Brain Scans Show Bullies Enjoy Others' Pain

Source: WP/HealthDay News

Bullies may actually enjoy the pain they cause others, a new study using brain scans suggests.

The part of the brain associated with reward lights up when an aggressive teen watches a video of someone hurting another person, but not when a non-aggressive youth watches the same clip, according to the University of Chicago study, published in the currentBiological Psychology.

"Aggressive adolescents showed a specific and very strong activation of the amygdala and ventral striatum (an area that responds to feeling rewarded) when watching pain inflicted on others, which suggested that they enjoyed watching pain," researcher Jean Decety, a professor in psychology and psychiatry at the University of Chicago, said in a university news release. "Unlike the control group, the youth with conduct disorder did not activate the area of the brain involved in self-regulation (the medial prefrontal cortex and the temporoparietal junction)."

The study compared eight 16- to 18-year-old boys with an aggressive conduct disorder to a group that didn't show unusual signs of aggression. All participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while watching videos in which people endured pain accidentally, such as when a heavy bowl was dropped on their hands, and intentionally, such as when a person stepped on another's foot....

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/07/AR2008110701898.html?nav=most_emailed

One mean SOB! He needs to be tried and hung for the evil he inflicted on this world!
CR:grr:

:)

The meaner she is the better they like it. These are the same people who call themselves "Christians". My personal feeling is that they go to church on Sunday thinking they can be forgiven for the rotten things they do the rest of the week.

go to church for affirmation of their status as God's chosen.

It's what they say. Go to one of these churches on a Sunday and listen to them wail and moan to Jeebus about what horrible shits they are, and then they are forgiven and the smile comes back on their faces like they have done nothing wrong. Understand that in their theology, they haven't done anything wrong because they have been forgiven after the fact.

It is seriously twisted.

it didn't come out for two years but when it did, there was no doubt in my mind, she was loving the bullying. We aren't friends anymore.

dupe

member getting the crap beaten out of them, my "reward center" might also light up.

I think context is important here.

And I must say that context is not important to bullies.

The fact that you might like to see a shitty person get their just rewards makes you human. The point of the study is to show that bullies don't need context, they just feel rewarded when others suffer no matter the context.

Georgia Peach Flambe?

(I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize to everyone in Georgia who isn't a KKK member.)

To tell us that what we've known for centuries is true.

response to other's pain in bullies, and so we can combine that with everything we know about those areas of the brain, how they develop, and how they can change to attempt to reduce the amount of people who become bullies, and change the people who already are bullies"

Pah, scientists. Telling us things we've known for centuries. That's all they ever do.

Yeah, you kinda hit a nerve. Researching what makes bullies bullies is damn well important, and there is more to this study than the headline that "bullies feel pleasure at other's pain".

Well, with that in mind, it is kinda likely that the media had a large influence in how you responded, ie. the way it was set out all around the single claim, rather than what the study was actually trying to do.

and Cheney and Rove.

The fact that science is starting to understand what causes people to be bullies may eventually allow us to deal with it better. I don't think any scientist is claiming that the end conclusion is all that new -- I hope not.

school the program to deal with this starts in pre-school.

The point of science is to gather evidence in support of a supposition.

The "fact" that this is "common wisdom" does not abrogate that there were no facts to support that theory. And thanks to a study, we now have the facts to back up our feelings.

To ignore this important distinction is to act like a republican and ignore science for feelings.

but, watching clips of teenage skate rats contusing their testicles on handrails makes my pleasure centers light right up. A little bit of the old ultra-violence in youTube clips, America's Funniest, etc... makes a lot of people feel some schaudenfreude.

That said, scenes of death, mutilation and such make me sick to my stomach, especially when it is real video or a re-creation of something that actually happened. Seeing an athlete get a compound fracture of the femur or dislocating a knee makes me cringe and almost want to vomit (I've dislocated mine several times.)

I empathize with the people (victims?) of these homemade videos, parachuting into trees, falling off of trampolines, trying to ride a bike off the roof but they just make me giggle. I think that is fundamentally different from sadism, but I could be wrong. I'm just saying that were I present at the taping of these idiocies I would try to discourage the person from doing this, and I would probably laugh a little while I called for a medic and tried to help. Make sense?

As far as the Cheney's of the world are concerned, I think the part of their brain that recognizes other people as human, possessing of individual rights, capable of experiencing pain, ennui and the like is non-functional. That might mean that by some philosophical standards they aren't even human, biological and legal standards unfortunately only require a smidgen of DNA.

C'est la vie

edit: I don't have anything against skaters btw, I admire their athleticism and tenacity, nevertheless there are many dumb kids out there proving Darwin right over and over again as they destroy the things that could pass on their dumb genes :cP

"Hey-we were laughing with you, not at you?"

:rofl:

Well, at least that's how I read the post title at first glance. Pretty much means the same thing though, no?

...by the Bureau of Painfully Obvious Conclusions.....

I was a small kid who got bullied and beat up a lot. One time, I had the opportunity to bully another, smaller kid. I didn't physically hurt him, but I scared and intimidated him until he burst into tears. The shame and self-loathing I felt for doing that were so awful and dismaying that I've never bullied anyone since. That was a horrible thing to do. I still ache when I think about it...

Should it?:shrug:

how you know that bit of the brain develops and changes, then you know something about how people become bullies and how to change them away from being bullies.

:)

Cool, no?

Psychology is sufficiently fuzzy that this means they can go back and say "the person likely experienced and environment that was like this, and this part of the brain responds to changes like that", but never in enough detail to work out a solution for each person.

In other words, this kind of thing will likely give better understanding of risk factors and such straight away, but no-one is expecting the ability to "solve" something like this anytime soon.

So rather than it being a matter of a large advancement that would do a world of good 'should it become possible', it is one more improvement in a long history of slowly coming to understand how the mind works.

that goes on here and around the internet daily. I think it's even worse when the "bully and bullied" are anonymous faceless on the web.

when anonymous and faceless?

I thought people preferred trolling to bullying over the internet.

duh