Psychopathy

Previously on Happy Face.

Meeting Melissa's mom in person, I was really taken aback by the fact that they don't look alike. She absolutely looks like her.

Father, Keith Fell in high school. I believe it was twenty five feet when they interview killers. They have found that a large percentage of them damaged their frontal lobe before they were twenty two, changes their whole personality.

I went back to my truck and rehearsed the lies I planned to tell when I was arrested. What made me cross the line into murder? Maybe it was my nature.

There was just this thing that people said in the family. They would say, Oh, that's just Keith, That's just how Keith is, and it seemed to be acceptable.

Did you feel you're in control?

Did you just.

Lose it with his soliders lost?

I didn't.

I don't think they had anything to do with control and just had paybacks a bitch, you know.

And I just grabbed him start wailing. Of course, I didn't know him to stop.

Now.

I was going to beat him to death.

I'm scared I look like him.

I came from here, That's okay.

My heart is so turned off.

I'm afraid I've built like him.

In the vies with the sun. I don't know, shine oh.

Oh, I threw. The worst case scenario about tomorrow when I meet with doctor Fallon is that I'm going to find out that biologically my brain is wired exactly the same as my dad.

Melissa's deepest fear is that somewhere in the threads of her DNA are the same miswired strands that eventually led her father to kill I'm Lauren brag Pacheco, and this is happy face.

I'm prepared for both ways that it will like. I know I'm a flawed human being. I know that I sometimes can get narcissistic like everybody else. I know sometimes I can be selfish like everybody else. I know that sometimes I forget to say the right thing to someone, or to offer the hug when they needed it. I know that sometimes I laugh at inappropriate things at the inappropriate time. I know sometimes I can be insensitive. I know that, but that's not all the time. And I

Even if you are, you're going to realize that it doesn't change any of those things. You're a good person. You would never do what your father's done, and you could never be what he is. Last week, Melissa had a pet scan to determine if her brain had the neurological markers associated with psychopathy.

Today is a really big day for me. It's a moment that.

I am coming face to face with something I've been running away from.

Learning about.

A hard time sleeping last night, because today I find out if my worst fears and insecurities are true. My dad and I had a very close relationship, almost a psychic connection, and it makes me wonder if my connection with my dad was because our brains are similar, or our makeup is similar, if I'm capable of being like my dad, But I don't know. Maybe doctor Felon can explain to me the difference between the brain of a

Are you ready to face it today?

I think that in the past I wasn't in a space where I could accept the results. I feel so much more secure with who I am. I feel like with Don's acceptance of who I am and knowing that my heart is different than if my brain does prove to be similar to my father, that at least my heart is different. I'm actually you know, when I think of the word psychopath, I think of someone who is a killer, someone who's cold hearted, someone who is evil, And maybe that term is the problem.

Melissa's definition of a psychopath is a description of her father. Keith's definition, however, differs.

I want to know what happens in prison's mind from point to point in their life.

I don't think person who's psychopath all their life? Yeah, no, No, I think it's it's something they grow into. Yeah, And it's a behavior pattern they grow into, and it's not a It's like we live normal lives up to a point and we make that conscious decision to go a certain way, and then it's like watching Planet of the Age, everything goes different directions. You don't turn right or turn possibilities around it.

What's going through your head right now? Do you know what to expect.

The doctor has my brain scans, and maybe I find out that I am a psychopath, or maybe I find out I have a brain tumor, or maybe I might have a perfectly healthy brain.

I don't know.

I could be walking into anything actually today, but.

I think knowing is better than not knowing.

Why does it matter?

What do you hope you're going to gain from today?

For me, why it matters is for a lot of people, I feel like I've been under a microscope and I really haven't had any tools to combat what they say. But at this point, I'm almost I really don't even care what other people think.

This is for my self awareness. This is for me to be able to know how I relate to the world.

Doctor James Fallen is a neuroscientist and professor of psychiatry and human behavior at the University of California Irvine School of Medicine. I had first read about him years ago in a fascinating article in The Atlantic titled Life as

Allen, Hi, how you go?

