[Applause] when I was a graduate student I wanted to be Thelma from The Flintstones for Halloween I went to a grocery store and I bought a dog bone for my hair and on my way out I saw a man looking straight into my eyes almost immediately I knew I was in trouble the next thing I knew I was on the pavement with a gun to my head I got hit on the head with the gun and my head was bleeding and I was rushed to the emergency room where I spent the night filled with fear
and anger I wanted my attacker dead then but I feel compassionate with him now so I'm a developmental psychologist and um uh the director of the kids interaction and neurodevelopment lab much of my research program was shaped by the events of that night and my research looks at the neurobiology of empathy and how it can go Ary in children with aggression today I want to share with you some insights from neuroscience and also from working with aggressive kids in how those insights helped me consider my aggressor as somebody worthy of compassion and Remediation and with
that in mind I want to share with you three things today the first we can identify neurobiological factors associated with aggression as early as childhood second these factors are not immutable they can be Amplified or attenuated with experience and third perhaps most important of all if we understand how neurobiology and EXP experience shape aggressive behavior this can help us change how we can how we treat aggressive people so advances in brain imaging technology such as magnetic resonance imaging or MRI have allowed neuroscientists to look under the hood of aggressive people and look into the inside
of their brain and ask questions such as are our brains different between violent and non-violent people so we use structural M MRI to look in the inside of a living human brain and take a highquality photograph we can ask questions such as how much gray matter does the brain contain and is that different between aggressive and non-aggressive people so we also use functional M or fmri to take a kind of movie of people as they participate in tasks such as um witnessing fear or distress or pain in others so here's a picture of um our
new MRI scanner at UCR which is actually right around the corner from our from our building um and I use both of these techniques to look at why and how children become aggressive because even though the media focuses on these extreme incidents these extreme instances of violence among adult males the truth is that violence later in life is actually quite rare in a betrayer's life and we can observe aggressive behavior much earlier as young as two or 3 years of age and sometimes even in the first year of life um so in my work I
focus on children with conduct disorder and these are um problems such as aggression and bullying and hurting animals so I look at these children and um I show them movies of um people in pain or in distress I want to I want to understand how they respond to these movies so I'm going to show you of an an example of one of um the images that I showed and this I did in collaboration with u my colleagues at the University of Chicago um just to warn you these clips were designed um to El to to
demonstrate pain and to elicit empathic responses what we see is we see the engagement of a network of regions that are engaged in in processing pain and distress in others and that network overlaps with a network that we have um in processing pain and distress in ourselves and this has now been replicated in a number of labs both in adults and in children so when we show these kinds of movies to to kids with conduct disorder what we see is we see two different patterns of behavior both of these patterns are very different from what
we see in typically developing kids so in one group of kids these are kids with conduct disorder who are high on traits known as callous and emotional traits and these kids with this kind of profile they don't really care about the emotions of other people so they might a child with callous and emotional traits might for example um steal another child's lunch money in school or trip a classmate in the hallway and not really care about the feelings of that child and these kids are particularly problematic um they are at a really increased incidence for
aggressive behavior in adulthood and these are the kids that we really um that that we that we look out for so what we see when these kinds of kids look at images like that in the scanner is that they show an attenuated response in this pain processing distress Network so that's one group of kids the other group of kids are also diagnosed with conduct disorder so they have the same disorder but they're low on these callous and emotional traits what we see here is that they're high on what are known as reactive aggressive kids and
these kids are um they're very emotional they're very emotionally reactive and volatile and um they often misunderstand and misrepresent emotions so these kids might Punch or kick or um shove another kid because they feel that they've been provoked or threatened when in fact they haven't so Mis they misread emotional information they misread intentions as hostile or threatening when in fact they're not so when these kinds of kids um look at images of pain and distress in the scanner what we see is that they show an amplified response right so the second um set of studies
we still need to replicate that but these findings tell us that the responses here are very different between the two kinds of children so the second kind of kid what might be happening is they might feel threatened or defensive themselves so what I find remarkable here we see all of these kids with aggressive behavior but when we look closely at their neural patterns we see that they get to these behaviors in such different ways another way of saying that is to say that even though all three groups of children they're seeing the same thing right
they're seeing somebody being hurt a person being hurt but they're not experiencing it the same way and I think that that's where the challenge to compassion lies the most difficult thing about being compassionate towards another person in particular when they're antisocial and violent is to try to understand their experience in the way that they're experiencing it not in the way that we experience it but the way that they experience it um and compassion is really stepping outside of ourselves and into the experience of another person and I think only when we do that can we
confront the problem of violence and the prevention of violence so I admit um that's a very difficult thing to do uh in my work also outside of work it's difficult to to feel compassion for kids who are hurting animals or who are aggressive it's much easier to be compassionate with a with an anxious child or with a worried child and I'm I'm actually I'm not always really good at it I'm not always able to do it but at times I can and it's those times that are most rewarding for me and where I feel like
