Editing Guilt (emotion) (section)

=== Lack of guilt in psychopaths ===
Individuals high in [[psychopathy]] lack any true sense of guilt or [[remorse]] for harm they may have caused others. Instead, they [[Rationalization (making excuses)|rationalize]] their behavior, [[blame]] someone else, or [[Denial|deny]] it outright.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Widiger |first1=Thomas A. |last2=Lynam |first2=Donald R. |chapter=Psychopathy and the five-factor model of personality  |pages=171–187 |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=LSiBsdxcGigC&pg=PA171 |editor1-last=Millon |editor1-first=Theodore |editor2-last=Simonsen |editor2-first=Erik |editor3-last=Birket-Smith |editor3-first=Morten |editor4-last=Davis |editor4-first=Roger D. |title=Psychopathy: Antisocial, Criminal, and Violent Behavior |date=2002 |publisher=Guilford Press |isbn=978-1-57230-864-0 }}</ref> People with psychopathy have a tendency to be harmful to themselves and to others. They have little ability to plan ahead for the future. An individual with psychopathy will never find themselves at fault because they will do whatever it takes to benefit themselves without reservation. A person that does not feel guilt or remorse would have no reason to find themselves at fault for something that they did with the intention of hurting another person. To a person high in psychopathy, their actions can always be rationalized to be the fault of another person.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Neumann |first1=Craig S. |last2=Kosson |first2=David S. |last3=Forth |first3=Adelle E. |last4=Hare |first4=Robert D. |title=Factor structure of the Hare Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version (PCL: YV) in incarcerated adolescents. |journal=Psychological Assessment |date=June 2006 |volume=18 |issue=2 |pages=142–154 |doi=10.1037/1040-3590.18.2.142 |pmid=16768590 }}</ref> This is seen by psychologists as part of a lack of moral reasoning (in comparison with the majority of humans), an inability to evaluate situations in a moral framework, and an inability to develop emotional bonds with other people due to a lack of [[empathy]].

One study on psychopaths found that, under certain circumstances, they could willfully empathize with others, and that their empathic reaction initiated the same way it does for controls. Psychopathic criminals were brain-scanned while watching videos of a person harming another individual. The psychopaths' empathic reaction initiated the same way it did for controls when they were instructed to empathize with the harmed individual, and the area of the brain relating to pain was activated when the psychopaths were asked to imagine how the harmed individual felt. The research suggests psychopaths can switch empathy on at will, which would enable them to be both callous and charming. The team who conducted the study say they do not know how to transform this willful empathy into the spontaneous empathy most people have, though they propose it might be possible to rehabilitate psychopaths by helping them to activate their "empathy switch". Others suggested that it remains unclear whether psychopaths' experience of empathy was the same as that of controls, and also questioned the possibility of devising therapeutic interventions that would make the empathic reactions more automatic.<ref name="empathy switch">{{cite news |title=Psychopathic criminals have empathy switch | vauthors = Hogenboom M |url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23431793 |newspaper=BBC News |date=July 25, 2013 |access-date=July 28, 2013 |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130727080108/http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23431793 |archive-date=July 27, 2013 |df=mdy-all }}</ref><ref>{{cite web | vauthors = Lewis T | title = Cold-hearted Psychopaths Feel Empathy Too | work = Live Science | date = 24 July 2013 | url = https://www.livescience.com/38421-psychopaths-feel-empathy-when-they-try.html }}</ref>

Neuroscientist [[Antonio R. Damasio]] and his colleagues showed that subjects with damage to the [[ventromedial prefrontal cortex]] lack the ability to empathically feel their way to moral answers, and that when confronted with moral dilemmas, these brain-damaged patients coldly came up with "end-justifies-the-means" answers, leading Damasio to conclude that the point was not that they reached immoral conclusions, but that when they were confronted by a difficult issue – in this case as whether to shoot down a passenger plane hijacked by terrorists before it hits a major city – these patients appear to reach decisions without the anguish that afflicts those with normally functioning brains. According to [[Adrian Raine]], a clinical neuroscientist also at the University of Southern California, one of this study's implications is that society may have to rethink how it judges immoral people: "Psychopaths often feel no empathy or remorse. Without that awareness, people relying exclusively on reasoning seem to find it harder to sort their way through moral thickets. Does that mean they should be held to different standards of accountability?"<ref>{{cite news
|url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/27/AR2007052701056.html
|title=If It Feels Good to Be Good, It Might Be Only Natural
|newspaper=The Washington Post
|date=May 28, 2007
|first=Shankar
|last=Vedantam|name-list-style=vanc
|access-date=23 April 2010|df=mdy-all}}</ref>