WHAT PRESIDENT DOES THIS REMIND YOU OF?

`WE WERE TERRIBLE TO ANIMALS,' recalled [Bush childhood pal Terry] Throckmorton, laughing. A dip behind the Bush borne turned into a small lake after a good rain, and thousands of frogs would come out.

`Everybody would get BB guns and shoot them,' Throckmorton said. `Or we'd put firecrackers in the frogs and throw them and blow them up.'- Nicholas D. Kristof, Midland Life,

SCIENCE NEWS - Psychopaths lack a conscience and are incapable of experiencing empathy, guilt, or loyalty. Descriptions of psychopaths callously manipulating, intimidating, or harming others go back hundreds of years.

Psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley wrote The Mask of Sanity, a classic textbook on psychopathy. Cleckley portrayed psychopaths as superficially charming, intelligent people who don't feel deep emotions and lie about almost everything because they neither understand nor care about others.

Two conditions - sociopathy and antisocial personality disorder - often get confused with psychopathy. Sociopathy refers to criminal attitudes and behaviors viewed as normal in certain groups, such as street gangs. Sociopaths have a sense of right and wrong that is based on the values of their criminal group.

Antisocial personality disorder, an official psychiatric ailment, is a diagnosis applied to people who commit a broad range of aggressive and criminal acts. Some qualify as psychopaths, but many don't.

Although psychiatrists don't currently label psychopathy as a formal personality disorder, a wave of new research has yielded insights into how psychopaths think and suggested biological and temperamental roots of this condition. . .

In 2002, psychologist Stephen Porter of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, interviewed 125 men who were serving time in two Canadian prisons for murder. The 34 men with high scores on a psychopathy test gave him a surprise. Despite many investigators' assumption that psychopathic criminals lack self-control and often act impulsively, most of the psychopathic Canadian killers had planned the ruthless, cold-blooded murders that they had committed. . .

Porter measured psychopathy using a tool called the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised. This clinical-rating scale, devised by psychologist Robert D. Hare of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, has served as the gold standard of psychopathy tests for about 20 years.

In this approach, a psychologist or psychiatrist interviews a person and reviews his or her criminal record. The rater then judges whether any of 20 psychopathy-related traits applies to that person. These traits include being superficial, acting grandiosely, lying frequently, showing no remorse, lacking empathy, refusing to accept responsibility for misdeeds, behaving impulsively, and having committed many crimes. . .
There's currently a bull market in corporate psychopaths, according to psychologist Paul Babiak of HR Back Office, an industrial-consulting firm in Hopewell Junction, N.Y. Organizations undergoing major changes, such as downsizing or mergers, provide a chaotic atmosphere that savvy psychopaths exploit, Babiak holds. They cozy up to a firm's power brokers, manipulate coworkers, and intimidate underlings on their way up the corporate ladder, stealing everything possible along the way.

In today's rapidly changing business world, "increased corporate rewards for risk taking and nonconformity can offer the psychopath faster career movement than before," Babiak says. . .

Psychologist Paul J. Frick of the University of New Orleans recalls a boy who was recently referred to the mental health clinic where Frick works. The 10-year-old had trapped a cat and killed it by slowly slicing it with a knife. The youngster calmly explained to Frick that he wanted to see how much he could cut the animal before it died. "He wasn't upset by the incident at all," Frick says. "He was a bit annoyed about being brought to me, though."

The boy might be a future surgeon, but it's more likely that he's headed for psychopathic pursuits, in Frick's view. The child's callousness and lack of emotion, seen in a small proportion of children and teenagers, probably foreshadow serious behavior problems, and perhaps even a psychopathic personality, in adulthood.

In such children, Frick finds a lack of guilt, an unemotional demeanor, little concern about others' feelings or about school, a refusal to keep promises, and difficulty forming lasting friendships.

Although about 1 in 100 kids displays such traits, nobody knows how many of them will grow up to become psychopaths. . .

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20061209/bob9.asp