Episode 13: Episode 13 - The Psychopath Whisperer with Dr. Kent Kiehl (Part 1)

Skeptically Curious

Rarely does one have the opportunity to interview someone who, without any exaggeration, can be legitimately considered among a handful of leading figures in their respective field. This aptly describes Dr. Kent Kiehl’s celebrated career as a world leading psychopathy expert. Furthermore, as anyone reading his superb 2014 memoir-cum-primer, The Psychopath Whisperer, will learn, Dr. Kiehl’s career has intersected with some iconic luminaries, particularly in neuroscience and psychology, including Karl Friston, Michael Gazzaniga, the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash, and the grandfather of modern psychopathy research, Dr. Robert Hare, creator of the Psychopathy Checklist, which is still the unsurpassed gold standard of assessment. Dr. Kiehl completed his undergraduate degree at the University of California-Davis and later earned a doctorate under Dr. Hare at the University of British Columbia. Putting his studies to practical use, for several years he worked in a maximum-security prison in Canada. Thereafter, he was affiliated with Yale and the Institute of Living, and for the last fifteen years has been a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of New Mexico where he heads the Mind Research Network, a non-profit institute. During his work at the latter institution, Dr. Kiehl and his team have used a mobile fMRI to scan the brains of over 5000 inmates in five states.
In the interview, after Dr. Kiehl summarised his storied career, he spent quite some time reflecting on the scientific method, which included relating this to his own work. I asked my guest to provide the so-called “dinner party” definition of psychopathy. He then clarified the distinction between psychosis and psychopathy, as well as sociopathy and psychopathy. As we discussed, and is elaborated upon in more detail in The Psychopath Whisperer, among the principle reasons for Dr. Kiehl’s esteemed stature are the landmark contributions he has made using two of the primary imaging tools in neuroscience, namely EEG and fMRI, which stand for electroencephalography and Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, respectively, techniques he kindly first explained before moving onto describing his research findings. In short, after repeatedly identifying a correlation between high scores on the Psychopathy Checklist and the volume and structure of certain brain areas, Dr. Kiehl formulated what he has dubbed the Paralimbic Dysfunction Model of Psychopathy. Impressively, this is now among the most robust findings in the field.
As uncomfortable as it may be for some to accept, psychopaths simply have different brains to those of us not so designated. The last major topic we discussed was whether, in light of these findings, psychopaths are born or made, which then segued into possible interventions to ameliorate these traits, or at any rate their most socially deleterious manifestations.
Dr. Kiehl’s personal website: https://kentkiehl.com/

Dr. Kiehl’s Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_Kiehl

The Psychopath Whisperer: https://www.amazon.com/The-Psychopath-Whisperer-Science-Conscience/dp/077043584X

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