They conducted the brain scan of children who liked to get engaged in fights, breaking things, harassing others with a type of imaging called functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, and found that when they watched a video of someone inflicting pain on another person, such as a person with a piano lead being slammed on their hands while playing, the area associated with pleasure was more active.
Past research shows that when non-bullies watch other people in pain, exactly the same brain area lights up when the non-bullies themselves experience pain, which could be a sign of empathy, Benjamin Lahey of the University of Chicago, who worked on the study said.
Bullies are adolescents with conduct disorder (CD) which refers to a set of problem behaviors exhibited by children and adolescents, which may involve the violation of a person, their rights or their property. The adolescents with the CD exhibit aggressive behavior such as starting a fight or weapon use and stealing after confronting a victim.
The researchers conducted the study on sixteen 18-year-old boys; half of them exhibited signs of aggressive conduct disorder and the other half with no history of unusual aggression.
The researchers made the adolescents of both groups watch a series of brief videos that showed painful situations and tracked brain activity with fMRI. They found that in the aggressive boys group the areas of the brain, amygdala and ventral striatum, which is associated with pleasure and rewards became very active when they observed pain being inflicted on others.
While when the control group was shown same series of video clips of something painful, no increased brain activity was noted.
Dr. Lahey said, “Aggressive adolescents showed a specific and very strong activation of the amygdala and ventral striatum — an area of the brain that responds to feeling rewarded — when watching pain inflicted on others, which suggested that they enjoyed watching pain.”
The study author feels that the differences between the two groups were strong and striking but he warned more extensive study is needed to confirm the findings. “We need to test that hypothesis more, but that is what it looks like,” he said.
The study appears in the latest issue of the journal Biological Psychology.
Conduct disorder is a mental disorder, which is characterized by aggressive, destructive or harmful behavior towards other people and animals and is not a common disorder. It affects one to 4 percent of preadolescent and young people in the United States alone. CD is more common in boys than girls and is associated with very poor psychosocial outcomes.
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