The American Journal of Psychiatry published an article this month entitled, “Association of Poor Childhood Fear Conditioning and Adult Crime.” I found it very interesting. Most previous studies looking at young children and whether they later became criminals have examined psychosocial factors of childhood, not neurodevelopmental ones as this one did.

Researchers assessed the fear response of 1,795 children at age 3. A shrill sound was administered, and the sweating response (indicating a fear reaction) was measured. Twenty years later, using court records, the researchers tracked down 137 of the study participants who had committed serious crimes. The young criminals had shown an absence of fear at age 3 whereas 274 non-criminal study participants had shown normal fear reactions.

Although a definite cause-and-effect relationship of the lack of fear in childhood and the later development of criminality cannot be made, this study does provide additional evidence that abnormal brain development puts children at risk of later criminal behavior.

So, other than this academic point, why does this matter?

Dr. Yu Gao, the lead investigator, sums it up in the original paper:

If crime is in part neurodevelopmentally determined, efforts to prevent and treat this worldwide behavior problem will increasingly rely on early health interventions. Prenatal programs aimed at health factors, including reducing cigarette, alcohol, and drug consumption and improving nutrition, have led to significant reductions in juvenile delinquency 15 years later. Enhancing the early health environment of young children from ages 3 to 5 years with better nutrition, more physical exercise, and cognitive stimulation has been shown both to improve brain functioning 6 years later, as indicated by a reduction in slow-wave EEG power (indicating faster developmental brain maturation), and to reduce adult criminal offending by 35% (18); conceivably it could also improve amygdala functioning. Such programs applied early in life and combining multidisciplinary health services from clinical, social, and educational domains have the potential to improve brain functioning and to make a public health contribution to the reduction of criminal offending throughout the world. At the same time, due caution should be exercised in the application of neurobiological markers early in life to predict later offending; crime is clearly a complex construct involving multiple interactions between genetic, brain, family, and societal influences (31) and cannot be predicted by single neurobiological markers such as fear conditioning.

Click here to read the abstract.

I look forward to hearing your comments.

Photo Credit: mike is scrumptious via Flickr