Empathy for the Psychopath
The New York Times magazine ran a chilling article yesterday about psychopathic children, and how the features that lead to anti-social personality disorder and sociopathy may be identified as early as age five. If you haven't already seen it, I suggest you give it read.
Researchers uniformly focus on lack of empathy as the best predictor for future psychopathic behavior. They emphasize the need to teach these children how to empathize "before it's too late," but they seem to have no idea how to do that. Efforts to teach these children ways to read and recognize emotional responses in other people only made them more effective manipulators. Instilling a system of rewards and punishments only made them more careful and secretive. According to the researchers, these children "lack humanity" because they seem unable to feel and connect with other human beings. So how to teach them empathy and help them to become "human" like the rest of us?