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   The Childhood Psychopath: Bad Seed or Bad Parents? (Born or Made?)   
      
   CRIMINAL MIND > CRIMINAL PSYCHOLOGY   
      
   The Childhood Psychopath: Bad Seed or Bad Parents?   
      
   By Katherine Ramsland   
      
   Born or Made? Theories of Psychopathy   
      
      
   According to Canadian theorist Dr. David Lykken, psychopaths are set   
   apart. They differ in temperament from other children and are at   
   greater risk for delinquency. He has looked at the statistics on   
   juvenile crime and concludes that only a few children with antisocial   
   tendencies were born with such a predisposition. They are fearless and   
   probably have a weak behavioral inhibition system. However, Lykken   
   contends that most antisocial behaviors in children are caused by poor   
   parenting--absent fathers and inadequate mothers who fail to properly   
   socialize their child. Perhaps the child frustrates them or perhaps   
   their parenting skills are subnormal. Either way, the child acts out.   
   Lykken calls these children sociopaths and he believes that we can   
   decrease their numbers with better social skills. He does acknowledge   
   the twin studies that support the view that criminality has a   
   substantial heritability factor, but claims that traits like   
   fearlessness, aggressiveness, and sensation seeking, all of which   
   contribute to antisocial behavior, can be properly channeled toward   
   better things. It is up to parents to do this, and where parenting   
   fails, the child with those traits may express them through violence.   
   In other words, in his opinion, even the child most prone to   
   psychopathy via inherited traits can be guided through good parenting   
   toward using those traits in prosocial ways.   
      
   Some brain studies suggest that psychopaths have abnormal brain   
   activities. They make certain connections more slowly than other   
   children, show less fear of punishment, and seem to need to do things   
   that excite their nervous system, such as thrill-seeking behaviors.   
      
   A few of the findings include:   
      
   adolescents who measured high on the Psychopathy Screening Device   
   showed reduced electrodermal skin responses to distress cues in slides   
   shown to them, indicative of a subnormal response   
   they also showed a decreased response to fear imagery and to threats   
    psychopathy-related personality traits correlated with difficulty in   
   processing emotional information   
   psychopaths over-respond to distracters, showing reduced ability to   
   focus and cognitive deficits in left hemisphere activation   
   psychopaths speak more quietly than nonpsychopaths and tend not to   
   differentiate between neutral and affective words, perhaps meaning   
   that they are insensitive to emotional connotations in language   
   psychopathic adolescents respond more strongly to reward than   
   nonpsychopaths, sustaining reward-producing activities for a longer   
   period of time   
   To try to determine whether a psychopath is somehow hard-wired or is   
   created by family and environment, it's instructive to look at the   
   details of individual cases.   
      
   A good case study is that of Gary Gilmore, who murdered two young men   
   in cold blood and then refused to appeal his death sentence. He was   
   executed in Utah in 1977. Mikal Gilmore, Gary's younger brother, did   
   an extensive search of his family's history to try to determine where   
   things went wrong--particularly since of four brothers, Gary was the   
   only outwardly violent one. Mikal traces family secrets, extreme   
   emotional neglect, religious rigidity, and bouts of physical abuse   
   that his brothers endured back to his grandparents - both sets of   
   which rejected the two children who grew up to become Gilmore's   
   parents. Mikal shows as well as any psychologist the life history and   
   possible development of an antisocial personality.   
      
   He begins his memoir by mentioning that all of his family, save he and   
   his older brother, are dead. Of five children, one died as an infant,   
   one of complications from being viciously stabbed, one by execution,   
   and the other living brother simply wandered away. The reader   
   immediately knows that severe dysfunction is at the heart of this   
   family, so it is not surprising to learn that the father, Frank   
   Gilmore Sr., was a con man, a gypsy, an alcoholic, a brutal autocrat,   
   and an abusive husband and father.   
      
   Frank had many dark secrets, many of them criminal, and Bessie was a   
   Mormon, outcast from her family. She accompanied Frank on his wild   
   chases across the country as he settled here and there just long   
   enough to run a con game and then leave. Bessie heard from Frank's   
   eccentric, spiritualist and unloving mother that Frank had married at   
   least half a dozen times and had families scattered in many places. He   
   had no use for his children.   
      
   He often disappeared without explanation for long stretches of time,   
   although he sometimes took Bessie with him, even when she had three   
   children in tow. Frank also drank heavily and vented his considerable   
   rage on his wife. Shortly after Gary was born, Frank decided that Gary   
   was not his son, but the progeny of a son of his from a previous   
   marriage whom Bessie knew. It seemed a way for him to detach from his   
   son the way his own father had detached from him. There was little   
   chance that Frank would feel much affection for this boy.   
      
   When Frank's sons got older, he began to whip them with a belt, much   
   more severely than their various infractions merited. The boys soon   
   learned that no matter what they said or did, their father simply   
   wanted to brutalize them, all the while insisting that they love him.   
   Their mother would not protect them. In fact, she let them know that   
   the ideal family was childless. Eventually Bessie began to beat her   
   children as she was being beaten.   
      
   Gary reacted with a rebellious streak. Whereas he was smart and   
   artistic, he never exploited the opportunities to move in a positive   
   direction. Instead, he acted out in school, tested his courage by   
   running in front of trains, exploited and violated friends, hung out   
   with an antisocial crowd of boys, and engaged in pretty crimes, such   
   as burglary, auto theft, and substance abuse. This landed him in   
   reform school, where he became more sophisticated in the criminal   
   attitude. By the age of sixteen, Gary was in jail.   
      
   Even there, Gary acted out and the few times he got out, he committed   
   a crime almost immediately that sent him back. One prison psychiatrist   
   diagnosed him as "antisocial personality with intermittent psychotic   
   decompensation." Another indicated that Gary wanted to die,   
   specifically to bleed to death.   
      
   He finally turned to murder. In July of 1976, just after being   
      
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