Psychology by Raine Adrian & Glenn Andrea L

Author:Raine, Adrian & Glenn, Andrea L.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2014-03-07T00:00:00+00:00

Head Injury, Birth Complications, Toxin Exposure, Nutrition

Other types of environmental factors may have more direct influences on the biological pathway, and may be considered biological adversity. For example, head injury specifically affects the brain. Exposure to neurotoxins such as lead can affect the development and functioning of the brain. Birth complications also represent an environmental hazard, although they also may be partly genetically determined.

Fowler, Langley, Rice, Whittinger, et al. (2009) examined pre- and perinatal factors in relation to psychopathic traits in adolescents with ADHD and found that psychopathic traits were associated with maternal smoking during pregnancy. The authors acknowledge that this association could be an artifact due to the mother’s own antisocial behavior, which may be associated with smoking during pregnancy. As stated earlier, having an antisocial parent may increase the likelihood of developing psychopathic traits both because of the genetic risk factors that may be passed on, and because of the antisocial influences from parent to child. A behavioral genetics study published in 2004 examined these issues. Maughan et al. tested the possibility that maternal smoking may be primarily an index for genetic risk for antisocial behavior. They found that approximately half of the association between maternal smoking and child conduct problems was due to correlated genetic influences (Maughan et al. 2004). They also found that mothers who smoked during pregnancy differed from other mothers in a number of ways, including the fact that they were more likely to be antisocial, to have children with more antisocial partners, to bring up their children in more disadvantaged circumstances, and to have had depression. Controlling for these factors, in addition to genetic factors, the effects of maternal smoking were reduced by between 75 percent and 100 percent. Thus, it is not clear whether maternal smoking itself (as a toxin that may damage the fetus) actually predisposes for psychopathic traits.

Only one study has examined birth complications in relation to psychopathic traits specifically. Birth complications such as forceps delivery, ventouse delivery, breech birth, and emergency Caesarean section were found to be associated with the emotional dysfunction features of psychopathy (Fowler, Langley, Rice, Whittinger, et al. 2009). Psychopathic traits in adolescence were not found to be associated with birth weight or prematurity.

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