Tolcapone

it's not that psychopaths can't feel empathy, but as your article states, it's that it appears to be turned off by default(the switch). Here's another quote from article "But the research does not go into whether the study's psychpathic participants could actually feel empathy on demand, rather than just regions of their brains being activated.

I am in the severe range for psychopathy. I got the highest score possible on factor 1 of the PCL-R. This is the factor that's related to lack of empathy, not being responsive to the fear of others, grandiosity, and detachment from others up to not bonding with others emotionally at all.

I have no desire to be a person who has less of those traits that maxed my factor 1 score. If we were talking about an illness/disease, then I'd want a cure but a personality is not an illness. Other people may not like that there are people with my personality out there, but those people are prejudiced. It will be a sad day when you're expected to eradicate who you are because people are prejudiced against you.

High factor 1 scores are interpreted as psychopathic personality, A person like me has a prototypically psychopathic personality with all the bells and whistles and every feature in overdrive. High factor 2 scores pertain to impulsivity, criminality, letting your temper get way out of control, being irresponsible, suffering from excessive boredom, living aimlessly with no practicals goals, sexual disinhibition, drug and alcohol addiction, feeling alienated, higher anxiety and depression, aggression, and so on. This factor is not related to empathy or any of the emotional abnormalities associated with psychopathy.

People don't get that factor 1 has virtually no relationship with criminal or violent behavior. Having a high score makes strategic, purposeful violence used to get a goal achieved more likely but if you look at correlation with criminal conviction and violent behavior, it is all factor 2 and factor 1 makes a negligible contribution. If someone says this drug is important because it can make the psychopathic personality part of clinical psychopathy more moderate and that's good because psychopaths are dangerous, that's sheer ignorance. That component of psychopathy is hardly related to antisocial behavior in the least.

Private Joker wrote:it's not that psychopaths can't feel empathy, but as your article states, it's that it appears to be turned off by default(the switch). Here's another quote from article "But the research does not go into whether the study's psychpathic participants could actually feel empathy on demand, rather than just regions of their brains being activated.

the same line of thought leads me to suggest that the lack of activation in the psychopathic subjects when not consciously trying to be empathic doesn't necessarily mean they weren't feeling empathy but rather just that there was decreased activity in regions of the brain. Maybe their empathy processing was so efficient they needed minimal brain activity to obtain it.

This gets to a philosophical problem. How do you know how brain activity corresponds to subjective experience? How do you know that if two people have the same activity they are having a similar experience and if they have different activity, they're in different subjective states? More generally, an octopus has a very different brain from mine but if it suffers an injury, it's quite possible its pain experience is very much like mine though my brain is more different from its than any human.

Myself, I don't buy these arguments. Subjective states line up with brain states. Same brain activity, same subjective state. If you don't agree, you've gotta consider my less activity = greater empathy idea or that some of the normal subjects always make a conscious effort to be empathic or they'd have scans like the psychopaths and these people don't necessarily feel empathy at all.

Lastly, if activity in the relevant brain regions is not empathy but something that looks identical to it, the drug this thread is about is a dumb idea. It doesn't make sense to even think it could work because all it would do increase activation in certain brain regions but conscious effort does that and it doesn't count because the psychopaths may not be feeling the same thing despite being in the same brain state.

Your concern shouldn't be that if I consciously try to be empathic and my brain lights up like a normal person having an empathic experience, it's not true that I'm feeling that way myself for some inexplicable reason. Your concern should be that I may not have any experiences whatsoever. Maybe I am a zombie that has brain activity and acts because the laws of physics cause the physiological activities happening inside me to animate my body but the fact I have brain activity doesn't mean I have thoughts. It just means I have brain activity.

The quote you are referring to can be found in the article you provided. Some of the information in the article you provided is in fact at odds with the one I provided. My article clearly states that subjects with severe psychopathy in prison cannot empathize with others pain, in fact it's their pleasure centers that are activated. So which one is correct. Shall we say yours because you say so. You're kidding right?

"When participants imagined pain in others, these regions failed to become active in high psychopaths. In a sadistic twist, when imagining others in pain, psychopaths actually showed an increased response in the ventral striatum, an area known to be involved in pleasure."

Your arguments are based on the article you provided, but my article states that the same brain regions were in fact not activated, rendering your arguments ineffective. Articles don't agree. Could it be possible that the author of your article misunderstood the study?

Can you provide,a similar fmri study for Factor 1? If not your philosophical arguments are not backed by hard science.

Private Joker wrote:The quote you are referring to can be found in the article you provided. Some of the information in the article you provided is in fact at odds with the one I provided. My article clearly states that subjects with severe psychopathy in prison cannot empathize with others pain, in fact it's their pleasure centers that are activated. So which one is correct. Shall we say yours because you say so. You're kidding right?

"When participants imagined pain in others, these regions failed to become active in high psychopaths. In a sadistic twist, when imagining others in pain, psychopaths actually showed an increased response in the ventral striatum, an area known to be involved in pleasure."

Your arguments are based on the article you provided, but my article states that the same brain regions were in fact not activated, rendering your arguments ineffective. Articles don't agree. Could it be possible that the author of your article misunderstood the study?

There is a difference between:
1) me imagining you in pain
2) me watching a video of you in pain and consciously trying to feel what you're feeling

If I imagine you in pain, it's like giving me a video of you really feeling it. I see and hear your expressions of pain and the damage being done to you whether in my mind's eye or a tv monitor, and I respond to it however i respond to these experiences on autopilot. If I am trying to feel something about what's happening and how you're responding, I'm not on autopilot. Its like comparing how often I blink per minute to how often I blink in a minute when I consciously exert control over my blinking.

Beyond Repute wrote:There is a difference between:
1) me imagining you in pain
2) me watching a video of you in pain and consciously trying to feel what you're feeling

Not true, this is what all the research into the "mirror system" shows. In fact watching a sexually explicit video would probably provide the stronger response. This is why the porn industry exists, a video is more stimulating than imagining. However same brain regions activated.

You are factor 1, the test subjects were inmates. Factor 1 may in fact be able to empathize with others' pain(who knows). However, without a study, similar to the fmri study performed on the inmates, whether someone that is factor 1 can empathize is speculation.

Quite offtopic, but isn't it quite an error in reasoning to always assume that empathy prerequires emotional mirroring? Empathy can also pretty adequately be simulated without the need for emotions to disturb the image. And the other usually neither notices this, nor cares. James Fallon f.e. explained in interviews that his wife - asked about if she is hurt by the fact that he only fakes empathy - replied that it would be just the opposite; she wouldn't care if it's real, what would matter is that he tried.
In any event NPD is the outcome of structural deficits, those cant be just rebuild with a pill, be it Tolcapone or XTC or whatever.

Heck, I agree, if you can't do it fake it. XTC would work fine too.

crystal_richardson_ wrote:I doubt this would work on psychopaths and narcissists though, because their problem is not one of under stimulation I don't think of the reward centre, or attentional... although I think someone posted a study once on the Aspd forum suggesting that psychopaths DID have empathy when they focused on the distress of others....

BPD, ASPD and ADHD are pretty much related.

All are marked by a combination of high dopamine and low norepinephrine at Cloninger Model(high novelty seeking, low reward dependence).

It is as if both had high alertness and low vigilance(albeit I dislike the term vigilance, it means on neuro psychology something like sustained concentration)

I still wonder what is this drug offers in benefits compared to regular ritalin.