Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 2: Biobehavioral Influences (1994)
Chapter: Neurodevelopmental Issues
specific information processing deficits in a variety of clinical populations, including schizophrenics and persons with eating disorders or seasonal affective disorders. These methods add to the armamentarium of noninvasive techniques that may be especially appropriate for research on child populations.
DEVELOPMENTAL RESEARCH RELATED TO VIOLENCE
Neurodevelopmental Issues
In numerous papers over the past 15 years there has been attention to developmental issues that are potentially related to the etiology of violent/aggressive behavior. We have already alluded to some of these studies in previous sections (i.e., Tarter et al., 1984). Two major themes emerge from this work: the first, and most often discussed, is that the tendency to display aggressiveness and violence represents a neurodevelopmental maturational deficit. The specific form of the hypothesized relationship differs somewhat from author to author, but the basic message is similar for all: in children who exhibit violent and aggressive behaviors there is evidence of substantial neuropsychologic deficit in such functions as memory, attention, and language or verbal skills. The aggressive behavioral manifestations may thus represent: (1) maladaptive communication skills in persons who are impaired in their capacity to communicate and/or (2) a frustration-elicited response based on inability to compete in the cognitive arena with peers (Mungas, 1988; Miller, 1987; Andrew, 1981; Yeudall et al., 1982; Brickman et al., 1984; Piacentini, 1987; Woods and Eby, 1982; Lewis et al., 1988; Hermann, 1982) (Table 13). Some unpublished data from a recent study of attention and other cognitive skills in second-grade children judged by teachers to be unusually aggressive, provide additional support for these hypotheses. Boys rated as aggressive showed poorer attention skills in tasks requiring the encoding of information and in sustained concentration. Aggressive girls were poorer than controls on sustained concentration tasks only (Anthony et al., in press; Mirsky, 1989). Zahn et al. (1991) recently reported similar deficits in externalizing (acting-out) boys (i.e., their performance on sustained attention tasks under conditions of stimulus uncertainty was inferior to that of control boys).
A somewhat unusual finding—an exception to the general trend of these studies—is reported by Kindlon et al. (1988). Although they reported the usual greater incident of aggressiveness in 12- to 16-year-old boys of lower socioeconomic status, they failed to
