Anne Lippert is a second-year graduate student in the psychology department at UNM. She is doing research that could lead to a better understanding of psychopathic behavior.
Daily Lobo: Can you tell me about the research that you do?
Anne Lippert: The research that I do isn’t strictly psychological. It’s more interdisciplinary. Right now I’m working on a project with agent-based modeling. We have these little agents, which are like if you were looking at a video game and there were little Pacmen running around everywhere — it’s all computer simulations. Within each agent, we’re going to program some of the neural architecture of the brain.
DL: You said you’re programming brains in these agents, how do you do that?
AL: You can build these neural networks that mimic how the brain works in the computer. We’re putting these neural networks into each of the agents. Mainly what we’re doing is using theoretical math — an area called category theory. It lets us build neural networks in each brain area.
DL: What do you hope to do with the results of your study in the future?
AL: I think one of the goals of the study is to try to better understand how terrorist behavior emerges. What is it about the psychology of individuals that promotes gangs or irrational behavior? We want to use the results to look at what factors individually and as a society contribute to terrorist behavior. We want to see how gangs might form because of individual differences or environmental factors.
DL: What sparked your interest in this subject?
AL: I’ve always been interested in the emotional component of criminal behavior and people who commit crimes. The type of people that I’m interested in are classified as psychopaths, and one of their characteristics is that they lack empathy. That’s mainly why I was interested in this project because I want to know what in the brain allows some people to have empathy when some people have none. Why is there such a big difference? So with the study if we can see an agent going around and killing other agents with no behavioral remorse, then we can look and see how we programmed that brain differently. Maybe that will give us some insights into why people become psychopaths in terms of the brain.
