Bullies' Brains Happy When Others Are Unhappy

The brains of bullies—kids who start fights, tell lies, and break stuff with glee—may be wired to feel pleasure when watching others suffer pain, according to a new brain scanning study.

The researchers had expected that the bullies would show no response when they witnessed pain in somebody else—that they experience a sort of emotional coldness that allows them to steal milk money with no remorse, for example. Previous research had shown that when nonbullies see other people in pain, the same areas of the brain light up that do when the nonbullies themselves experience pain—a sign of empathy, Lahey said.

The new research showed these areas in the bullies' brains were even more active than in the nonbullies.

"We think it means that they like seeing people in pain," Lahey said. "If that is true," he added, "they are getting positively reinforced every time they bully and are aggressive to other people."

In the study, Lahey and his colleagues looked at brain activity of eight 16- to 18-year-old boys with histories of lying, stealing, committing vandalism, and bullying.

These eight boys, who suffer what's clinically known as aggressive conduct disorder, were compared to a group of adolescent boys with no such histories.

The finding was unexpected, noted Benjamin Lahey, a psychologist at the University of Chicago and co-author of the study, which appears in the new issue of the journal Biological Psychology. Jean Decety, a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago, is lead author of the study.