ABSTRACT
The origins of antisocial behavior have been studied from multiple vantage points including sociological, psychological, and biological perspectives, all of which have competed somewhat unnecessarily to be recognized as possessing the definitive model of criminal behavior. An accurate review would transcend overly reductive boundaries of academics to draw a more complete picture of the criminal. Therefore, although this review will focus on the biological concepts of violent behavior, it will be informed by current psychosocial models of criminality. With the recent development of strict criteria in the psychiatric literature for the diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder, it has been possible to start to delineate its etiology. Unfortunately, psychiatric literature has not fully considered the broader concept of psychopathy. That is, antisocial personality disorder emphasizes behavioral misconduct continuing from childhood to adulthood rather than interpersonal defects such as lack of empathy and egocentricity that are encompassed by the construct of psychopathy. This neglect of the idea of psychopathy is unfortunate because in attempting to uncover the etiology of enduring behavior, it is useful to look at more specific characteristics of individuals and how those contribute to the development of long-lasting conduct as seen in sociopathy. It is not a priori clear that biological differences would predict misconduct as well as it does interpersonal-affective problems; however, such differences are helpful in uncovering how affective disorders affect 2behavior, violent or otherwise. Hence, the biological paradigm of human behavior is most useful when looking at how such environmental influences as isolation, neglect, abuse, and other conditioning variables are imprinted into individuals to cause predictable, incorrigible behavioral disorders years later. So biological psychiatry does not contradict any of the conclusions of other fields as to the importance of contextual variables on personality and behavior; it simply addresses the possibility that these conditioning experiences are mediated into long-ranging behavior through known and newly discovered biological and neurobiological systems. Indeed, many of the animal models of behaviors hypothesized to be related to psychopathy, such as aggressiveness, fit a social interaction paradigm. Therefore, a useful scheme for integrating these viewpoints is to segment the complex construct of antisocial behavior to consider it a composite of more easily investigated factors such as arousal, dominance, and aggression. Each of these component factors has been studied in humans using a dimensional model of personality traits leading to interesting hypotheses about the relationship between psychosocial variables, neurobiological function, and personality. The structure of this paper will be to report on studies of impulsivity and related traits, such as sensation seeking and extroversion, as well as presenting important studies on human aggressiveness. Finally these two sets of findings will be integrated to organize a conceptual heuristic for exploration of models of sociopathy.
