Nature Vs Nurture

Psychopathy is one of the most commonly misunderstood disorders present in todays society. However, this papers object is not to clear up said misunderstanding, or to determine whether it is right or wrong to behave with psychopathic tendencies, but to discuss different perspectives involved in evaluating psychopathy. People living in todays society consider the world to be black and white, although that is not the case. The world is full of grey areas as well, especially when considering the world of mental illness. Understanding this is key to understanding the reasons for all the different perspectives on psychopathy. First, an understanding of what a psychopathic person is will be necessary. Among the psychologists and psychiatrists, there

A large amount of psychologists use the concept of Nature vs. Nurture in analyzing mental illness. Nature vs. nurture is the idea that mental illness can be caused by genetics and brain development or it can be caused by environmental factors such as childhood and culture. Regarding the nature side, what physically causes a person to be a psychopath? A professor of psychiatry and human behavior at the University of California, discusses how he found out he could be a psychopath in an interview. James Fallon studied PET scans and other scans of different types of killers brains and found that there was a common pattern among them. In the psychopathic killer’s brain scans, there was low brain activity in the limbic system (Fallon, 2013). This limbic system is the part of the brain that controls and monitors emotion. Fallon and his family decided to have their brains scanned to inspect for signs of Alzheimer’s, which was common in his wife’s family. While doing so, they discovered that one of the brain scans resembled that scans of the psychopathic killers. Fallon’s brain scan was examined by other professionals and afterwards he had genetic testing done. Fallon had all the genetic markers typically found in psychopaths and the brain scan to match. In the interview, Fallon discussed how he had had an amazing childhood and that he was always incredibly content. He went

Some argue that they shouldn’t due to their lack of emotions and empathy. Others argue that they should for the reason that there are set laws regarding how people should behave in a society, such as not killing. Once again, the purpose of this paper is not to determine which opinion is the correct opinion, but perhaps to shed a light on the perspective of a psychopath. A suitable example of how people can have such different perspectives from each other is found when regarding ethics or morals. Morals tend to be determined by culture, although they can differ slightly among the individuals. “Some philosophers have argued that psychopaths’ deficits in empathy cause them to have difficulties with the acquisition of moral concepts, and that these difficulties, in turn, entail that they lack moral responsibility for their actions” (Levy, 351). As of current, there is no way to verify that psychopaths don’t understand ethics or morals, they just might understand them in a different manner from the majority of the culture. Psychopaths most likely follow ethics that happen to be considered obscene to the majority of society, such as types of ethical hedonism. The general idea behind hedonism is the idea that pleasure should be sought after. Dana Kay Nelkin said, “When we think about psychopaths’ actions, and the pleasure they sometimes take