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Dr. Kent Kiehl is at the forefront of the emerging neuroscience research on psychopathy, and is considered one of its leading experts. Mentored by the creator of the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R), he is an associate professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico, and Director of the Mobile Imaging Core and Clinical Cognitive Neuroscience at the non-profit Mind Research Network in Albuquerque. His primary focus is on groundbreaking research on the brains of incarcerated psychopaths. Kiehl also consults for attorneys and judges and testifies in the courtroom, hoping to educate the fact-finders about the impact of neurological factors on culpability. Progress has been made, he believes, but his field aims toward an even greater impact on the future treatment of psychopathy. Kiehl will likely play a key role.
IT BEGAN WITH BUNDY
Kiehl grew up in Tacoma, Washington, where his father was a copy editor at the News Tribune. Kiehl was around eight when his father mentioned the killing spree of a man who had once lived down the street: Ted Bundy. Kiehl was intrigued. "I never met Ted Bundy," he says, "and I didn't need to grow up down the street from him to be fascinated about why someone could be like that, but my father was writing about it, and we were mystified how someone could grow up in our nice little neighborhood and end up as a killer. He had a relatively normal home.
That was a point of fascination for me." Despite his interest, Kiehl aimed toward a different career. With an athletic build and his father's enthusiastic support, he aspired to play professional football. But then a knee injury terminated his chances and he had to refocus. He enrolled as a pre-med student at the University of California at Davis, and he grew interested in the field of neuroscience, especially the brains emotional centers. At the suggestion of his advisor to consider the research on psychopaths, Kiehl returned to the Bundy question: was the brain a significant factor in psychopathic behavior? He soon discovered the diagnostic Psychopathy ChecklistRevised (PCL-R), which led him to the work of Dr. Robert Hare.
During the 1980s, Hare and his colleagues had developed the PCL-R to focus their work with psychopaths in Canadian...