Criminal behavior: Older siblings strongly sway younger siblings close in age

Findings illustrate impact of family environment on violent criminal behavior

2014-04-28

(Press-News.org) If a sibling commits a violent criminal act, the risk that a younger sibling may follow in their footsteps is more likely than the transmission of that behavior to an older sibling, according to a new study conducted by researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University and Lund University in Sweden.

The findings provide insight into the social transmission of violent behaviors and suggest that environmental factors within families can be important when it comes to delinquent behavior. Down the road, the results may be used to inform strategies for prevention and treatment programs.

For some time, experts have recognized that violent criminal behavior runs strongly in families due to shared environmental factors such as poverty, divorce and poor parental supervision.

In a study, published online April 28 in the journal Psychological Medicine, researchers examined a series of national databases from Sweden linking full sibling pairs and criminal conviction. The team conducted two analyses – one that looked at age differences in siblings, and one that examined the difference in the risk of being a younger sibling versus an older sibling of a proband with violent criminal behavior.

Researchers found that older siblings more strongly "transmit" the risk for violent criminal behavior to their younger siblings, rather than vice versa. The team also found that the closer in age that siblings are, the greater the risk for the transmission of violent behavior. The authors write, "Because older siblings often exert more influence on siblings than younger, the risk for violent criminal behavior should be greater when the older sibling has violent criminal behavior as compared to the younger sibling. However it is not just mere closeness in age, but rather the nature of the sibling relationship that often occurs when siblings are closer in age."

"Our findings strongly support the importance of familial-environmental influences on violent criminal behavior and provide some insight into the possible mechanisms at work," said first author Kenneth S. Kendler, M.D., director of the VCU Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics.

INFORMATION: Kendler, professor of psychiatry, and human and molecular genetics in the VCU School of Medicine, collaborated with Nancy A. Morris, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Criminal Justice in the L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs, VCU College of Humanities and Sciences. Researchers from Lund University were led by Jan Sundquist, M.D., Ph.D., professor and director of the Center for Primary Health Care Research, and Kristina Sundquist, M.D., Ph.D., professor of family medicine at the Center for Primary Health Care Research, and Sara Larsson Lönn, Ph.D., with the Center for Primary Health Care Research. Sundquist and Sundquist also have affiliations with the Stanford Prevention Research Center at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

This work was supported by the Ellison Medical Foundation, the Swedish Research Council (K2012-70X-15428-08-3), the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare (In Swedish: Forte; Reg.nr: 2013-1836), the Swedish Research Council (2012-2378) as well as ALF funding from Region Skåne.

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Research shows smartphone sensors leave trackable fingerprints

2014-04-28

Research at the University of Illinois has demonstrated that smartphone sensors — not just the ones meant to track your location — can leave real-time fingerprints unique to each individual device. An attacker could use such sensor data from a given smartphone to identify it ever after, almost making the user-trackable. Research by Electrical and Computer Engineering Associate Professor Romit Roy Choudhury and graduate students Sanorita Dey and Nirupam Roy, demonstrated that these fingerprints exist within smartphone sensors, mainly because of imperfections during the ...

Carnegie Mellon-Disney researcher invents 3D printing technique for making cuddly stuff

2014-04-28

PITTSBURGH—Soft and cuddly aren't words used to describe the plastic or metal things typically produced by today's 3D printers. But a new type of printer developed by Carnegie Mellon University and Disney Research Pittsburgh can turn wool and wool blend yarns into fabric objects that people might actually enjoy touching. The device looks something like a cross between a 3D printer and a sewing machine and produces 3D objects made of a form of loose felt. Scott Hudson, a professor in CMU's Human-Computer Interaction Institute who developed the felting printer with Disney ...

