The Anatomy of Violence Quotes

“Spouse-abusers have a reactive aggressive personality that makes them more likely to lash out when provoked. Emotional words inordinately grab their attention. They are less able to inhibit the distracting emotional characteristics of stimuli, resulting in impaired cognitive performance. When presented with aggressive stimuli their brains overrespond at an emotional level and underrespond at a cognitive control level. Spouse-abusers are constitutionally different from other men.”
― Adrian Raine, The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime

“When do we lie most? Community surveys show it’s on our first date with a new person. And this gives us a clue as to why we lie so much—it’s impression management.”
― Adrian Raine, The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime

“Violence and terrorism are not just low physiological arousal,97 yet this is certainly one of the active ingredients that, when combined with other influences, can move us toward a more complete understanding of killers like Kaczynski.”
― Adrian Raine, The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime

“you may recall from chapter 4 we put our subjects through a stress task in which they had to talk about their worst faults. As pointed out by Damasio, this is a very appropriate task in the context of the somatic-marker hypothesis because it elicits secondary emotions—embarrassment, shame, guilt—that are the province of the ventral prefrontal cortex.23”
― Adrian Raine, The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime

“Indeed, Jane’s emotions were almost dead. Like a pathological stimulation-seeker, she was so removed from her natural feelings that she had to go to very extreme lengths to register a tangible feeling of “voluptuous delight.” Consider the killing of Elizabeth, her sister-in-law. Jane confessed that she had deliberately prolonged her life so that she could witness more of her suffering: “I held her in my arms and watched with delight as she gasped her life out.”84 Cuddling and groping in bed with Elizabeth in the moments of her sister-in-law’s death was just about the only way Jolly Jane could apparently be truly happy, and experience some sense of emotion in her life.”
― Adrian Raine, The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime