Applied Psychology

Mass killings perpetrated by loners, and not motivated by clear political influences, are a low risk, but high impact feature of modern life. Males have been literally running amok — attacking innocent strangers en-masse — across time and space. The word “amok” refers to a behavior once thought to be a culture-bound syndrome, but similar offence characteristics, which make sense from a Life History Theory (LHT) perspective, are also present in other cases of mass killings in Western cultures. Status is a female-selected reproductive desideratum in males, especially under harsh conditions. Thus, male responses to failure to acquire status, or threats of losing it, are predicted to sometimes take pathological forms. An archival search of mass murderers was conducted to identify offender and offence characteristics. Latent class analysis revealed a mass murderer typology and a bimodal age distribution consistent with critical periods of either status acquisition or status loss in males. These results highlighted the benefit of re-evaluating a previously examined area of multiple homicide from an alternative perspective and the contribution evolutionary psychology can make to understanding the motivation of mass murderers.

Although it is usually assumed that ail those who commit suicide give some prior indication of their intention to take their own life, there is growing evidence that a .small but significant proportion of suicides occur without any clear, explicit indicators. It is proposed that these suicides share similar pathways to other suicides but that the despair involved is not expressed so clearly, often being kept secret. In order to identify such suicides and potential suicides it is helpful to have an indicator of the dominant subsets of constituents that are precursors to suicide. A 14-item Suicide Precursors Scale (SPS) was therefore developed. This was applied to 128 cases of suicide that occurred between January 1997 and December 2000 in Stockport (South Manchester. UK). A very high alpha coefficient ofO. 98 supported the reliability and homogeneity of the SPS. A Multi-Dimensional Scaling (MDS) analysis of the SPS revealed three prototypical subsets of expressions of suicidal actions-illness, life circumstances, and depressive history. These are offered as coherent themes in the life of potential suicides, which may be of assistance both in determining whether an equivocal death is suicide or not, and in alerting caring agencies to the potential for suicide even when the despair is kept secret.