Can criminology thrive on quantitative studies alone? Can evil be operationalized? Quantitative work may have, for the time being, supplanted common sense, personal experience and resulting in an ...improbable “Periodic Table of humanity”. Has the construction of the psychopathic concept surpassed positivist “constitutional” formulations and translated into effective (re)habilitation of individuals lacking affiliative ethical behaviors? Or has it simply fueled a deterministic neo-Lombrosian truism: moral development has a brain. Has it helped so far? Has letting go of fundamental moral concepts, implicit in organized religion - but pervasive in most cultures irrespective of religious affiliation and devotion - in favor of causal explanations based solely on neuroimaging, personality inventories or structured emotional decoding tasks, made a difference in the life – or in the defense for that matter - of wrongdoers diagnosed as intrinsically evil?
A Message from the Editor-in-Chief Palermo, Mark T.
International journal of offender therapy and comparative criminology,
01/2017, Letnik:
61, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Predictability of dangerousness in association with mental disorders remains elusive, outside of a few relatively well-established risk factors for the prognostication of violence, such as male sex, ...the presence of a psychotic disorder, and comorbid substance abuse. In clinical practice, inquiry into the presence of aggressive or violent ideation, in the form of ideas of homicide or suicide, is part of a standard mental status examination. Nonetheless, fantasy life, when it concerns harm toward others, may not be as reliable an indicator of imminent danger as it may be in the case of self-harm. Five cases of young Italian men with Asperger syndrome and recurrent and extremely violent femicide fantasies are presented. While there is no direct correlation between autism spectrum conditions and violence, as other humans, persons with an autistic condition are capable of committing crimes, including homicide. All five had in common a number of characteristics and behaviors felt to be pathoplastic: All had been bullied, all had been romantically rejected, all were long-standing First Person Shooter (FPS) game players, and all were avid violent pornography consumers. The potential for an actual neurocognitive impact of violent video games, well documented in the literature, and its combination with personal life history and chronic habituation following long-standing violent pornography use is discussed in the context of social and emotional vulnerabilities. While aggressive fantasies cannot and should not be underestimated, in countries where duty to protect legislation does not exist, a clinical approach is imperative, as, incidentally, should be anywhere.
Posthumous diagnoses are not uncommonly given to notorious public and historical figures by applying retrospectively, and typically in the absence of the individual being diagnosed, contemporary ...diagnostic criteria. Although this may be relatively easy and free of consequences when it concerns clear-cut medical conditions, it may have unintended repercussions in the case of psychiatric disorders by creating myths and perpetuating stigma. The case of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer is a typical example where a somewhat facile and almost syllogistic application of perhaps over-inclusive criteria may have contributed to the legend of solitary murderers as possibly suffering from an autism spectrum condition. Although there may be an understandable human need to explain abominable and heinous behaviors, the lack of the possibility to verify a diagnostic theory and the ill-advised attempt to make a diagnosis fit may de facto be the basis of prejudice and profiling that do not correspond to clinical reality. Although there is no doubt that the brain is the organ of behavior, the authors caution against a budding neo-Lombrosian approach to crime and criminality and against the all too common use of widely differing terms in the study of deviance, such as crime, delinquency, and aggression, the operational use of which, often used interchangeably even in association studies, often erroneously leads to further confusion.
