Lalumière, Martin

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    Nepotistic patterns of violent psychopathy: evidence for adaptation?
    (Frontiers Research Foundation, 2012) Krupp, Daniel Brian; Sewall, Lindsay A.; Lalumière, Martin L.; Sheriff, Craig; Harris, Grant T.
    Psychopaths routinely disregard social norms by engaging in selfish, antisocial, often violent behavior. Commonly characterized as mentally disordered, recent evidence suggests that psychopaths are executing a well-functioning, if unscrupulous strategy that historically increased reproductive success at the expense of others. Natural selection ought to have favored strategies that spared close kin from harm, however, because actions affecting the fitness of genetic relatives contribute to an individual’s inclusive fitness. Conversely, there is evidence that mental disorders can disrupt psychological mechanisms designed to protect relatives. Thus, mental disorder and adaptation accounts of psychopathy generate opposing hypotheses: psychopathy should be associated with an increase in the victimization of kin in the former account but not in the latter. Contrary to the mental disorder hypothesis,we showhere in a sample of 289 violent offenders that variation in psychopathy predicts a decrease in the genetic relatedness of victims to offenders; that is, psychopathy predicts an increased likelihood of harming non-relatives. Because nepotistic inhibition in violence may be caused by dispersal or kin discrimination, we examined the effects of psychopathy on (1) the dispersal of offenders and their kin and (2) sexual assault frequency (as a window on kin discrimination). Although psychopathy was negatively associated with coresidence with kin and positively associated with the commission of sexual assault, it remained negatively associated with the genetic relatedness of victims to offenders after removing cases of offenders who had coresided with kin and cases of sexual assault from the analyses.These results stand in contrast to models positing psychopathy as a pathology, and provide support for the hypothesis that psychopathy reflects an evolutionary strategy largely favoring the exploitation of non-relatives.
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    The validity of phallometric assessment with rapists : Comments on Looman & Marshall
    (Springer, 2007) Lalumière, Martin L.; Rice, M. E.
    In a recent article Looman and Marshall (2005) questioned the validity of phallometric assessment of rapists based on the results of a study of incarcerated rapists and child molesters. In this commentary we offer (1) a critique of the methods used and conclusions reached by Looman and Marshall and (2) a discussion of important methodological issues relevant to phallometry. We conclude that the correct inference from Looman and Marshall’s study is that rapists, as a group, show a pattern of sexual arousal to audiotaped scenarios of coercive and non-coercive sex that significantly differs from the pattern of groups of non-sex offenders, in agreement with the general literature on this question.
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    Do people differentially remember cheaters?
    (Transaction Publishers [Springer as of February 2007], 2006-03) Barclay, Pat; Lalumière, Martin L.
    The evolution of reciprocal altruism probably involved the evolution of mechanisms to detect cheating and remember cheaters. In a well-known study, Mealey, Daood, and Krage (1996) observed that participants had enhanced memory for faces that had previously been associated with descriptions of acts of cheating. There were, however, problems with the descriptions that were used in that study. We sought to replicate and extend the findings of Mealey and colleagues by using more controlled descriptions and by examining the possibility of enhanced altruist recognition. We also examined whether individual differences in cheating tendencies were related to cheater and altruist recognition. In the first experiment, 164 undergraduates saw 40 faces that were paired with character descriptions representing the categories of cheater, trustworthy, altruist, or neutral, for individuals who had either low or high social status. One week later participants reported which faces they recognized from the previous week (among 80 faces). Overall, the results failed to replicate the findings of Mealey and her colleagues, as there was no enhanced memory for cheaters. In addition, there was no enhanced memory for altruists, and no effect of participants’ cheating tendencies. A second experiment using a slightly different methodology produced similar results, with some evidence for enhanced memory for altruists.
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    Review of the book Evolution, gender, and rape by C. Travis Brown (Ed.)
    (Springer, 2006-02) Lalumière, Martin L.
    Evolution, Gender, and Rape. Edited By Cheryl Brown Travis. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2003, 472 pp., $62.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paperback). This book is a collection of 17 critiques of the recent book, A Natural History of Rape, by Thornhill, a biologist, and Palmer, an anthropologist.
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    Behavioral genetics: The study of differences
    (Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Lethbridge, 2005) Lalumière, Martin L.
    Behavioural genetics is about partitioning the sources of individual differences in any trait that can be measured reliably. The fundamental question is how much of the observed variability in a given trait can be explained by the fact that people have different genes, and how much can be explained by the fact that people have been exposed to different environments.