Posted on 03/11/2015 5:01:04 AM PDT by ek_hornbeck
Murders are tragic but rare. But what drives some people to kill? Michael Mosley has been looking into research exploring the minds of murderers.
In the 1870s Dr Cesare Lombroso, sometimes called the father of scientific criminology, was studying criminals imprisoned in Turin.
He became convinced that criminals are a step back down the evolutionary ladder, a reversion to a primitive or subhuman type of man. He decided, after years of study, that you could tell a criminal by the shape of their face and the excessive length of their ape-like arms.
"A criminal's ears," he wrote, "are often of a large size. The nose is frequently upturned or of a flattened character in thieves. In murderers it is often aquiline like the beak of a bird of prey."
Sadly, spotting potential murderers turned out to be nothing like as simple as Dr Lombroso claimed and his "scientific" findings were soon discredited. But this was the beginning of a search that has continued for more than a century - to find out if criminals, and in particular murderers, have different brains to the rest of us.
The invention of functional brain scanning in the 1980s revolutionised the understanding of what goes on inside our heads. The first scanning study of murderers was carried out in California by British neuroscientist Prof Adrian Raine. He was attracted to the Golden State not by the beaches but by, as he put it, "the large numbers of very violent and homicidal individuals".
Over the course of many years Raine and his team scanned the brains of numerous murderers and nearly all showed similar brain changes. There was reduced activity in the pre-frontal cortex, the area of the brain which controls emotional impulses, and over activation of the amygdala, ...
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
The answer is yes.
If they are born that way (murderers) then we can’t expect them to change. It’s not their fault. It’s God’s fault for creating them that way.
Years ago the wife and I had a Foster Daughter with Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD)
These children can not form normal bonds or relationships. It is often found in children that lived in orphanages, particularly from the Soviet Union. When the facilities are overcrowded they are unable to give the children the attention they require.
The children have no one to soothe them and they learn to "live" with out affection.
That was on Dr. Phil yesterday. He thought the parents were overreacting to the boy.
Are you kidding? Overreacting? LOL! What a doofus that guy is. Yeah OK let Phil sleep in the same room with the kid with a bunch of knives see how safe he feels.
It was a criticism directed at the (adoptive) mother. He was implying she empowers the kid by acknowledging to him that the threats scare her. Watch and judge for yourself:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dmpAVu_TJg
I’ve always believed that at least some people, and especially a lot of serial killers, are just flat out wired wrong. I think a medical study recently confirmed that. But the point is that some people just can’t be rehabbed or ‘fixed’. They are what they are.
I agree, and whether they're wired wrong because of their genes, events in early childhood, or (most likely) some combination of the two is really irrelevant by the time you're dealing with an adult who is beyond redemption.
Unfortunately, the nature-nurture debate has been politicized to the point where people can't take research like this at face value. The Left bears most of the guilt for this, because research on the heredity of human behavior, intelligence, etc. runs counter to their obsessive dogma about "equality," while the Right generally accepts these ideas. However, sometimes the tables are turned. The Left pounces on hereditarian explanations for behavior (e.g. homosexuality) when it suits their agenda, while certain elements of the Right turn into anti-hereditarians on this issue.
In reality, these questions shouldn't depend on politics at all. Either there's a genetic basis for intelligence/anti-social behavior/deviant sexuality or there isn't, whether it's politically convenient for whatever group or not.
Serial killers have a well known profile; childhood abuse, playing with fire and torturing animals. Seems to strongly suggest serial killers are a product of nurture.
The playing with fire and torturing animals part isn't evidence for nurture, it's just evidence for the early stages of the same psychopathic behavior as the later serial killing.
It's true that many serial killers were severely abused and/or neglected as children. However, the fact that the overwhelming majority of people who were abused or neglected as kids don't grow up to be serial killers or other psychopathic criminals suggests that there's more going on than just a bad environment. Also, not all serial killers were abused as children, as I recall, Jeffrey Dahmer had emotionally distant and divorced parents but he was never abused in any way.
