Many psychopathic individuals seem fearless to the average person, and this behavior has been for a long time attributed to the fact that these people are cold-blooded. However, a new research seems to indicate that the real triggers behind their behavior is a form of attention deficit. The investigation puts a dent in the commonly held idea that psychopaths are cold-blooded, merciless predators, who will stop at nothing to fulfill their desires, NewScientist reports.

“A lot of their problems may be a consequence of something that's almost like a learning difficulty,” University of Wisconsin Madison (UWM) psychologist Joseph Newman believes. He has spent a great deal of time studying the behavior of prisoners of the correction system suffering from psychopathic personalities, when these individuals were anticipating pain.

Previous studies have evidenced abnormalities in the amygdala region of these people's brains, an area that has been linked with perceiving, interpreting, and responding to fear. Therefore, these studies suggested, psychopaths did not feel fear, which was one of the main reasons why they acted the way they did. “People call them cold-blooded predators,” Newman says. He was, however, unconvinced that this was the whole story behind the behavior, and decided to investigate further on.

In his investigations, he selected 125 prisoners and subjected them to personality tests, in order to assess their levels of narcissism, impulsiveness and callousness. Some 20 percent of the participants scored high enough to be considered psychopaths, a significantly higher percentage than the one-percent level in the general population. This was to be expected, however, considering that the individuals had been already convicted of serious crimes.

Newman's experiments demonstrated that psychopathic individuals felt fear in the same way others did, but that they appeared fearless because they no longer went through the trouble of paying attention to things, and evaluating which was dangerous and which was safe. Newman says that the new knowledge could help devise new methods of preventing repeating offenders from causing further harm to others. “They're famous for being difficult if not impossible to treat,” he concludes.