Cambridge (OTL) – Children who suffer from Conduct Disorder (CD) have a repetitive tendency towards inflicting pain on others, violating rules, manipulative lying, theft and bullying. As adults these children exhibit anti-social personality disorder. There is a definite need to understand CD and its mechanisms to help these children lead normal lives. According to a study conducted at Cambridge University in England, a group of adolescents afflicted with CD have less of physical reaction towards stress, in other words they do not posses the ability to show normal stress reactions when put in a stressful situation. More recently, according to an article published in the Journal of Biological Physiology, a group of University of Chicago researchers wanted to test this occurrence at the biological level.
They hypothesized that this lack of reaction could be seen in the MRI’s or brain scan of adolescent suffering from CD. They designed a set of experiments where the youth watched aggressive behavior and normal scenes while wired to an fMRI. The study concluded that the CD youth did indeed react atypically to scenes depicting aggressive behavior by showing activity in the pleasure part of their brain implying that pain may be pleasurable to bullies, when compared to the control group of youth who were CD free.
This study is a step forward in understanding empathy and its mechanisms. It is anticipated that once the biophychological process is better understood with more studies, this could lead to a treatment for CD which implies a treatment for bullying