Murderous Minds by Dean Haycock

Author:Dean Haycock [Haycock, Dean A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-1-4804-4798-1
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2014-01-25T00:10:00+00:00

Flanking Maneuvers

The neuroprediction report from Kiehl’s lab makes another interesting and potentially useful observation about how researchers may be able to progress in their search for clues about criminal behavior, psychopathy, and potential treatments.

It refers to a promising way to attack the challenge of reducing criminal behavior to pages of graphs and illustrations in scientific journals. Finding the biological and genetic bases of mental and personality disorders has been a frustrating experience for researchers. For instance, after years of research and millions of dollars in costs, no clear-cut examples of individual genes solely responsible for complex diseases have been identified. This includes schizophrenia, depression, and bipolar disorder, even though these disorders clearly have strong genetic influences. Even less is known about the nature of psychopathy.

This is one reason in recent years scientists have begun to look for biological markers or traits associated with complex disorders versus searching for particular genes. They call these traits endophenotypes to distinguish them from genotypes, the genes a person is born with. Endophenotypes may be more easily identified, observed, and measured than the complete, complex genetic bases of psychiatric conditions with their complex behaviors.27 This makes endophenotypes potentially attractive targets for getting at some of the root causes of complex psychiatric disorders.

The same outflanking, divide-and-conquer approach may be a way to dissect complex behavior patterns like criminal behavior and psychopathy. If the ACC can be shown to be underactive in impulsive criminals, it might be looked upon as a neurocognitive endophenotype, a defect or abnormality linked to criminal impulsivity but more readily accessible to study than the criminal behavior as a whole.

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