Cat you out?

Nice to meet you, Marrick, Kay, great, thank you.

So this is our house.

Doctor Fallon's house was bright and cheerful. The exterior was surrounded by colorful, well tended plants and flowers, and the inside was filled with family photos and art, he explained was mostly created by various family members. It felt like a welcoming, creative place.

This is my lab, yeah, because I do analysis. We play experiments here. So anyway, there's where we live. And I was just looking at some of the slides. Just got your slides, you know, your pet scan?

Did you imagine that I'm nervous? Well, I don't know what you know about my background.

I know who your dad is, certainly, but I don't know much about you.

And I didn't want to know too much about you, you know, I just because I didn't want to.

I didn't want to look at the scan with some idea of who you were. Okay, that's the idea. The less I know going in the better. Okay.

Okay again, because doctor Fallon's own brain exhibits indicators of psychopathy, we felt he had the ideal insight and expertise to help Melissa navigate and process her PET scan results. Regardless of what they revealed.

The behaviors are not in themselves evil. It's the context that we consider making him evil, and that context is defined differently in different societies. All societies are not the same, So no absolute behaviors are good and bad for these things. So it's not just the genes you have, because I mean I inherited all these psychopath related genes.

I don't have much anxiety.

If I'm caught by somebody doing something, I can look them in the face and they go, he's completely innocent.

So you can inherit them.

But if you've been treated okay, and especially with love, it kind of negates that effect. All you do is become assertive. Low anxiety kind of up all the time. You could be glib and all this stuff like that you can sell like a salesman, but it comes across as an earnest in an earnest way.

So are you a psychopath?

I'm not a categorical psychopath. I mean I've been analyzed. I've been psychiatrically analyzed. And one of the interesting reads I was looking at, you know, one of the diagnoses, and it was basically the summary is that here's someone who has all the thoughts and urges and dreams and everything that a full blown psychopath has, but he never acts them out.

Now, I wouldn't have known that.

I thought everybody was having these thoughts and really crazy intense scared the hell out of people with them. I always assumed because it was in my head everybody was thinking this way, and they're not. The difference is that I never act him out. I mean, I got absolutely clean record, and I got a family. I'm still dating the girl I dated at twelve years old. We were both twelve, and we've been married forever, and I've had a really great job forever, and I have kids and

I feel like I'm.

Relating to you right now because I feel like I'm a great girl.

I feel like I'm a great person.

Oh yeah, I think I'm terrific.

And it's not that I don't have faults, but overall, I said, who wouldn't like to be around me?

You know? It's like I was up grade.

I was like, and so I asked started with my wife and I asked her, I said, you got to tell me, now, really, what do you think of me? I mean, tell me I'm not going to get mad or anything. And I did that with my mother, my brothers, my sister, my kids.

A bravery to hear what people really because I didn't really care.

I mean, you know, for me, it was part of the way it is. I just was interested. I being a scientist, you're able to say, I'm just scientists. Yeah, And they all told me the same thing. They said, you do really psychopathic things and you don't even realize it.

Did they give you examples?

Oh yeah, yeah, in great detail. I put people at risk for the fun of it. And it's not like strangers need to worry about me, But if you become close to me, you gotta worry because I'll get you to do something. I'm the person that runs with the bulls and tries to get you to run with me. That's not psychopathic, but I do it all the time, and I put my people close to me and friends

So in my dad's case, he had the genes and had the environment.

Yeah.

I mean this is almost every dictator, you know, really aggressive dictator, and every serial killer I looked that I you know, could find as much information were abused early and they had in their family these traits. The only one who claims he was never abused was Polpot. He was the only one. I don't believe him. I think you know a lot of sometimes they lie.

I'm learning about that with my dad. That through this journey. What has been unique about my dad is that he says one thing and what he does is another thing. But he's so believable and what he says that people don't look at what he does.

That's it.

That's and being raised with that, like I only saw what he did and believed him too. And so as I've been going on this journey, I've been figuring out that it's not what he says that is what he does, but it's exactly what you just said is how he said. It was just so matter of fact and straight face that you just don't even I guess, well.

