Researchers are studying psychopathic chimps to better understand the human variety

By Emma Young To understand the drivers of a psychopathic personality (marked by callousness, disinhibition and superficial charm), it’s worth looking at our closest relatives. Some chimps, like some people, score highly on scales designed to evaluate psychopathic tendencies. And new work in Frontiers in Neuroscience reveals a potentially important genetic contributor to psychopathic traits in chimps, which could lead to a better understanding of the traits in people. The team led by Robert Latzman at Georgia State University studied 164 chimpanzees housed at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the National Center for Chimpanzee Care at the University of Texas. Each chimpanzee was rated by typically two to three colony staff members, who knew the individual animals, on the “CHMP-Tri scales” (a kind of chimp personality questionnaire that assesses their boldness, meanness and disinhibition – the three traits that form the so-called “triarchic model” of psychopathy). They also sequenced the AVPR1A regions of the chimps’ genomes. Latzman and his team decided to home in on this gene because it codes for a receptor for vasopressin, a neuropeptide known to play a role in complex social behaviours in humans and other animals, and so, in theory, relates to psychopathy. Vasopressin levels have been found to correlate with a history of aggression in people with various personality disorders. And polymorphisms (variations) in a re...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: biological Comparative evolutionary psych Genetics Personality Source Type: blogs