Is cold and calculating Anders Breivik insane?

That most people would find his reasoning deeply offensive, and his actions on July 22 monstrously horrendous, is a separate issue. The question remains whether a man who is so cold and calculating in executing his logical plan is sane or, as the court psychiatrists have suggested, insane. If this is confirmed, his thoughts and murderous actions are to be viewed as the products of a mental illness, requiring treatment in a hospital rather than punishment in a prison.

A week after the crime, I was asked by the Norwegian newspaper Morgenbladet for my reaction, as I had just published a book arguing that acts of human cruelty must by definition entail a loss of ''affective'' empathy. Empathy divides into at least two components: ''cognitive'' and ''affective''. Cognitive empathy is the drive to identify someone else's thoughts and feelings, being able to put yourself into their shoes to imagine what is in their mind. Affective empathy, in contrast, is the drive to respond to someone else's thoughts and feelings with an appropriate emotion. People with autism typically have difficulties with the cognitive component (they have trouble inferring what other people might think or feel), but have intact affective empathy (it upsets them to hear of others suffering). So Breivik is unlikely to have autism.

In contrast, those with antisocial personality disorder (including psychopaths) typically have the opposite profile: they have no trouble reading other people's thoughts and feelings (intact cognitive empathy) but other people's suffering is of no concern to them.

It is not for me to speculate on Breivik's diagnosis, and in some ways the precise formulation is of secondary importance. The more important issue is to understand what factors can lead to empathy erosion. Decades of research underscore the importance both of early childhood emotional experience and of genetic factors that have far-reaching effects on an adult's empathy levels. Advances in neuroscience now enable us to delineate the ''empathy circuit'' (a network of brain regions) with much more precision. Low affective empathy is necessary to explain Breivik's behaviour. But low affective empathy is not sufficient to explain such cruelty, because there are people with low affective empathy who do not go on to commit such acts.

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