The Anatomy of Violence

by Adrian Raine

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  59. Raine, A. (1997). Crime, conditioning, and arousal. In H. Nyborg (ed.), The Scientific Study of Human Nature: Tribute to Hans J. Eysenck, pp. 122–41. Oxford: Elsevier.

  60. For a detailed account of a conditioning theory of crime, see Eysenck, H. J. (1977). Crime and Personality. St. Albans, England: Paladin. Eysenck is debatably England’s most influential and simultaneously controversial psychologist. His biosocial theory of crime did not sit well with many criminologists in the 1970s and still does not today.

  61. Hare, R. D., Frazelle, J. & Cox, D. N. (1978). Psychopathy and physiological responses to threat of an aversive stimulus. Psychophysiology 15, 165–72; Lorber, M. F. (2004). Psychophysiology of aggression, psychopathy, and conduct problems: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin 130, 531–52; Raine, A. (1993). The Psychopathology of Crime: Criminal Behavior as a Clinical Disorder. San Diego: Academic Press.

  62. Gao, Y., Raine, A., Venables, P. H., Dawson, M. E. & Mednick, S. A. (2010). Association of poor childhood fear conditioning and adult crime. American Journal of Psychiatry 167, 56–60.

  63. Ibid.

  64. Hare, R. D. (1993). Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of Psychopaths Amongst Us. New York: Guilford Press.

  65. Raine, A., Lencz, T., Bihrle, S., LaCasse, L. & Colletti, P. (2000). Reduced prefrontal gray matter volume and reduced autonomic activity in antisocial personality disorder. Archives of General Psychiatry 57, 119–27.

  66. Meeting diagnostic criteria for DSM antisocial personality disorder requires that the individual also meet criteria for conduct disorder in childhood or adolescence.

  67. The temporary-employment-agency workers who met the adult criteria for antisocial personality disorder lack the child criteria. That is, they are antisocial in adulthood, but they did not meet criteria for conduct disorder as children. We focused our research on those who met full criteria for antisocial personality disorder.

  68. None had been convicted of either homicide, attempted homicide, or rape.

  69. For the entire unselected sample, males reported an average of 16.1 criminal offenses while females reported 8.6 offenses. Rates of at least one seriously violent act were 55.7 percent in males and 42.9 percent in females. For males, 24.4 percent of the sample admitted to rape or sexual assault, while 34.8 percent admitted to assault on a stranger causing bodily injury, 13.3 percent had fired a gun at someone, and 8.9 percent had either attempted homicide or completed homicide. For females, 14.3 percent admitted to assault on a stranger causing bodily injury, 7.1 percent had fired a gun at someone, and 7.1 percent had either attempted homicide or completed homicide.

  70. Hare, R. D. (2003). The Hare Psychopathy Checklist—Revised (PCL-R), 2nd ed. Toronto, Canada: Multi-Health Systems.

  71. Ibid.

  72. Rates of psychopathy for females were 8.3 percent (a score of 30 or more) and 16.7 percent (a score of 25 or more).

  73. Widom, C. S. (1978). A methodology for studying non-institutionalized psychopaths. In R. D. Hare & D. Schalling (eds.), Psychopathic Behavior: Approaches to Research, p. 72. Chichester, England: Wiley.

  74. Ibid., p. 83.

  75. Widom, C. S. & Newman, J. P. (1985). Characteristics of non-institutionalized psychopaths. In D. P. Farrington and J. Gunn (eds.), Aggression and Dangerousness, pp. 57–80. London: Wiley.

  76. This quasi-conditioning is very much like fear conditioning. Numbers are flashed on a screen counting down from 12 to 0. At the count of 0 the subject is blasted with a loud noise or given an electric shock. Between 12 and 0 (the anticipatory phase), most of us will give skin conductance “anticipatory” responses as we are somewhat anxious about the noise blast. Psychopaths give significantly fewer of these responses. The task differs from conditioning in that participants are told what will happen—there is cognitive awareness. In the classical conditioning paradigm, they are not told the association—that the CS+ tone predicts the aversive noise—and instead they must learn this association for themselves.

  77. Ishikawa, S. S., Raine, A., Lencz, T., Bihrle, S. & LaCasse, L. (2001). Autonomic stress reactivity and executive functions in successful and unsuccessful criminal psychopaths from the community. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 110, 423–32.

  78. Ibid.

  79. Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Grosset/Putnam.