Beyond graphene: Controlling properties of 2D materials

2014-04-28

The isolation of graphene at the University in 2004 led to the discovery of many other 2D crystals. While graphene has an unrivalled set of superlatives, these crystals cover a large range of properties: from the most conductive to isolating, from transparent to optically active. The next step is to combine several of these crystals in a 3D stack. This way, one can create 'heterostructures' with novel functionalities – capable of delivering applications as yet beyond the imagination of scientists and commercial partners. The first examples of such heterostructures already ...

One cell type may quash tumor vaccines

2014-04-28

(PHILADELPHIA) -- Most cancer vaccines have not lived up to their promise in clinical trials. The reason, many researchers suspect, is that the immune cells that would help the body destroy the tumor – even those reactions boosted by cancer vaccines – are actively suppressed. Now, researchers at Thomas Jefferson University have found that a single cell type is actively suppressed in several experimental cancer vaccines, paving the way toward methods to break suppression and improve the effectiveness of cancer vaccines. The work was published this week online in the European ...

Ames Lab researchers see rare-earth-like magnetic properties in iron

2014-04-28

Scientists at the Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory have observed magnetic properties typically associated with those observed in rare-earth elements in iron. These properties are observed in a new iron based compound that does not contain rare earth elements, when the iron atom is positioned between two nitrogen atoms. The discovery opens the possibility of using iron to provide both the magnetism and permanence in high-strength permanent magnets, like those used in direct-drive wind turbines or electric motors in hybrid cars. The results appeared in Nature Communications. In ...

Estimating baby's size gets more precise

2014-04-28

New Michigan State University research aims to help doctors estimate the size of newborns with a new set of birth weight measurements based on birth records from across the country. "More than 7 million records were reviewed," said Nicole Talge, an assistant professor in MSU's Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, who co-led the study which is now available in the journal Pediatrics. "Our research looked at live births in the United States during 2009-2010 and using a newly developed method, corrected unlikely gestational ages during that time. This led to changes ...

Gulf War illness: New report lauds treatment research, confirms toxic causes

2014-04-28

Progress has been made toward understanding the physiological mechanisms that underlie Gulf War illness and identifying possible treatments, according to a report released Monday by a Congressionally mandated panel of scientific experts and veterans. Treatment research has increased significantly since 2008, and "early results provide encouraging signs that the treatment goals identified in the 2010 Institute of Medicine report are achievable," the Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses (RAC) said in a report presented Monday to VA Secretary Eric ...

Studies offer insight on how to improve kidney and liver transplantation

2014-04-28

The quality of kidney and liver donations is fundamentally important for the longevity of transplants and the health of recipients. That's why it's critical to know which organs are suitable for transplantation, as well as to use techniques that preserve an organ's function after donation. Several studies published in the BJS (British Journal of Surgery) address these issues and offer ways to maximize the use of donated organs. In the first study, Rajeev Desai, MRCP, of NHS Blood and Transplant, in the UK, led a team that assessed transplants from 17,639 donors, including ...

R.I. nitrogen cycle differs in bay and sound

2014-04-28

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Rhode Island's geography is famously small, but new measurements of the nitrogen cycle in its waterways suggest that even over a small distance, differences can be huge. Scientists report that the nitrogen-converting process anammox is almost completely absent in Narragansett Bay, even though it is going strong in Rhode Island Sound only 15 miles off the coast. The novel and somewhat surprising finding, documented in the journal Limnology and Oceanography, raises intriguing questions about why the bay seems inhospitable to an important ...

Breast cancer patients place huge emphasis on gene expression profiling test

2014-04-28

TORONTO, April 28, 2014—Gene expression profiling tests play a critical role when women with early-stage breast cancer decide whether to have chemotherapy, but many of them do not fully understand what some of the test results mean, new research suggests. Current guidelines for treating early-stage breast cancer—cancer that has not spread to nearby lymph nodes or other parts of the body—result in thousands of women receiving chemotherapy without benefitting from it. A gene expression profiling test can help differentiate women who might benefit from chemotherapy versus ...

Criminal behavior: Older siblings strongly sway younger siblings close in age

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES: