I bet Norman Mailer was high on factor 1.

Moffitt (1993) proposes two distinct pathways for the development of antisocial behavior. The first path, life-course-persistent, begins in early childhood, continues throughout the life, and is probably genetic. The second, adolescent-limited, is a natural, normative reaction that many teens have to the maturity gap that has evolved since the industrial age. Adolescent-limited delinquents are stuck in state of biological maturity without the benefits and cues associated with social maturity. During this maturity-gap, these youths tend to mimic their life-course-persistent counterparts in an effort to cope with the discontinuity of their physical and social age, as the life-course-persistents seem to make their own rules and have it all. These adolescent-limited youths also tend to remit their antisocial behavior once placed in an environment where they have an opportunity to accept responsibility or are given something to lose as a result of antisocial behavior. Moffitt concludes the article by outlining what future research will find, if her theory is correct, while noting that we should distinguish between the two types when studying antisocial behavior in youths.

The theory that Moffitt proposes is intricate and, in many ways, quite beautiful (such as when she likens the mimicking behavior of teenagers to the mimicking behavior of hungry tamarin monkeys, p. 687). However, by restricting her discussion to antisociality as defined by the DSM-IV, Moffitt is missing a huge chunk of the literature that examines covert personality traits versus overt behavioral features of antisociality. In contrast to the DSM’s definition of antisocial personality disorder, the psychopathy literature separates antisocial characteristics (“factor 2”) from interpersonal/affective characteristics (“factor 1”) when making a diagnosis using the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (Hare, 1990). By further investigating the antisocial behavior factor in contrast to the interpersonal factor, it has been found that the two factors are differentially related to anxiety and fear: greater antisocial features are associated with higher anxiety levels and interpersonal/affective features are associated with low fear levels, but normal anxiety levels (Fowles & Dindo, 2006). Put another way, those who exhibit a need for stimulation, have poor behavioral controls, are impulsive, and break the law repeatedly tend have anxious apprehension about potential future threats, whereas those who are manipulative, pathologically lie, and lack remorse or guilt tend to lack fear, which is can be defined as the activation of the autonomic nervous system in order to deal with imminent threat. My qualm with Moffitt’s (1993) approach to antisocial behavior in youth is that she looked at it in terms of antisocial behavior as a whole, addressing it as a neuropsychological deficit originating in childhood based on the presence of a broad definition of antisocial behavior (p. 680). However, just as she calls for a differentiation of life-course persistent vs. adolescent limited teenagers in addressing pathological antisociality, she needs to differentiate, within the life-course persistent group, between children high on the behavioral versus interpersonal features of the construct. One reason for this is that the interpersonal feature as found in psychopaths is much more robustly related to long-term criminal activity than the behavioral feature alone: of the 80% of incarcerated criminals that qualify for a diagnosis of APD according to the DSM, 20% of those qualify for a diagnosis of psychopathy based on the PCL-R, and that 20% commits 50% of the overall crime (Hare, 1993). Moffitt’s (1993) statistics for this are a bit more dramatic, as she cites an even smaller 5% or 6% of criminals being responsible for 50% of the crime. I’m pretty sure there have been studies linking psychopaths high on the interpersonal factor alone as having committed more crime, but I do not have a book handy to cite this.

I am not sure that Moffitt would entirely disagree with me when it comes to the interpersonal factor, as I just found a more recent article of hers (Viding, Blair, Moffitt, and Plomin, 2005), researching interpersonal callous-unemotional traits in 187 5-to-7-year-old twin pairs. They found that callous-unemotional traits in children are under strong genetic influence but under no environmental influence, compared to antisocial behavior, which is under moderate genetic and environmental influence. This goes along with Moffitt’s (1993) theory, but integrates the interpersonal feature nicely.

The interesting thing about this, for me, is that the defining feature of dangerous criminals is their lack of remorse and their manipulative ways, not their criminal acts. This means that, if put in the wrong environment as a child, that two-faced ass hole you knew in high school could have turned into Jeffrey Dahmer. But he had an attentive mother, so he didn’t. Now he’s just a two-faced ass hole that you want to have thrown in jail, but you can’t, because we have yet to create an “ass-hole personality disorder” in the DSM.

For the eleven of you who read my previous post (which has been removed), I apologize. It was based on nothing scientific or rational, and had no citations or sense. In case you missed it, my last post made grandiose claims like, “fear is the only emotion worth researching.” I might as well have been George W. Bush claiming that global warming does not exist, or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claiming that there are no homosexuals in Iran. Maybe the fleeting, flamboyant world of the blogosphere went to my head, or maybe it was some sort of subconscious performance art based on that class’s readings about anxious apprehension. Regardless, I promise to never again blog while grumpy.