Heart rate linked to gender gap in criminal offending
Olivia Choy, who graduated this month with a Ph.D. from Penn's Department of Criminology in the School of Arts & Sciences and is joining Nanyang Technological University as an assistant professor in July, conducted the research in Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor Adrian Raine's lab. The study, "Explaining the Gender Gap in Crime: The Role of Heart Rate," complements traditional theoretical accounts of the gender gap and has implications for the advancement of integrative criminological theory in public health and law enforcement. Researchers examined data from a longitudinal study that measured the heart rate of participants at age 11 and found that heart rate partly explains gender differences in both violent and nonviolent crime assessed at age 23. Prior studies have shown that people with low resting heart rates seek stimulation to raise their level of arousal to a more optimal one. This stimulation-seeking theory converges with a fearlessness theory...