Violence in America: Lessons on understanding the aggression in our lives, by Arnold P. Goldstein. Palo Alto, Calif, Davis-Black Publishing, 1996, xiii + 270 pp.
✍ Scribed by Seymour Feshbach
- Book ID
- 101266161
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1998
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 16 KB
- Volume
- 24
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0096-140X
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Jan Volavka is a Czech who came to the United States in the aftermath of the 1968 spring revolt and has practiced in various psychiatric settings in New York institutions since that time. He cites his personal and professional experience with violence as an impetus for his work. Neurobiology of Violence is an expansion and updating of shorter reviews of the biological causes of violence that he published in the early 1990s. Volavka assigns himself the daunting task "to update, summarize, and critically evaluate the field of neurobiology of violence..." (p viii), which he indicates has not been done since Moyer's 1976 effort. While readers of authors such as Moyer himself [1987[ ], Valzelli [1981]], Karli [1991], Archer [1988], and Denno [1990] might be concerned with omission of these efforts from consideration, it is the case that these books either have a broader orientation, focus on studies of lower animals, or involve a select population at risk for criminal behaviors. Volavka provides us with a review of relatively recent work done from a psychiatric perspective. The present work should be useful for mental health professionals who are interested in acquiring a fundamental knowledge of the bases of violence and in predicting its occurrence in their clients. The professional who is involved in laboratory research on the bases of aggression will find parts of this work useful for its information on possibilities of generalization of their studies to applied settings.
The book begins with a brief review of past scientific misadventures as well as more well-reasoned attempts to explain criminality, including consideration of the relative importance of biological and social factors. Apparently the author was not aware of the extensive work with lower animals that had been done. Therefore, he devotes an early chapter to review some of these studies, including investigations of brain functions, neurotransmitters, and sexual hormones. This chapter is relatively brief, considering the magnitude of this literature, and may not adequately inform the reader of the valuable contributions that derive from this work. For example, it includes relatively little material on brain functions, and its discussion of neurotransmitters does not include acetylcholine. The section on sexual hormones does not include much of the extensive recent work on aggression by females (e.g., see Björkvist and Niemelä [1992], reviewed in this journal, 1994;20:399-400). A more extensive treatment of this material would have provided more support for the author's suggestion that the lower animal literature be considered as a base for understanding human aggression.
The chapter on research with lower animals provides a reference for subsequent informative discussions of how biological mechanisms are related to human violence. Thus, there is a chapter on the contributions of neurotransmitters and sexual hormones to the control of violence and another chapter on neurological functions and violence. These chapters consider both the applicability of the work from lower animals as well as limits to generalizations from this work. The multi-level studies involving serotonin as an inhibitor of aggression are especially well reviewed, and the possible relation of testosterone to human aggression is carefully analyzed. Discussion of total and partial prefrontal lobotomies would have made the neurology chapter more complete, given that a critique of psychosurgery is included and that frontal lobe roles in aggression are discussed.