Psychobiology of Extremist Violence: The Comeback of Individuality

Abstract

Research on the psychological paths leading towards involvement in violent extremism and terrorism has not produced a consistent layout of traits describing recurrent dispositions or plausible vulnerabilities. Extremist/terrorizing violence can adopt many forms from lone-actor attacks to guerrilla actions and other war-like tactics, and such versatility defies unifying depictions. Advances achieved at identifying important elements of ingroup dynamics and commitment ties mediating the surge and activities of violent groups neglected individual factors. Recent research has re-established the relevance of individual temperament traits to explain the attraction, engagement and support to these combative coalitions and the different roles and involvement that people enact in them. This essay presents some of these research forefronts and proposes further integration between individuality-based measures with ingroup-related mechanisms when studying proneness to violent extremism. A merge between Personality and Forensic Psychology with Social Neuroscience appears as a particularly fruitful track to generate consistent advancement in the area.

Distinguishing Partisan and Extremist Brains?: Research Paths Toward Neural Signatures of Violent Radicalism

“…Decety et al [2] emphasized the need for further and more nuanced research to discern whether the activities and functional connectivities among regions of the prefrontal cortex and subcortical-limbic crucial zones will be able to capture individual differences in proneness to violent extremism. The sketch maps already outlined by the pioneering studies devoted to specify neural circuits mediating extremism, along with their associated molecular (neuromodulatory) cascades, will help to ensure further advances if future explorations would include measures of temperament traits as well as of the different roles played by individuals in extremist groups [4,5,55,56].…”

“…Research on the biological underpinnings of dominance, risk-seeking, dogmatism, parochialism, dishonesty, machiavellianism, and other relevant traits has accrued a good amount of associations with extremism proneness, at different levels of neural analysis. Links that go from gene markers and neurohormones to brain subsystems [4,5,30,47,56,[63][64][65][66]. These interdependencies have already been used to improve the deployment of provisional but increasingly detailed depictions.…”

“…The lethal attacks coming from squads participating in rounds of fights among urban bands or from militias of criminal gangs are equally excluded. I am fully aware that this represents a simplification of the complex and changing varieties of terror attacks but it permits demarcating the phenomenon within the limits of political/doctrinal clashes while agreeing with the encompassing and computational descriptions of terrorism, insurgencies, and warfare [4][5][6][7].…”