‘You do not get a full-blown personality disorder as a birthday present when you turn 18’

Prof Essi Viding: ‘There is a lack of very basic human qualities in some children that is incredibly disconcerting’

As every parent knows, children can be a handful at the best of times – and little terrors at the worst.

But imagine a scenario in which your tantrum-ing toddler or moody teenager isn’t simply acting out… but showing signs of something more sinister.

According to a growing group of global academics, psychopathy – the personality disorder that drives the darkest acts of some of the world’s most heinous criminals – can be detected in children.

Essi Viding, a professor of developmental psychopathology at University College London, is among those driving this unsettling – and somewhat controversial – school of thought.

Research by her and her colleagues, based on empirical studies, has shown that you can reliably detect behavioural, social and emotional traits that can increase a person’s risk of developing psychopathy in childhood, as early as three or four years old.

“Scientists or clinicians would feel rightly uncomfortable calling children ‘psychopathic’, as it’s an adult personality disorder,” Prof Viding explains.

“But you do not get a full-blown personality disorder as a birthday present when you turn 18, so there are clearly children who have these sorts of traits from a very young age.”

As a mother to two boys, aged three and six, this is nothing short of terrifying.

My two are prone to hitting, kicking, wrestling and occasionally biting; they’re terrible at sharing, worse at apologising and tend to cry when they don’t get their own way.

So how do I know they’re just ordinary children, pushing boundaries and not yet able to manage their emotions – and not on the path to becoming psychopaths?

It can be hard to tell the difference between bad behaviour and something more sinister - Jose Luis Pelaez/Digital Vision

There is quite a difference, Prof Viding explains, between children who are badly behaved and children who exhibit what is known as conduct disorder with callous-unemotional (CU) traits, characterised by a lack of empathy and muted emotions.

“As early as in three- to four-year-olds, it is possible to identify children who are less affected by other people’s sadness, fear or distress, have a harder time regulating their emotions when frustrated, and who are more likely to lash out in a physically aggressive way,” she says.

“Of course, identifying these children early on doesn’t mean you can definitely predict that someone will become an adult psychopath, but these are the children likely to be at an increased risk compared with their peers.”

Like other personality disorders, psychopathy exists on a spectrum from mild to severe. According to a 2021 study of US prisoners, up to a quarter of men and 17 per cent of women behind bars meet the criteria.

In children, Prof Viding estimates, around one per cent of the wider population have the combination of conduct disorder with CU traits. Conduct disorder – severely disruptive behaviour – is more prevalent, found in two to five per cent of children aged five to 12, but not all these children have high levels of CU traits.

There are three key areas, she explains, in which children with conduct disorder and associated CU traits are wired differently from others of a similar age.

The first is that they lack “emotional arousal” to another’s distress, as displayed by the protagonist in the novel We Need to Talk About Kevin.

Tilda Swinton and Rock Duer in the 2011 film ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin’ - Nicole Rivelli

Prof Viding explains: “If your little one bashes another child and takes their toy, making that child cry, most parents will say, ‘That’s not a nice thing to do. You took Jack’s toy and now he’s sad. How would you feel if someone took a toy from you?’

“Usually, that other child’s distress arouses a reaction in them, they feel bad, and so they don’t want to behave that way again. This is not the case among these children.”

Second, they struggle to make connections between doing something wrong and suffering the consequences – like being put on the naughty step or losing out on a treat.

Third, they don’t get the same satisfaction from doing or saying things that make others happy. Instead, they tend to put themselves first.

“Most children want to please you,” explains Prof Viding. “They’ll do something simply because it makes Mummy or Daddy smile. But children with high levels of CU traits don’t seem to get the same reward out of pleasing others.”

There are, of course, more obvious giveaways – she has, in the past, come across children who have deliberately killed living creatures for pleasure.

“There is sometimes a lack of very basic human qualities that is incredibly disconcerting,” she says.

Children with high levels of callous-unemotional traits often don’t care about pleasing others - Ridvan Celik/E+

There is little Prof Viding, 50, hasn’t seen in the 25 years she has been researching psychopathy and young people’s mental health, and she spent two years conducting studies on inmates at Wormwood Scrubs prison and Broadmoor high-security psychiatric hospital.

“It struck me that when you read prisoners’ case histories, there were warning signs that had been there long before they committed their crimes,” she recalls.

Ted Bundy, the notorious American serial killer, was a prime example of this: as a child he liked to dig holes in the ground, laced with spikes, for passers-by to fall in and hurt themselves. He also used to buy mice at the pet shop and pull them apart.

Over the years, there have been even more alarming reports: babies who repeatedly bite their mother’s breasts; toddlers who pretend to hug their parents and headbutt them instead.

One of Prof Viding’s studies looked at the genetic predisposition to psychopathy in seven-year-old twins, finding that CU traits have a “strong genetic influence”.

In other words, some children are born more likely to develop personality features that could be red flags.

‘No one is born a psychopath’

“You see families where there are concentrations of these traits,” Prof Viding explains. “No one is born a psychopath and the genes are not a blueprint, but there are people whose genetic makeup means that they are at higher risk than others.”

Our genes and our early social environment shape how the brain processes emotional and social information – and the brains of children at risk of developing psychopathy are different from those of other children, showing little response to emotional stimuli that would normally induce fear. They also tend to have a low resting heart rate, typically associated with stress resilience. Researchers at the University of Cambridge in 2021 found that children whose hearts beat faster at the age of eight were at lower risk of developing adult psychopathy, despite having adverse childhood experiences.

“Children with conduct problems and CU traits, and adults with psychopathy, are poor at feeling what others are feeling, known as emotional empathy,” Prof Viding adds. “On a conceptual level, they understand it, but that is not the same as feeling it.

“They are better at cognitive empathy, so they can work out what makes someone tick, but they don’t care if they make others distressed. This combination makes for a powerful tool for manipulation.”

The latter will chime with most parents – my three-year-old certainly has me wrapped around his little finger – but, if anything, my kids feel too many big emotions, not too few.

‘Interventions can work’

It’s not all bad news, however, even if a child displays these traits from a young age.

Several studies around adoption show that children at risk of developing worrying behaviours because of their biological family history, if they go on to be adopted by warm, loving parents, are less likely to see those behaviours worsen as they get older. Treatment, Prof Viding says, is effective, such as adapting parenting styles, learning how to help a child regulate their differing reactions, and seeking ongoing professional help in which a therapist works with both child and parents.

“With any behaviour, the more rooted it gets, the more difficult it becomes to intervene. But we know that interventions in adolescents and adults can also work, so the message should not be that if you don’t get there in the first five years, it’s useless.”

Unfortunately, she adds, getting help to the children who need it is easier said than done, as those who exhibit these tendencies often come from families where their parents have complex issues of their own (such as addiction, mental-health difficulties or problems with the law).

“It is harder to elicit sympathy for children who don’t play by the rules and behave in ways that can be unpleasant or downright dangerous,” she says. “It is an uphill battle to get funding to help these children, even though it would be in society’s interest.”

A mother herself, to two teenagers aged 15 and 17, Prof Viding understands only too well the parenting rollercoaster – and how difficult dealing with an unruly child, let alone one showing worryingly abnormal personality traits, can be.

“I get emails on a weekly basis from parents who are concerned and don’t know where to turn,” she admits. “It’s heartbreaking.

“At the moment in the UK, the health service is incredibly reluctant to diagnose conduct disorder, so the parents often have to wait until things are so bad they can no longer cope or their child is in trouble with the law.”

But, she insists, no child is beyond reprieve – nor is anyone’s little darling “destined” to become a psychopath. Cue a collective parental sigh of relief.

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