This is the charm of it. This is real.

A psychopaths or people, well even narcissistic personality disorder can do it with such earnestness and glibness and no anxiety. You absolutely believe them. You believe them before you believe anybody. And that's what makes it so pernicious and insidious. You know, in fact, they you know, a real psychopath doesn't really believe what they're doing is bad.

It's kind of just whereas a sociopath knows what they're doing is wrong.

Oh there's a difference.

Yeah, yeah, well everybody's got a different definition. But then usually people and going they're kind of the same. They're not, you know, a real psychopath, we call a primary psychopath. And these are the ones that are clinically psychopaths that have no moral reasoning, have no guilt, they have no remorse. So what makes the personality disorders so different than other psychiatric disorders is that people don't know what they're doing is wrong or different. And I'll give you an example.

They know what they're doing is crazy, but they can't stop it.

Okay, The people with OCDPD the percentage disorder, thinks what they're doing is perfectly okay and good and works. Big difference, right, So, superficially the behaviors are the same, but what happens inside and how they're generating what they mean are completely different. Now, somebody with sociopathy like we're talking about, which it's called the secondary psychopath, they know what they're doing is wrong.

Goes on and on and on.

There's always but those people can be maybe not wired genetically for psychopathy, but they were like bullied when they're eight, nine, ten years old.

A lot of times these are bullied people.

But if you are wired for it and you're bullied, I mean, it's just terrible.

See will my father beat me? I wondered what he was feeling when he beat me? Like what was there so gratifying to him to beat the shit out of me and then send me to bed like nothing happened, and then go back in and do what he wanted to do with mom or whatever, or just go on with life, and then the next day like nothing happens.

He's okay.

Now when I'm killing my victim, I'm sitting there going like, now, is this what my father felt when he beat the shit out of me? Is this the feeling he got?

You?

Getting answered to that I already didn't.

The question remains, does trauma trigger violent psychopathy or is it a domino effect?

The thing is there's so many of these what are called cluster B personality disorders. These are the ones that are dangerous to other people, like histrionic, these are people that are always using sex to manipulate people and they're really nasty be around. And also narcissistic personality disorder and psychopathy, and so for those, what you're doing is basically looking at all these traits, ten fifteen to twenty traits, and the standard thing is you take them. You score each

I really have no interest in hurting people.

When I think of psychopath it seems to have a negative label. Sure, but is it actually a good thing to have for is it possible it could be good?

Well, you know full blown psychopaths, you know the thirty and above and a hair scale or on a number of scales. It's kind of never a good thing because a lot of times they never make.

It past their teens or twenties.

They're in prison, and they can have a lot of disorganized behavior. But people who are borderline or pro socials that are not quite clinically there a lot of those traits are very very useful for navigating and becoming successful. But there are the traits. One of the two main groups of traits factors is called fearless dominance, and fearless dominance is a bunch of traits, but it's basically the person walks into the room and they got that light

These are people who will take chances.

You want that person on your side, so I don't care if he's a bad ass. I want him to be my badass. I want them to be my crook, my thief, you know. And so the successive psychopaths, especially the pro social or borderline pro social psychopaths, is a reflection of people's own lack of morals, I think, because to win, they want them on their side, even though they know that they're probably going to do. It's like, don't tell me what you did, just win, you know.

There's no other way.

But once you are found out to have something, then we can use the brain scans and the genetics to note why you're that way.

This puts you in another world because you see, people aren't expected to murder people.

And when you murder.

Someone and you're you're you have their life in your hand, you just think of no one else has been there about you, and and think of all the all your feelings, all your emotions put all on the one that the hurt that you have, and the love that you have, and joy and hate and just everything all your emotions you could ever put together.

And that's what murder's like.

After Fallen was able to give an evolutionary and historical ex explanation of psychopathy, Melissa was finally ready to face and accept her results.

So I gave you this kind of a general like how we do stuff, you know, look on the science and the biological psychiatry of it. And so would you like to know what I saw by looking at your scans?