Adrian Raine - Fish oil
Spent a lot of time studying his work while working on my PhD
Well said! I agree completely.
A person does not murder because of differences in his brain, his brain changes after he does murder.
There are many issues related to psychopathy, both physical and environmental. RAD children often exhibit bizarre behaviors including psychosis. They cannot relate to others with any normal level of emotional involvement, but not all RAD kids are psychotic.
I have worked with numerous dangerous children, and have adopted many severely troubled children. I have dealt with RAD, ODD, and innumerable “alphabet soup” kids, but, I have only met two psychopaths-one of whom lives with me.
These children are amazing in many regards. They are often outgoing, extremely personable and tend to be good looking. Until you get past the veneer, you would never imagine little Johnny will do literally anything to get what he wants. They can manipulate well-meaning adults and prey upon their peers in ways unimaginable to a normal person.
No one will diagnose a child as a psychopath, but it is clear from early on that they are completely without conscience. Shortly after my son was adopted, he went to a large fish tank that we had and pulled out a small crab. Looking at me with eyes completely devoid of emotion, he dropped it on the ground and said,”The crab’s dead.”
He was five-years old.
Forgot the important part: he stepped on it...
Do you have any evidence to back this up, or this a case of proof by assertion? While I wouldn't claim that the article I posted (or rather, the research it describes) proves the reverse of what you say, but it at least offers some data that people are to some degree born that way. Your evidence to the contrary is ...?
This is not speculation but fact.
So if it is "something in our brain" then it comes from what happened after we are born. So, made not born.
When they removed her from that situation they discovered that she had used a steak knife to mutilate a Barbie doll that my mother had given her as a Birthday present. She told the Psychologist that she was "practicing."
Looking back I think I can safely say she was one of the most amoral people I have ever met.
Nature versus Nurture is the wrong question. Both play a role, but the issue is really how to change the outcome. There are many environmental stimuli and organic brain issues that influence violent criminals. There are simply far too many comorbid influences in all emotional, behavioral and mental health issues: genetic abnormalities; hereditary influence; organic injury; physical, emotional and developmental trauma; environmental toxins; prenatal exposure to alcohol and drugs; physical, sexual and emotional abuse; neglect; lack of familial relationships (especially fathers); repeated loss; chaos; poverty; exposure to criminal behavior; lack of religion and moral instruction; a foster care system that rewards sociopathic/psychopathic behavior; and psychoactive medications dispensed indiscriminately with few empirical studies on interactions and none on adolescent use. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Parsing semantics makes terrific grist for academics, but the important issue is identifying such individuals and safeguarding society. Regardless of how one classifies the individual, or how you define the behavior, we do not have options to deal with these individuals until they commit violent crimes. It is almost impossible to have someone involuntarily committed and there are really no long-term facilities available. Thanks to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, we can no longer discriminate between a depressed individual and a violent psychopath.
Adoptive and foster parents fight constantly to find solutions for their dangerous children. These children learn how to manipulate the system from the time they are children. Every interaction builds their arsenal of manipulation. Despite deadly threats, escalating violence and repeated institutional programs, these children (and eventually adults) are returned to torment their caregivers for years. Every cry for help is met with silence and blame is placed on the very ones who are trying to make a difference. Exhausted, beaten and bloody (often a literal description), their greatest fear is not for their own lives, but of hearing their child’s name on the news. That will mean that they have failed, and someone else was hurt or killed despite their efforts.
Every time you hear about the latest murder on the news, know that there are hundreds or thousands of these people sitting in a therapist’s office just biding their time and they will not be committed long-term until they offend. When an LSD-addled shrink penned his opus, Nurse Ratched entered the American lexicon as the epitome of the villainous nurse, but the fact that she influenced national policy is a national disgrace.
Violent criminals need to be removed from society permanently. We should be discussing how best to accomplish that goal, not philosophizing on the classification or treatment of psychopaths.
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