The article, Neurodevelopmental and psychosocial risk factors in serial killers and mass murderers inquired on the rare events of mass murders and serial killers as they impact society. There is a difference between serial and mass murders, as there is a difference between Seung-Hui Cho and Richard Ramirez. Serial killings are individuals who committed three or more murders over a period of time, could be months or years, with cooling periods between the murders. Mass murders typically take place in one location with a large number of victims in a short period of time (Alley, Minnis, Thompson, Wilson, & Gillberg, 2014). In recent years, it begs the question of whether mass shootings have become more common occurrence or whether it reported
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The study is a correlational study between murders and whether either ASD or head injury occurred. Head injury or ASD and murder can be considered a bidirectional causation as they could cause the conditions that lead to one another. For instance, the case of Jeffery Dahmer whom may have had a possible ASD with psychological stress in childhood. Dahmer had difficulty with nonverbal cues, lack a variety of facial expression, and rigid body posture it is possible he suffered from Asperger syndrome. Also, the use of Richard Ramirez as a case of head injury as a child along with other environmental and family structure lead to his killing spree. He was diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy, where suffers have altered sexuality, hyper-religious feelings, hypergraphic, and excessively aggressive (Alley et al., …show more content…
There is already an idea of which type of individuals would be evaluated. There was also a limited number of peer-reviewed articles so other sources were used, including newspaper articles, court transcripts, online articles, biographies, and online sources such as the murder encyclopedia (Alley et al., 2014). Another issue could be that the only data and sources used were those published in English, so there were possible studies that were eliminated. Also, the peer reviewed papers where of single case reports. The limitations with non-experimental studies are that researchers cannot manipulate any variables, so there is no control over the possible outcomes. In studies such as this, it is looking an already existing data such as case studies to indicate if a hypothesis a researcher has formed is valid. There is no control group so both external and internal validity are compromised, as the degree of generalizing is lower and the degree of establishing a cause and effect relationship between independent and the dependent variable is gone (Laprade,
The study is a correlational study between murders and whether either ASD or head injury occurred. Head injury or ASD and murder can be considered a bidirectional causation as they could cause the conditions that lead to one another. For instance, the case of Jeffery Dahmer whom may have had a possible ASD with psychological stress in childhood. Dahmer had difficulty with nonverbal cues, lack a variety of facial expression, and rigid body posture it is possible he suffered from Asperger syndrome. Also, the use of Richard Ramirez as a case of head injury as a child along with other environmental and family structure lead to his killing spree. He was diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy, where suffers have altered sexuality, hyper-religious feelings, hypergraphic, and excessively aggressive (Alley et al., …show more content…
There is already an idea of which type of individuals would be evaluated. There was also a limited number of peer-reviewed articles so other sources were used, including newspaper articles, court transcripts, online articles, biographies, and online sources such as the murder encyclopedia (Alley et al., 2014). Another issue could be that the only data and sources used were those published in English, so there were possible studies that were eliminated. Also, the peer reviewed papers where of single case reports. The limitations with non-experimental studies are that researchers cannot manipulate any variables, so there is no control over the possible outcomes. In studies such as this, it is looking an already existing data such as case studies to indicate if a hypothesis a researcher has formed is valid. There is no control group so both external and internal validity are compromised, as the degree of generalizing is lower and the degree of establishing a cause and effect relationship between independent and the dependent variable is gone (Laprade,