Melissa Hogenboom — Psychopathic criminals have empathy switch

Psychopaths do not lack empathy, rather they can switch it on at will, according to new research....

Christian Keysers from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, and senior author of the study, said it could change the way psychopathic criminals were viewed.

"The predominant notion had been that they are callous individuals, unable to feel emotions themselves and therefore unable to feel emotions in others.

"Our work shows it's not that simple. They don't lack empathy but they have a switch to turn it on and off. By default, it seems to be off."

The fact that they have the capacity to switch empathy on, at least under certain conditions, could have a positive side to it, Prof Keysers said.

"The notion psychopaths have no empathy at all was a bleak prospect. It would make it very hard for them to have normal moral development 

"Now that we've shown they have empathy - even if only in certain conditions - we can give therapists something to work with," Prof Keysers told BBC News.
But he explained that it remained unclear how this wilful capacity for empathy could be transformed into the spontaneous empathy most of us have.

BBC News
Psychopathic criminals have empathy switch
Melissa Hogenboom | Science reporter

Gary Olson — Education, Neoliberal Culture, and the Brain

Dr. Marco Iacaboni, one of the world’s recognized authorities on the neuroscience of empathy, argues that the discovery of mirror neurons, the
 neurons responsible for empathy, is “so radical that we should be talking about a revolution, the mirror neuron revolution.” Why? Because of the profound implications for how we think about both individuals and the future of our endangered planet. These neuroscience findings can be the foundation for a fortuitous marriage between science and secular morality but, as Prof. Iacoboni argues, this requires dissolving “the massive belief systems that dominant our societies and that threaten to destroy us.”

My sense is that the most insidious, influential and largely unacknowledged of these belief systems is neoliberal capitalist ideology. That is, the critical missing piece in this lively and rapidly proliferating conversation about empathy is the failure to identify the dynamic convergence of of culture, politics and the brain, what the eminent political theorist William Connolly once describes as neuropolitics or the “politics through which cultural life mixes into the composition of the body/brain process. And vice versa.”

Dissident Voice
Education, Neoliberal Culture, and the Brain
Gary Olson | Professor of Political Science and Chair of the Department of Political Science, Moravian College

(h/t Ian Welsh)