........ published in NEWSLETTER # 68
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........ published in NEWSLETTER # 68
BIOSOCIAL BASES OF VIOLENCE
Excerpt from preface by Dr. A.Raine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles/CA (U.S.A.)
There are notable features about violence research. First, research over the past 50 years has identified many important familial, psychosocial, and community influences on violence. Furthermore, within the past decade there has been a sudden growth in interest in biological contributions to violent behavior. Second, it is clear that violence is a complex form of behavior that defies a simple explanation. Consequently, any successful approach to understanding such behavior must take into account the multiple social, psychological, and biological processes that conspire together to create the violent individual. Despite these two obvious facts, most research on violence is not conducted within a multidisciplinary, integrative biosocial framework. The goal of this book (NATO ASI SERIES A292) is to begin to lay the groundwork for a genuine integration between psychosocial and biological processes in attempting to explain violence. While there is cursory acknowledgment of the biosocial approach in the literature, this is largely superficial and does not tackle the specific manner in which biological factors interact with social factors in the development of violent behavior in humans. Indeed, there are only a handful of empirical studies which have tackled this issue head-on. The reason for this gap in the field is that such integration is extremely difficult for both practical and conceptual reasons. The contributions in this book cannot hope to suddenly fill this void overnight. Nevertheless, it is hoped that they can at least begin to lay the foundations to the evolution of biosocial violence research in the forthcoming years by both adding to the very few empirical demonstrations of the biosocial interaction perspective, and also by clarifying conceptual and theoretical issues.
The book is aimed at academics who study crime and violence. It focuses on violence because this is a critical problem in society, but also contains perspectives on aggressive and antisocial behavior in children because such behaviors are critical contributions to adult violence. As such, this book should be of interest to all research scientists, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates in psychology, sociology, criminology, psychiatry, social work, law, and medicine who have an interest in the causes of violent and antisocial behavior in both children and adults.
Reference books: A292, D8, D17, D88