In the last few years, psychiatrists began documenting cases of patients who reported a belief that they were being filmed for television entertainment. The patients differed in their experiences, but all believed that their lives had somehow been selected to participate in a show without their consent:

One man showed up at a federal building, asking for release from the reality show he was sure was being made of his life. Another was convinced his every move was secretly being filmed for a TV contest. A third believed everything - the news, his psychiatrists, the drugs they prescribed - was part of a phony, stage-set world with him as the involuntary star, like the 1998 movie "The Truman Show."

Although the syndrome, which some psychiatrists have unofficially named after the film, is related to classic paranoid and grandiose delusions, the pervasiveness of reality television in our culture may reinforce the delusion in many patients. Mental health professionals note that, when patients see shows featuring hidden cameras and invasive footage, it seems plausible that they could be on television themselves:

That's not to say reality shows make healthy people delusional, "but, at the very least, it seems possible to me that people who would become ill are becoming ill quicker or in a different way," Ian Gold [a philosophy and psychology professor at McGill University] said.

While many sufferers are intensely disturbed by their delusions (one physician reported a patient who threatened to kill himself if he couldn’t drop out of his imagined reality show), some find the idea of being on television appealing. The imagined total invasion of their privacy may be distressing, but a few actually take pride their supposed celebrity status.

[via Associated Press]

Psychology professor Jean Decety and his team analyzed the brains of bullies — teens who had showed unusual aggression, starting fights, using weapons, and mugging people. He put the bullies in a functional MRI scanner, looking to see how their brains reacted to pictures of a person deliberately stepping on someone else's foot. Said Decety:

Aggressive adolescents showed a specific and very strong activation of the amygdala and ventral striatum (an area that responds to feeling rewarded) when watching pain inflicted on others, which suggested that they enjoyed watching pain.

Earlier this year, Decety demonstrated that most children respond to these images of pain with sympathy, imaginatively feeling the pain themselves. And that's what the control group in his most recent study did. But the bullies clearly liked seeing pain.

Decety thinks his discovery will help psychologists and psychiatrists treat violent adolescents. He believes that when teens enjoy other people's pain it means they've suffered a disruption in their brains' natural empathetic reactions.

In other words, someday we might have a "cure" for aggression that restores bullies' ability to feel sympathy for other people's pain. Of course, tinkering with this brain signaling mechanism might also reveal a way to disrupt people's empathy too — turning pacifists into sadists.

Source: "Atypical Empathetic Responses in Adolescents with Aggressive Conduct Disorder: A functional MRI Investigation" [via Biological Psychology]