, for example, a kid accidentally bumps them in the lunch line.

“We will have to develop therapies to either treat or compensate for this lack of self-regulation that we think is there and the fact that it may be positively reinforcing every time they hurt somebody,” Lahey said.

Comments are closed.