Depression associates with increased risk for dementia and Alzheimer's disease (AD), although it is unclear whether it represents an actual risk factor or a prodrome. To determine the relative hazard ...of premorbid depressive symptomatology for development of dementia and AD, we studied risk for incident dementia and AD over a 14‐year period in 1,357 community‐dwelling men and women participating in the 40‐year prospective Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging. Screening for depressive symptoms, comprehensive medical and neuropsychological evaluations were prospectively collected every 2 years. Time‐dependent proportional hazards of development of AD or dementia were calculated separately for men and women, with symptoms of depression detected at 2‐, 4‐, and 6‐year intervals before onset of dementia symptoms. Vascular risk factors were analyzed as covariates. Premorbid depressive symptoms significantly increased risk for dementia, particularly AD in men but not in women. Hazard ratios were approximately two times greater than for individuals without history of depressive symptoms, an effect independent of vascular disease. We conclude that the impact of depressive symptoms on risk for dementia and AD may vary with sex. Further studies assessing separately the role of depression as a risk factor in men and women are necessary. Ann Neurol 2005;57:381–387
In this article, assemblage art is presented to visually underscore social discourse relevant to urban vandalism and illegal dumping. The waste emergency, brought about, in part, also by illegal ...dumping and littering, is experienced on a daily basis across the globe in industrialized and less-industrialized countries alike. Likewise, vandalism is so pervasive in some areas that we have come to normalize it as intrinsic to urban life. The pieces presented here serve as attention-inducers. Destroyed or dumped things are assembled into new forms which symbolically and “totemically” represent contemporary collective identity. While the poetics of the art presented is not political, nor was the art created for social purposes, its social impact or social and criminological connection with deviance is a consequence of the “where” the assembled parts were found. The matter collected is transformed and its shapes and its source can now be seen and confronted, rather than avoided. Broken parts become a new whole, and also herein lies another symbolic connection with the world of deviance as far as the obvious possibility for change and transformation, relevant to broken lives and broken communities.
Repetitive behaviors are common in autistic disorder, as in other developmental disabilities. Behaviors as diverse as stereotypies, cognitive inflexibility, and a need for sameness are grouped ...together under DSM IV classification, even though they are diverse in phenomenology, underlying neural circuitry, and possible clinical significance. In order to better define repetitive behaviors, we studied the relationship between such behaviors and chronological age, developmental level, estimated IQ, presumed mood state, severity of illness, as well as behavior reactivity to environmental stimuli, in a group of 121 consecutive autistic children, aged 2-4 and 7-11 years.
Younger autistic children displayed more motor and sensory repetitive behaviors. Older children had more complex behaviors. Children with higher IQ scores, likewise, demonstrated more complex repetitive behaviors. Most motor behaviors and self injury showed features of reactivity.
Certain "repetitive" activities may not represent core features of autistic disorder and may be equivalent to normal motor and cognitive behaviors, as seen during typical development.
Patients with autism show clinical features suggestive of abnormal processing of auditory and other sensory information. We hypothesized that low-functioning autistic subjects present abnormalities ...in discriminating simple auditory stimuli at sensory system preconscious stages of cortical processing.
To verify our hypothesis, we used magnetoencephalographic measurements of mismatch field (MMF), which reflects the detection of a change in the physical characteristics of a repetitive sound. Fourteen patients (aged 8–32 years) who met DSM-IV diagnostic criteria for autistic disorder participated in an auditory oddball experiment. Ten healthy participants matched for age and gender acted as control subjects.
Significant differences in cerebral responses between patients and control subjects were recorded. Whereas control subjects showed a clearly identifiable MMF, with distinct generators in the M100 brain wave with regard to latency, position, and strength, no identifiable MMF was present in the autistic group.
Our findings suggest that low-functioning autistic subjects present a dysfunction at preconscious stages of cortical auditory discrimination, playing a role in the abnormal processing of auditory sensory afferences. The attention independence of the MMF allows for exclusion of an effect related to impaired attention or task-related responses.
Performance on an emotional labeling task in response to schematic facial patterns representing five basic emotions without the concurrent presentation of a verbal category was investigated in 40 ...parents of children with autism and 40 matched controls. ‘Autism fathers’ performed worse than ‘autism mothers’, who performed worse than controls in decoding displays representing sadness or disgust.This indicates the need to include facial expression decoding tasks in genetic research of autism. In addition, emotional expression interactions between parents and their children with autism, particularly through play, where affect and prosody are ‘physiologically’ exaggerated, may stimulate development of social competence. Future studies could benefit from a combination of stimuli including photographs and schematic drawings, with and without associated verbal categories. This may allow the subdivision of patients and relatives on the basis of the amount of information needed to understand and process social-emotionally relevant information.
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