Biological factors and crime: implications for forensic psychiatry

Individual differences in autonomic learning: a quarter century of reflection

A series of studies carried out over the past two decades has shown selected group differences in the speed and final level of learned control of various autonomic functions. The Pavlovian and operant conditioning of as many as 6 physiological variables have revealed varying ability for this form of control. Studies were performed on subject populations that included drug-free chronic schizophrenics and healthy controls, psychopathic and non-psychopathic male juvenile delinquents, and a clinical population that included migraine sufferers and persons undergoing psychotherapy. Also studied were school dropouts in vocational training, inner-city high school seniors and junior high school students at a university school. These studies carried out on normal and abnormal individuals of strikingly different social backgrounds have lent consistent support for the hypothesis that an aptitude for autonomic learning is basic to social motivation, achievement, emotional control, and empathy.

Illegitimacy, child abuse and neglect, and cognitive development

This study explored the relationship between illegitimate birth and cognitive development among 513 boys on probation. Prior research has shown that being part of a single-parent household leads to diminished verbal capacities and often puts a child in greater danger of abuse and neglect. Frequent abuse is thought to lead to the enhancement of visual and spatial skills relative to verbal skills through a process of "frozen watchfulness". I hypothesized that illegitimate boys from one-parent homes would have greater verbal-performance discrepancy scores than would boys from other combinations of birth status and family structure. These boys had the lowest verbal IQ and highest performance IQ scores and, hence, the largest discrepancy. These boys also suffered the highest degree of abuse and neglect of all four birth status/family structure combinations studied.

Love deprivation, Wechsler performance greater than verbal discrepancy, and violent delinquency

This study explored the relationship among love deprivation, Performance greater than Verbal discrepancy, and violent crime in a sample of juvenile probationers. Love deprivation and P greater than V discrepancy was significantly related to violent delinquency after adjusting for the effects of both race and social class, two variables often closely associated with violent delinquency. Also, love deprivation was strongly related to P greater than V discrepancy. We speculated that high performance IQ scores relative to verbal scores are a function of a lack of disruption in the short-term memory mechanisms of high P greater than V subjects, that this nondisruption is a function of hyporeactive autonomic nervous systems, and that this hyporeactivity could itself be a function of early love deprivation.