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Psychological therapy may be much more effective at making people happy than getting a raise or winning a lottery prize, suggests an English study.

Researchers analyzed data on thousands of people who provided information about their mental well-being and found that the increase in happiness from a $1,329 course of therapy was so significant that it would take a pay raise of more than $41,542 to achieve an equal boost in well-being.

That suggests that therapy could be as much as 32 times more cost-effective at improving well-being than simply getting more money, the researchers said.

The study was published online Nov. 18 in the journal Health Economics, Policy and Law.

“We have shown that psychological therapy could be much more cost effective than financial compensation at alleviating psychological distress,” said study author Chris Boyce, of the University of Warwick. “This is not only important in courts of law, where huge financial rewards are the default way in which pain and suffering are compensated, but has wider implications for public health and well-being.”

“Often the importance of money for improving our well-being and bringing greater happiness is vastly over-valued in our societies,” Boyce explained. “The benefits of having good mental health, on the other hand, are often not fully appreciated and people do not realize the powerful effect that psychological therapy, such as non-directive counseling, can have on improving our well-being.”

Dr Michael Craig of the Institute of Psychiatry at London’s King’s College Hospital, and may have profound implications for doctors, researchers and the criminal justice system.

“These were particular serious offenders with psychopathy and without any other mental illnesses,” he told Reuters in an interview.

“Essentially what we found is that the connections in the psychopaths were not as good as the connections in the non-psychopaths. I would describe them as roads between the two areas — and we found that in the psychopaths, the roads had potholes and weren’t very well maintained.”

TIMING IS KEY

The scientists cautioned against suggestions the study could lead to screening of potential psychopathic criminals before they are able to commit crimes, saying their findings had not established how, when or why the brain links were damaged.

“The most exciting question now…is when do the potholes come — are people born with them, do they develop early in life, or are they a consequence of something else?”

Psychopathic extremes have been portrayed in Hollywood blockbusters by characters like the serial killer and cannibal Hannibal Lecter. Psychopaths often violate social norms, are manipulative, impulsive and sensation-seeking, and appear to feel no empathy or remorse.

Craig, who conducted the study, published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry with colleagues Declan Murphy and Dr Marco Catani, stressed that the numbers in brain scan study were small, with only nine psychopaths analyzed and compared with nine non-psychopaths.

“Trying to get people of this particular type to take part in a study, and also then deal with all the security you need to get them into a brain scanner, is not an easy feat,” he said.

The study used a new brain imaging technology to further analyze psychopaths’ brains after previous studies found that the amygdala part of the brain, which processes emotions, and orbitofrontal cortex, which handles impulses and decisions, are structurally and functionally different in psychopaths.

“Up until recently the technology hasn’t been available to look at the connections between those two brain areas in any meaningful way,” Craig said.

But a new technique, called diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging (DT-MRI), allowed the researchers to look at the white matter tract linking the two key brain areas.

As well as finding clear structural deficits in the tract in psychopathic brains, they also found the degree of abnormality was significantly linked to the degree of psychopathy.

“As for the moral significance for society, and how society wants to deal with these things, that is a little premature,” said Craig. “This is a small study and the important thing it raises is that more research needs to be done.”

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Perhaps as importantly, the MCG scientists and others are beginning to believe sexual dysfunction provides an early, or at least visible, clue of vascular disease. Vascular problems, that can result from diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol and the like, are a major cause of sexual dysfunction in men and women. “You don’t feel atherosclerosis but you know darn well if you are not getting an erection,” Dr. Webb says. In fact, the MCG scientists are beginning to look at animal models of disease states, such as diabetes, to see what it does to these internal pudendal arteries.

“What we have seen preliminarily is there is big difference in responsiveness in these arteries. The diabetic pudendal arteries are much more sensitive to contraction,” Dr. Allahdadi says. They will look at how drugs like Viagra impact that contraction in the days ahead.

In fact MCG scientists suspect one reason that many of the women participants in previous studies of Viagra did not seem to respond is because they did not have vascular problems that could have been circumvented by a drug that relaxes arteries so blood can enter. In men with a healthy vasculature, the drugs likely would still produce a longer erection.

Dr. Rita C. Tostes, associate professor in the MCG Department of Physiology, is a co-author who contributed to the design and analysis of the study.