I would love to I'm ready you sure, Yeah, I'm absolutely ready.

Yeah. I think after talking with you, I now see that it might not necessarily be a bad thing.

But I'm just curious now, I'm just I want to know such a psychopathy can be a very useful thing, and it does make it criminal or bad, but you can still be a pain.

And he has to be around.

With some of these, right, I mean really can, So you got to be then You've got to expect that from people.

Okay, I'm ready, I'm ready, I'll follow you.

Doctor Fallon's office was filled with eclectic art he'd gathered during his trap or was given over the years. It also showcased some of his own signature paintings, which tended to involve some very interesting and more than slightly disturbing depictions of clowns, demented looking clowns.

Okay, okay, So there's many ways to get a pet scan or a functional MRI. You can get a cat scan or a regular MRI that just looks at the anatomy. But this is then looking at the function. That's the main thing. The task that you did. We could have you do other tasks that test your empathy before you go in there for a PET scan or while you're doing it for fMRI. You can be looking at a mix of images of things that in normal people provoke

But at any rate, you had it done.

And so you had the basic PET scan and you didn't have a task, that is, you didn't have to look at scary pictures and discussing things.

You were just told to.

What close my eyes And for about twenty minutes, I just kept my eyes closed and I was relaxed. I didn't see anything, and I try to keep my mind centered and not distracted.

Okay, so this is kind of the non task task, and now it's called the default mode network. We're looking for and it's a circuitry that we should see these areas of the brain and a normal person light up, and these are connected areas that most people's lives are in this mode because you're kind of daydreaming or you relax.

You know there's no task there, and so a lot of your life is in this mode.

And if you look at the connectivity of this circuit of this plus with your limbics system, your emotional parts of your brain, you can really get an idea on why somebody is a certain way. You're simply given this task and it sounds like the way you've described it is exactly correct. And here's the raw scans. Part of the raw scans are up here without any processing. So

Turns out yours is completely normal.

So this first test that this is like your your clinical scan is completely normal. So you don't have any problem in your brain that anybody can see. And anatomically it's not like tumors or anything like that, and there's no no weirdness at all. It's completely normal. And now when we looked at this, they really match up.

You look like a completely normal for this test. So that's amazing, it's amazing normal.

Yeah, it could be disappointed too, So I mean, again, this is not diagnostic, but you have quite a normal reaction. And you see how sort of hot you are down here. I cannot turn this part of my brain on at all.

Wow.

So when I do default mode, I can't turn that on. And so that's a psychopathic pattern.

It's normal.

And so after years of wondering if her father's genes had somehow infected her with the same traits, the same buried evil tendencies, Melissa could finally breathe a sigh of relief, knowing that she was another step in the opposite direction of Keith.

The power that he had over me. Now I feel like he doesn't have any power over me anymore. I feel like I'm my own person. I feel liberated. I almost feel like I got out of jail. I feel so much better. I almost wish I would have.

Done this a long time ago, that I would not have been running away, but I would have never been ready for it. I don't think like I am now.

But I feel amazing. I feel like I'm my own person and free now. I'm excited about moving forward in the future. Like this is less energy devoted to worry. The energy that I've been using scared of my connection with my dad can now be used for something useful and purposeful. And it gives me everything that I need to just look to the future and stead of to the past.

If you lost me or not, do you know what I an a bag?

What?

Do you know what I see?

You?

And I know what I do that you don't know me? You could have that too, but you would rather be free, big free.

In the final Happy Face, Melissa comes to a reckoning with her past, her present, and her future.

Happy Face is a production of How Stuff Works. Executive producers are Melissa Moore, Lauren Bright, Pacheco, mangesh Ha Tikedur and Will Pearson. Supervising producer is Noel Brown. Music by Claire Campbell, Paige Campbell and Hope for a Golden Summer. Story editor is Matt Riddle. Audio editing by Chandler Mays and Noel Brown. Assistant editor is Taylor Chicoigne. Special thanks to Phil Stanford, the publishers of the Oregonian Newspaper, and the Carlisle family.