NCJ Number
173147
Date Published
1996
Length
407 pages
Annotation
Drawing on research from the neurosciences, developmental psychology, personality and social psychology, and the psychology of learning and from data on perpetrators, victims, and situational conditions implicated in aggressive criminal violence, this volume proposes a stepwise progression from neurogenic-based impulsivity to criminally aggressive behavior.
Abstract
The authors refine, amplify, and extend an earlier-introduced conceptual model for understanding tinder-box criminal aggression. This model integrated relative contributions made by such intrapersonal characteristics as the need for serial stimulation and impairment in foresight and planfulness. The model also considered the acquisition of a taste for risk on the one hand, considering such factors as childrearing practices, vicarious conditioning, and subcultures of violence, and the availability of mood-altering chemical substances on the other hand. The authors review and distill evidence from contemporary research on neuropsychological dysfunctions and particularly focus on impulsivity. They present a broad-gauged conceptual model for understanding the dynamics of criminal aggression, one that covers a prototypical interactive and developmental sequence from neuropsychological dysfunction through the acquisition of a high taste for risk to involvement in impulsively violent behavior. The authors also discuss implications of the model for traditional concepts of culpability and offender rehabilitation. Six book chapters are organized as follows: (1) criminal behavior and its biological, psychological, and social determinants; (2) neurological invitations to aggressive violence; (3) neurochemical contributions to aggressive violence; (4) social and demographic potentiators of criminal aggression; (5) psychometric differentiation and the phenomenology of violence; and (6) process paradigm for tinder- box criminal aggression. References, notes, tables, and figures