Criminal psychology: what is the mind of the serial killer like?

Perhaps because of the alarm it generates, because of its crudeness or the intellectual challenge that its study requires, serial murders have been since the appearance of the Forensic Psychiatry one of the main foundations of the study of the criminal.

Until today it has not been possible to definitively establish what the psycho-clinical profile that delimits the murderer serial of a normal citizen.

Serial Killer Psychology, Criminal Psychology

It is known that the psychological background of the profile of a serial killer is that of a humiliated, abused and violated child. In half the cases he has suffered from paternal absence and considers his mother a danger from which it is necessary to protect himself.

Research

Still, in a recent discovery presented at the New England Journal of Medicine anatomical differences between serial killers and ordinary people are noted. In the serial killer there is a larger frontal lobe and therefore more functional, characteristic that gives them greater aggressiveness and less empathy than the average.

Behavior, strategy, working memory, and planning skills reside in the frontal lobe. It could be said that he is the most "human" part of our brain. Its hypertrophy indicates a high aggressiveness and, in turn, an increase in the strategy capacity as well as a low capacity for empathy that can lead to a certain risk of sadism.

The neurochemistry of the serial killer

According to Dr. Reid Meloy, another differential characteristic between serial killers and the rest of the population is an abnormally high level of manganese, iron and copper, such that has a direct impact on the decrease of dopamine and serotonin, which are relaxing substances that decrease testosterone levels (a hormone that causes not only excessive aggressiveness but also the need for control), in such a way so that the individual suffers a behavioral alteration that starts the criminal act in a desperate attempt to impose his superiority over his peers.

Unfortunately, even with the advancement of this discovery, which allows us to get a little closer to the mind of the referential serial killer, these clinical findings do not yet allow us to predict or prevent sadistic drive of these subjects.

It is precise decipher the exact combination of factors that leads to this criminal behavior. Does science have an answer to this challenge? Without a doubt, possibly in a few years the answer will be found.

Discovering the lives and minds of some serial killers

For detailed analyzes of the criminal psychology of some famous murderers, we recommend the following monographs:

• Ed Gein, ‘the Plainfeld Butcher’

Jack the Ripper'