4.8 • 861 Ratings
🗓️ 30 July 2025
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Labeling a child a psychopath can be incredibly harmful, but there might be ways to treat these unsettling personality traits early. Maia Szalavitz, author and contributing opinion writer for the The New York Times, joins host Krys Boyd to discuss children who are behaving in “callous, unemotional” ways and how early interventions are proving helpful, how genetics and trauma factor into a diagnosis, and why traditional methods of punishment don’t work. Her article “What If We Could Treat Psychopathy in Childhood?” was published in Scientific American.
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| 0:28.8 | standard wherever you get Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Maya, this idea of children displaying any kind of traits that seem to predict adult |
| 14:56.0 | psychopathy, it's hard to count it's right. |
| 14:58.7 | Like we like to think of children as innocence and we like to think of people with psychopathy |
| 15:03.7 | less as people with a mental |
| 15:04.7 | illness than as people who are somehow inherently evil. |
| 15:08.5 | Given that people with psychopathy do seem prone to acts that can cause serious harm, |
| 15:15.4 | we're not sure what to do with them. |
| 15:18.9 | How much clinical research exists on these children who display what might be |
| 15:22.4 | called proto-psychopathic behaviors? I mean, there is some, and it has grown, the amount of |
| 15:29.7 | literature in this area has certainly grown over time, but it is, as you can imagine, a very, |
| 15:36.3 | very fraught area, |
| 15:37.9 | because it's sort of at this intersection |
| 15:40.2 | between medicine and morality. |
| 15:43.7 | And you really don't want to give somebody, |
| 15:46.3 | essentially a diagnosis of you're a bad person as a child. |
| 15:51.6 | On the other hand, if somebody is exhibiting these behaviors and they have this set of |
| 15:57.1 | traits, there are ways to help them become more humane. And obviously, for the good of that |
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