ABSTRACT
Attempts to elucidate some of the etiological contributions to violence have met with limited success. First, the intricacies of violence research such as the separate contributions from biology and environment and their resulting interactions make this a very complex issue. Second, the study of violence has been plagued with lack of uniform definitions for violent behaviors and by unidimensional approach to its study. Furthermore, the field of violence has been studied by scientists from diverse disciplines that include criminology, sociology, and different biological perspectives (physiology, psychobiology, and neurobiology). These diverse disciplines use different language, tools, ways to conceptualize the problem, and have studied developmentally different violent populations. To compound these problems investigators from these different disciplines frequently do not read each others work, and consequently the amount of cross-fertilization has been, until quite recently, somewhat limited.
