ABSTRACT
Issues of dangerousness arise in a variety of forensic contexts, including the commitment and release of patients to and from psychiatric hospitals, the management of defendants found not guilty by reason of insanity, death penalty cases, the evaluation of criminally violent predators (e.g., Kansas v. Hendricks, 1997), and decisions concerning probation and parole. There is a widespread notion that violence toward others is typically linked with mental illness. Such a perception is not without foundation; population surveys have consistently revealed a higher base rate of interpersonal aggression in persons with mental illness than in the population as a whole (Swanson, Holzer, Ganzu, & Jono, 1990; Swanson et al., 2006), although a critical aggravating variable among the mentally ill who are violent is alcohol or illicit drug use (Steadman et al., 1998). Often characters in the media are portrayed as engaging in a type of violence described as predatory, defined by a planned attack during which the aggressor is emotionless and often quite calm. This is distinguished from the other and more common type of violence, often labeled affective. In this latter mode, the actor responds to a perceived threat in an emotion-laden fashion with intense autonomic arousal, only intending to reduce or eliminate the perceived threat (Meloy, 2006). The psychosocial differences between these two modes of violence-notwithstanding their striking biological distinctions-are often clinically obvious through careful scrutiny of the violence history and behaviors at the time of the offense. Understanding the differences in modes of violence is essential when opining about an individual’s dangerousness.
