If you talk to school kids what’s one constant? Many of them can tell you they’ve been bullied. If you talk to an adult — no matter how old — he or she will also tell you no matter that they can remember when they were bullied, and they probably tell you when, where, how old they were when it took place and even who did it.
Are bullies just mean people who grow out of it? Or are they misunderstood? Or are will their bullying get worse as time goes on? Do they do it because they can’t help themselves or to they actually think it’s fun?
New research confirms what many kids and grown up adults have suspected for years: bullies actually enjoy watching other people squirm in fear (or even pain) because it makes them feel good. The answer has come in research involving brain scans:
Bullies may actually enjoy the pain they cause others, a new study using brain scans suggests.
The part of the brain associated with reward lights up when an aggressive teen watches a video of someone hurting another person, but not when a non-aggressive youth watches the same clip, according to the University of Chicago study, published in the current Biological Psychology.
“Aggressive adolescents showed a specific and very strong activation of the amygdala and ventral striatum (an area that responds to feeling rewarded) when watching pain inflicted on others, which suggested that they enjoyed watching pain,” researcher Jean Decety, a professor in psychology and psychiatry at the University of Chicago, said in a university news release. “Unlike the control group, the youth with conduct disorder did not activate the area of the brain involved in self-regulation (the medial prefrontal cortex and the temporoparietal junction).”
Researchers were somewhat shocked at what they had learned:
While both groups showed activity in the brain’s pain centers, the brains of aggressive males, those with conduct disorder, also showed activity in the brain’s pleasure centers, suggesting that they may have been enjoying what they were seeing. Normal males showed no such activity.
“It just dumbfounded us,” said Dr. Benjamin Lahey, co-author of the study and professor of epidemiology and psychiatry at the University of Chicago.
Lahey said he expected an emotionally indifferent response to pain from subjects with conduct disorder, a mental disorder characterized by aggressive, destructive or harmful behavior towards other people and animals and can include theft, substance abuse and sexual promiscuity, according to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.
It turns out that the brain circuitry in people with conduct disorder is different from a neurotypical person’s when it comes to pain.
PERSONAL NOTE: In my other incarnation I visit a lot of schools to do programs on bullying. It is a major concern in many schools throughout the country.
Schools try and teach kids at an early age that respect equals no teasing/no bullying. Schools consider it a major issue due to the pain bullying causes, how kids who are bullied might not come to school, the morality of bullying and, in the larger picture, the role bullying may have played in triggering violence on the part of victims or students who perceive they are victims in student violence directed against teachers and students in cases such asthe 1999 Columbine High School massacre. Bullying in kids can eventually morph into assault when they become teens and adults.
THERE ARE MANY WEBSITES DEALING WITH BULLYING. HERE ARE JUST A FEW:
—Stop Bullying Now
—Facts For Famlies On Bullying
—Dealing With Bullying
—Fact Sheet On Bullying
—Bullies: What Is Bullying (PBS)
—Bullying: National Crime Prevention Council
—Kids Against Bullying
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.