The Psychopathology of Crime is a classic book in criminology. Originally published in 1993, this book by Dr. Adrian Raine describes biological forces affecting human behavior. This post has some notes from the book featuring the results of some of the studies cited in the book.
• Twin studies show a heritability of crime of 51% for MZ twins and 20% for DZ twins.
• 14 out of 15 studies show some genetic predisposition to crime.
• An analysis of twin data estimated heritability to be 0.78 for property crimes and 0.50 for crimes against persons.
• Self-report delinquency data in twins show a heritability of 0.70.
• A meta-analysis of 29 neurotransmitter studies show reduced serotonin and norepinephrine in antisocial people.
• A study found the amount of alcohol consumption in a criminal group to be four times that of the general population.
• A study found that 46.2% of criminals (mostly violent offenders) reported having committed their crime while under the influence of alcohol.
• A study found that impulsive and withdrawn secondary psychopaths show frontal lobe damage whereas primary psychopaths demonstrated no such deficits.
• A study found that psychopaths make more hand gestures in an interview, especially more nonsemantic language-related gestures.
• An experiment found that psychopaths showed a larger vertex-evoked potential slow wave in a dual-task phoneme discrimination condition.
• Adult prisoners with high levels of psychopathy were less lateralized on a verbal dichotic listening task.
• A study of Finnish soldiers with open head injuries found that the highest rates of crime occurred in those with open head injuries to the occipital cortex.
• A CT scan study found that sadistic criminals were more likely to have right-sided temporal horn abnormalities.
• A neuroimaging study found that violent psychiatric inpatients had hypofrontality and left temporal dysfunction in terms of glucose metabolism and cerebral blood flow.
• A study involving MRI and CT scans found that violent psychiatric patients were more likely to have lesions in the anterior-inferior temporal lobe than mental disorder patients without violence.
• A neuroimaging study found that murderers had reduced glucose metabolism in the anterior medial prefrontal cortex and the supraventricular superior prefrontal cortex.
• 14 studies found lower resting heart rate in adolescent antisocial populations.
• Studies found EEG abnormalities in about 50% of violent offenders.
• Multiple studies found enhanced P300 ERPs in psychopaths.
• An analysis found high levels of manganese in hair samples of violent criminals.
• A study of 14 seriously violent juveniles condemned to death found that all of them had a history of relatively severe head injury, which resulted in hospitalization in 8 cases.
• All of the adult offenders on death row in one study had a history of severe head injury.
• 75% of a sample of adult prisoners had histories of head injury severe enough to result in periods of unconsciousness.
• A study found that 52% of wife batterers have a history of head injury compared to 22% of nonbatterers.
• Research found that aggression and irritability followed serious head injury in 70% of cases.
• A sample of over 11,000 criminals and 7,000 controls showed that 60% of criminals had facial defects, compared to only 20% of controls.
• Six out of nine studies showed that plastic surgery reduced recidivism rates.
• Five studies of prisoners showed substantial effect sizes of testosterone.
• A study of 156 newly convicted women found that 46% of crimes had occurred either 4 days prior to menstruation or 4 days following menstruation.
• A study found an excess of hypoglycemia in 46% of imprisoned arsonists, compared to only 17% of controls.
• Researchers were able to correctly classify 84.2% of recidivistic alcohol-abusing violent offenders and impulsive fire setters based on combining measures of blood glucose with measures of 5-HIAA.
• A controlled study of adolescent delinquents demonstrated a 48% reduction in disciplinary offenses following a reduction in consumption of refined carbohydrates.
• A study found that violent offenders had higher levels of lead and cadmium in their hair than nonviolent offenders did.
• Reviews of data have found that criminals and delinquents have lower IQs than control groups.
• A study found that low IQ Measured at age 8 predicted self-report and official measures of violence at age 32.
• A study found that 62% of adolescent delinquents in a rural area showed learning disabilities.
• More than two dozen studies found that delinquents perform at a lower cognitive level than non-delinquents.
