Criminal Behavior
In a groundbreaking study in psychopathy or criminal behavior, Mednick, William Gabrielli, and Barry Hutching in an article forScience article showed that anti-social behavior to have a genetic component, at least in relation to property crimes. Using an adoption paradigm, the authors found no correlation between criminal conviction in the adoptive parents and their children but there was a correlation between biological father conviction and child conviction. The authors stressed that genetic influences do not mean that anti-social behavior is completely genetically determined, but that it has a genetic component. Earlier in his career Mednick, had hypothesized that Autonomic under-arousal may be a genetic factor predisposing to anti-social behavior because under-arousal slows the socialization process. He helped develop a New Zealand cohort with one of his most notable students at the University of Southern California, Terrie Moffitt, who is a full professor at Duke University and has developed her own theories of genetic X environmental interactions in the genesis of anti-social behavior.
Read more about this topic: Sarnoff A. Mednick
Famous quotes containing the words criminal and/or behavior:
“Think of admitting the details of a single case of the criminal court into our thoughts, to stalk profanely through their very sanctum sanctorum for an hour, ay, for many hours! to make a very barroom of the mind’s inmost apartment, as if for so long the dust of the street had occupied us,—the very street itself, with all its travel, its bustle, and filth, had passed through our thoughts’ shrine! Would it not be an intellectual and moral suicide?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There are ... two minimum conditions necessary and sufficient for the existence of a legal system. On the one hand those rules of behavior which are valid according to the system’s ultimate criteria of validity must be generally obeyed, and on the other hand, its rules of recognition specifying the criteria of legal validity and its rules of change and adjudication must be effectively accepted as common public standards of official behavior by its officials.”
—H.L.A. (Herbert Lionel Adolphus)