Empirical basis and forensic application of affective and predatory violence.

Predatory violence aiming at relief in a case of mass murder: Meloy's criteria for applied forensic practice.

Mass murder is the result of the complex interaction of several factors. What seems ubiquitous within mass murder are extreme feelings of anger and revenge. Yet despite these intense affective states, mass murders are, as a rule, not behaviorally impulsive, but rather prepared. The presence of extreme hate and anger evokes an impulsive outburst of rage, whereas planning and premeditation point ...

Deconstructing violence as a medical syndrome: mapping psychotic, impulsive, and predatory subtypes to malfunctioning brain circuits.

Violence is a major management issue for forensic mental health systems. Violence can be approached as a medical syndrome and deconstructed into psychotic, impulsive, and predatory subtypes, which are hypothetically mapped onto corresponding malfunctioning brain circuits. Rational management of violence balances treatment with security, while targeting each subtype of violence with approaches u...

Communicated threats and violence toward public and private targets: discerning differences among those who stalk and attack.

A computation of false positive and false negative rates concerning the probability that directly communicated written or oral threats predict subsequent violent behavior yields a striking difference between "public" and "private" targets. Among private targets, communicated threats appear to increase risk, but are so common that they have little predictive value. On the other hand, public targ...

Reduced prefrontal and increased subcortical brain functioning assessed using positron emission tomography in predatory and affective murderers.

There appear to be no brain imaging studies investigating which brain mechanisms subserve affective, impulsive violence versus planned, predatory violence. It was hypothesized that affectively violent offenders would have lower prefrontal activity, higher subcortical activity, and reduced prefrontal/subcortical ratios relative to controls, while predatory violent offenders would show relatively...

Running head: VIOLENCE AND EARLY LIFE STRESS 1 Comparing Predatory Versus Affective Violence and Examining Early Life Stress as a Risk Factor