I'm most able to grow both as a scientist and as a human being so one I think one particular instance comes to mind um when I was able to do that and here I was about to scan a 9-year-old boy with conduct disorder and this boy was aggressive he had a diagnosis but he was also quite afraid of going into the scanner he was visibly afraid and he was getting upset when he insisted on trying so he went in um and we scanned him um but then he became afraid again and he started crying and
in that moment his mother was standing right next to him and she went in and started hitting him and yelling at him and this was right in front of all of us so if you've never been inside an MRI machine let me explain it to you this way you're lying on a bed and it's dark inside and you're in this narrow tube and the scanner makes a really loud noise to me it sounds like the construction side is right next to your head um and I want to show you a little video um just to
demonstrate what it's like and imagine that you are this boy lying in that scanner you have to do that for an hour without moving your head uh so you can see I've been in this machine so many times that it doesn't bother me anymore but you can see how people can be afraid especially kids they'll tell me that it sounds like they dentist or uh like a bear trying to catch them um um it's it's really scary for them so this boy was in there and his mother was beating him and and yelling at him
and I'm not blaming the mother here that's not my intention but I want to illustrate that this is what we're doing to our children we're punishing them and we're incarcerating them and we're adjudicating them without really explaining why Without Really providing them the context so one of um you know what this illustrates is that yes there are neurobiological um correlates of aggressive behavior but experience and and an environment matter as well the most effective strategies for conduct disorder are actually parent management techniques so studies from a number of labs have now shown that the most
effective way to combat conduct disorder is through parent Management training and here again we see very different kinds of responses so in the in the group of kids who are explosive and emotional and volatile these kids really benefit from manage parenting that's warm and caring and sensitive while maintaining rules as well so these are kids that benefit from time out from very mild kinds of um discipline not punishment like not indiscriminate punishment but but U but mild discipline the first set of kids however the ones with callous and emotional traits the they don't really respond
very well to that kind of um to that kind of parenting in these kids I showed you that they had an attenuated response to other people's pain they also have an attenuated response to punishment they're not really concerned with uh time out or with a threat of punishment so those techniques don't work for them what works for them uh more are reward based um parenting techniques so they they're more responsive to um things like reward things like encouragement in general these kids are more difficult to treat and we have to use very systematic kinds of
of of treatments that that Target both parenting and school and peers but again um you know both of these both of these approaches they suggest that we need to be caring and supportive and not punitive and not um punitive without cause both of the examples that I gave you involved males involved aggressive males but it's a mistake to think that only males are aggressive and it's a mistake to think that only males are um in the juvenile justice system and that we are not paying attention um to to to males because actually females are aggressive
as well and when we look at the numbers we see that incidences of female violence and Fe female crime has actually increased so this is the most recent set of data and here we see um that females female aggression is on the rise and we see that um in 1980 across multiple indices so weapons assault vandalism disorderly conduct women and females were about a 19% but at in 2010 that percentage was at 28% so that's a 50% increase so what's happening here part of what we look at um I'm I'm starting a new project together
with Goot n and Steve Lee looking at females in the juvenile justice system and my Approach has been to look at the brain function and brain structure and what we see in these females when we look at the brain function and the Brain structure of females with aggression we see that the females are more vulnerable so what we see is that the brain networks the volume of the regions that are involved in perspective taken in empathic responding are actually smaller in females and when we look at their brain function we see similar vulnerabilities so here's
just one example here what you see is activation in two networks that are involved in perspective taking and mentalizing and in one um Network the the females here are in orange and and what you see is that they're deactivated they're lower in both of these kinds of networks so what this suggest to us that that it's the females that are driving this Behavior so there's something about these aggressive females that maybe they're at bigger risk maybe they're more vulnerable we have to test this idea further of course but it suggests that we shouldn't really um
just dismiss them we shouldn't really um just forget about these girls because actually in the project that we now have one of the things that we're finding out is actually girls are punished a lot more judges are giving them longer and harder sentences um and why like they expect them to be more empathic they often expect them to be more pro-social and so what what it looks like it's happening is that judges are because they expect them to to to do better to know better they're punishing them more harshly and again here this is not
helping them punishing girls is not a helpful response to violence you know where does this leave us where does um all of this information leave us what we see here is that violence is the result of a combination of biological psychological and social factors where does it leave us we see from these data that violence is the result of a combination of biological psychological and social factors and when you think back to my story it should be evident that trying to continue to punish people like my attacker does not solve the problem of violence as
a society we can do better when we are violent and abusive and dismissive towards our children we lead example we teach them to be unsympathetic and uncaring the problem of violence I think the solution to Pro to the problem of violence I think is not um to turn our backs on these vulnerable kids but instead to keep our minds and our hearts open what we want to do is we want to make our kids feel understood and Val and valued we want all of our children to feel understood and valued and only by doing that
can we teach them to also begin to care about others we need more compassion and not cruelty in this world thank you