  80. We did not run a classical conditioning paradigm on the psychopaths because I felt at the time it was such a well-replicated finding that it did not need repeating, and that a paradigm with a social context that manipulated secondary emotions would be more novel. We have predicted that the successful psychopath would show better autonomic fear conditioning, and we have brought fear conditioning back into our research protocols.

  81. Despite a dearth of systematic research studies, there has nevertheless been a great deal of speculation about what makes a serial killer; see, for example, Holmes, R. M. & Holmes, S. T. (1998). Serial Murder, 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications; also Fox, J. A. & Levin, J. (2005). Extreme Killing. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications.

  82. The executive-functioning task we gave our participants is the Wisconsin card-sorting task, a classic measure of executive functioning.

  83. Strangulation as depicted in movies and TV does not take too long, but it is much harder in reality. It took Ross eight minutes to strangle one of his victims, as his fingers would cramp up. He had to stop and massage them before proceeding.

  84. Berry-Dee, C. (2003). Talking with Serial Killers, p. 150. London: John Blake.

  85. Scripps argued that he became annoyed with his victim in the hotel room when he suspected that Lowe was a homosexual and was making advances to him.

  86. Berry-Dee, Talking with Serial Killers, p. 94. Scripps used a six-inch boning knife to systematically dismember his victims; he gives a systematic description of how he went about doing it. His skills are unusual but stem from the fact that Scripps worked in a butchery while serving a prior prison sentence.

  87. Ibid.

  88. Pontius, A. A. (1993). Neuropsychiatric update of the crime “profile” and “signature” in single or serial homicides: Rule out limbic psychotic trigger reaction. Psychological Reports 73, 875–92.

  89. Carver, H. W. (2007). Reasonable doubt. Scientific American 297, 20–21.

  90. Johnson, S. (1998). Psychological Evaluation of Theodore Kaczynski. Federal Correctional Institution, Butner, North Carolina. January 11–16, http://www.paulcooijmans.com/psychology/unabombreport2.html.

  91. Ishikawa, S. S., Raine, A., Lencz, T., Bihrle, S. & LaCasse, L. (2001). Autonomic stress reactivity and executive functions in successful and unsuccessful criminal psychopaths from the community. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 110, 423–32.

  92. Dan Rather had other risk factors for an antisocial behavior outcome, including bad spelling and coming from a working-class neighborhood. Interestingly it was a heart inflammation he had as a ten-year-old, confining him for weeks to bed, where he could only listen to World War II newscasts—that caused him to become fascinated by broadcasting.

  93. Raine, A. (2006). Crime and Schizophrenia: Causes and Cures. New York: Nova Science Publishers.

  94. Johnson, Psychological Evaluation
of Theodore Kaczynski.

  95. Raine, A., Brennan, P. & Mednick, S. A. (1994). Birth complications combined with early maternal rejection at age 1 year predispose to violent crime at age 18 years. Archives of General Psychiatry 51, 984–88.

  96. If you see The Hurt Locker, note Sergeant James’s thirst for vengeance when he believes that Beckham, a young boy he forms a fleeting relationship with, has suffered terribly at the hands of terrorists. Note also how he breaks down in the shower, haunted by guilt after his need for an adrenaline rush results in a comrade’s leg being shattered. Despite the devil-may-care, stimulation-seeking cowboy persona that he presents, James has a conscience—he is neither a psychopath nor a “red-neck piece of trailer trash,” as one of his disconcerted comrades calls him.

  97. It should be recognized that there appears to be no unitary arousal system—measures of resting-state ANS correlate at a surprisingly low level, around .10. Arousal is clearly a complex and multifaceted construct, and low-arousal theory is perhaps too simplistic. Still, it is conceivable that an extreme (antisocial) group within this general population does have low arousal on multiple arousal measures. Evidence does exist for under-arousal on at least two separate measures of arousal in antisocial child and adolescent samples. Even with simple biological measures like heart rate, unfolding the “mechanism of action”—how low heart rate goes about producing individuals with antisocial and aggressive behavior—is likely highly complex, involving many different processes.

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  4. Ibid.

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  15. Such claims of drunkenness and sexual promiscuity in Gage have been questioned—see Malcolm Macmillan, The Phineas Gage information Page, http://www.deakin.edu.au/hmnbs/psychology/gagepage/Pgstory.php.

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  19. Ibid.

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