Most young people have psychopathic traits that get smaller with age, but in a small group of adolescents, the psychopathic features do not diminish.
A new Swedish study that has followed over a thousand young people for four years shows that the psychopathic features are slowly replaced by empathy and conscience - and that most young people learn to comply with social rules.
However, questionnaires designed to reveal psychopathic features in adolescents show that a small group did not change their personality for the better during the four-year period.
These young people express psychopathic personality traits associated with adult psychopathy, a serious personality disorder associated with antisocial behavior and crime.
The study was made by Selma Salihovic and her research group at Örebro University in Sweden and published in the journal Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment.
The researchers have focused on examining the long-term development of adolescent years of three crucial features that characterize psychopathy. These characteristics are lack of anger or guilt, manipulative tendencies and irresponsible behavior associated with juvenile delinquency and future antisocial behavior and violence.
"One of the reasons why researchers study early expressions of psychopathic personality traits are to better understand how psychopathy develops," says Salihovic, PhD student in developmental psychology and lead author of the study.
"Knowledge of the stability and change of these features can help us locate the developmental period where they are least stable and therefore more susceptible to treatment."
Possible to change the development
The survey followed 1,068 young people in the 7th to 9th. Grade from a Swedish city over a period of four years. There were almost as many boys and girls and 92.5 percent of the young people were of Swedish descent.
Psychopathic features were measured with the Youth Psychopathic Traits Inventory, which was developed to capture psychopathic features in young people over 12 years of age. Here they are faced with 50 statements such as:
I like to be there where something exciting happens.
I'm usually calm when others are scared.
I'd rather buy something right away than save my money.
It's easy for me to get what I want from other people by charm and seduce them.
It's fun to invent stories and try to make people believe in them.
I am better than everyone else in almost everything.
Salihovic and her colleagues found four subgroups of young people who were characterized by high, low and moderate levels of psychopathic traits and declining or stable development.
As expected, most of the young people in the study showed low to moderate psychopathic traits that decreased with age. They had almost no criminal behavior and indicated that they had warmth and good relations with their parents.
But for a small group of young people, they remained psychopathic features such as stubbornness and impulsive irresponsible behaviors that are so typical of psychopathy, high and stable.
Not surprisingly, the youngsters also reported that they had more often committed crime and had the most problematic relationship with their parents.
Salihovic acknowledges that the results of the study do not promise good for the future of the small group of young people. But she adds:
"Psychopathic features develop like general personality traits during the teenage years, which means that personality is not cast in stone and that effective treatment can change the development."
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Las frases dichas provienen de una encuesta hecha hacía el racional de los adolescentes, buscando respuestas de algo proveniente del subconsciente e inconsciente? o.O
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