Abstract
Psychopathy holds a fascination for mental health professionals and the general public alike. A fixture in popular culture works on the subject range from the scholarly and inaccessible to the sensationalistic and lurid. Biological research on psychopathic individuals touches upon not just neuroscience but matters of culpability, ethics and the intersection between science and the law. In Psychopathy: An Introduction to Biological Findings and their Implications, the authors, both researchers in this field, have managed to produce a book which even-handedly discusses these issues.
The cardinal virtue of this book is clarity: each of the nine chapters provides a clear, concise introduction to a domain of research methodology, followed by a précis of the relevant findings produced to date. This approach has two main advantages. First, this book serves as a solid primer to many research techniques that the reader may not be familiar with. Even a reader comfortable with the principles of neuroimaging may struggle with a chapter on behavioural genetics or psychophysiology; the authors’ approach ensures there are no readers left behind in the subsequent discussion. The student looking to understand any body of research will find this book useful, regardless of the trait or disorder they are interested in.
The second advantage is that the eclectic, complex findings in psychopathy research are broken down into comprehensible and comprehensive chapters. As each chapter builds on the findings of the previous, a consistent and detailed understanding of the current state of the literature emerges. The value of this approach is particularly clear in the chapters covering brain imaging findings, genetics and neuropsychology. To their credit, the authors take pains to show where findings are consistent across the literature, where they are more tentative and where they are contradicted by other work. This saves this book from stating its claims too boldly or offering facile, reductionist solutions to what are, as the authors carefully remind us, complex bio-social phenomena.
It is important also to appreciate that this book does not focus solely on innate, classically ‘biological’ factors. There is an entire chapter dedicated to environmental influences on biology and behaviour, and the authors carefully point out that both genetics and environment have profound effects on how people act.
There are only a few issues to be raised with this book. The introduction, where psychopathy itself is sketched out, feels somewhat brief. Given the detail we are presented with subsequently, a richer understanding of the behavioural features of psychopathy would have been appreciated. Later chapters, on ethics and potential interventions, feel like they could also be expanded on.
This book is an excellent introductory text to its subject matter. It leaves the reader with not just a more complete appreciation of psychopathy but also of the research methods available to understand it. The research covered is recent to within a few years and dispassionately assessed. As such, this book would be a valuable addition not just to the forensic psychiatrist or researching criminologist but also to the interested student or lay-person.