Criminal Psychology: What is a Serial Killer Like?

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

To date, it has not been possible to definitively establish what the psycho-clinical profile that defines the murderer serial of a normal citizen.

Table of Contents

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 of the cases he has suffered paternal absence and considers his mother as a danger from which he must protect himself.

Research

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

Behavior, strategy, working memory and planning abilities reside in the frontal lobe. It could be said that it is the most “human” part of our brain. Its hypertrophy indicates high aggressiveness and, in turn, an increase in the capacity for strategy 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 differentiating 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 reduce the levels of testosterone (a hormone that causes not only excessive aggressiveness but also the need for dominance), in such a way that the individual suffers a behavioral alteration that leads him to commit a criminal act in a desperate attempt to impose his superiority over their peers.

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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 still do not allow us to predict or prevent the sadistic drive of these subjects.

It is necessary decipher the exact combination of factors that lead 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.