Tales of heads: A brief look at non-suicidal decapitation

I apologise in advance that today’s blog (a) contains almost no psychology, and (b) may upset my more squeamish readers. However, the material in today’s blog certainly fits my definition of both ‘extreme’ and ‘extreme behaviour’. The idea for this blog began when (quite by accident) I read a 2012 paper by Dr. A.F. Rashid and his colleagues in the Egyptian Journal of Forensic Sciences entitled ‘Accidental decapitation – An urban legend turned true’. They wrote that:

“This is a rare case of complete decapitation involving a 78-year-old bus passenger. All the occupants of the bus except the driver, sustained multiple injuries and died on the spot. An old man was decapitated in the accident. His head was recovered outside the mangled remains of the vehicle and the rest of the body was in the seat of the damaged vehicle. Evaluation of roadside evidence and the deceased injuries revealed that the victim was holding his head outside a window as the vehicle spun out of control, decapitation being due to the impact of his head against a tree on the side of the road”.

What piqued my interest was the claim that decapitations were “rare”. A paper by Dr. B. Kumral and colleagues evaluating medico-legal deaths due to decapitation in the Romanian Journal of Legal Medicine confirmed that such deaths are indeed rare events in the civilian population accounting for approximately 0.1% of medico-legal autopsies. I was surprised to find that quite a few decapitation case studies in the literature were suicides (and I’ve written these up in a separate blog that I will post at a later date). Today’s blog takes a brief look at some of the recorded non-suicidal decapitations from the forensic literature.

From my own reading of the non-suicidal decapitation literature, it would appear that the majority of decapitations are either caused by tragic traffic accidents or by murderers during or after the killing. For instance, in relation to traffic accidents, Dr. K. Kibayashi and colleagues reported in a 1999 issue of Medicine, Science, and the Law the case of decapitation of a vehicle passenger in an accident on a. The roadside evidence and the victim’s injuries revealed that the passenger was partially ejected from a broken car window as the vehicle spun out of control. The decapitation occurred as a result of the impact of the man’s head hitting a barrier on the side of the road. The key causes of the accident were listed as (i) an unfastened seat belt, (ii) high-speed driving and (iii) the design of the road barrier.

The most common vehicle associated with decapitation appears to be motorcycles. For instance, 2008 paper in the International Journal of Legal Medicine by Dr. Y. Ihama and colleagues reported the tragic head decapitation of an 18-year old motorcycle rider in an off-road accident when his motorcycle tore a roadblock chain from its attachment. The paper noted that:

“The decapitation injuries of the head and the torso corresponded perfectly, without apparent loss of tissue. The severance plane passed horizontally through the upper cervical region and [the] C4 [neck vertebrae], which sustained a comminuted fracture…The decapitation resulted from the rotational movement of the unstrung chain, which struck and strangled the driver’s neck”.

Another paper (reported a year earlier) also described the decapitation of a motorcyclist. In a case study in the journal Folia Medica, Dr. I. Doichinov, and his colleagues reported on the complete decapitation of a 20-year old motorcyclist during a road accident. However, in this case, the motorcycle rider was hit in his neck by the edge of a car compartment and resulted in complete decapitation of the rider’s head. The authors also noted that:

“The head of the motorcyclist was 37.5 [metres] away from the car in the direction of the motorcycle movement. The collision speed of the motorcycle was about 133 km/h…In our case the basic mechanism for decapitation was the direct trauma in the cervical region”.

In a third motorcycling tragedy, Dr. R. Zoja and colleagues reported the death and complete decapitation of motorcyclist wearing full-face helmet in a 2011 issue of the journal Forensic Science International. In this case:

“A young man lost control of his motorcycle and was thrown about 20 [metres], hitting his head against the barrier separating a tramline from the road. The resulting trauma caused his decapitation, the only fatal wound ascertained by the various forensic investigations…The absence of abrasions or signs that the wound edges came into contact with a metal structure, the presence of signs of impact on the side of the helmet and the finding of a transversal fracture at the base of the skull point to the violent action of a side-to-side opposite force, due to the resistance provided by the lower edge of the protective helmet”.

A 2009 paper by Dr. S. Demirci and colleagues in the American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology reported the case of an accidental decapitation of a male agriculture worker. While he was working in a field, the man had tied his scarf tied over his face to stop barley dust (to which he was allergic) blowing into his face. The authors reported that:

“The trailer was simultaneously being loaded by a helix elevator machine and its rotating shaft suddenly caught the victim’s scarf and pulled it down to the victim’s neck. The rotating motion immediately tightened the scarf around the neck resulting in hanging/strangulation noose that, by continued tightening, caused decapitation of the victim. The victim’s body was found on the ground by the trailer and the victim’s head was discovered in the barley load in the trailer. Examination revealed that the neck was severed at the level of the second and third cervical vertebrae”.

In 2010, Dr. K.H. Dogan and colleagues reported the disturbing case of a Turkish 33-year schizophrenic daughter who dismembered the corpse of her 57-year old mother (in the Journal of Forensic Sciences). They noted that the dismembering of corpses is always viewed by society as “more hideous crime than the homicide itself”. In the published paper, the authors reported that the mother’s head had been decapitated, and that the daughter had also dismembered her mother’s arms and hands. The authors also reported that:

“On the victim’s head and back there were 71 incised and stab wounds in total. They were superficial, except the five stab wounds which were connected to the right chest cavity and which incapacitated the victim. Although there is not a regulation for the act of dismembering the corpse in the Turkish Penal Code, since this type of case is rare”.

Dr. E. Turk and his colleagues described the features and characteristics of homicide in cases of complete decapitation in a 2004 issue of the American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology. The paper examined four different cases of complete decapitation during or after murder. Of the four victims, three had their heads decapitated postmortem after the victim had been killed. The authors reported that the “motives for decapitation were considered defensive, aggressive, and a possible combination of the [two] in one case each”. In the remaining case, decapitation was the murderous cause of death where there was “an offensive motive for mutilation was suspected”.

Finally, a very different – and disturbing – kind of decapitation was reported in 2011 by Dr. J. Hiss and colleagues in the American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology – accidental fetal decapitation. The paper noted that blunt trauma to the head and/or neck in newborn babies is very rare. However, the authors reported the shocking case “of decapitation of a live fetus during vacuum-assisted delivery, where excessive traction on the head of the full-term macrosomic fetus with shoulder dystocia resulted in overstretching of the neck up to the point of decapitation”.

Non-suicidal decapitation appears to be very rare which perhaps makes each case shocking irrespective of how it happened. However, decapitation obviously occurs in other non-academically reported circumstances (e.g., terrorist beheadings that have been recorded and then online, beheadings as part of criminal punishment or war crimes), and are equally – if not more – shocking.

Dr Mark Griffiths, Professor of Gambling Studies, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

Further reading

Demirci, S., Dogan, K.H., Erkol, Z., & Gunaydin, G. (2009). Accidental decapitation: a case report. American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology, 30, 270-272.

Dogan, K.H., Demirci, S., Deniz, I., & Erkol, Z. (2010). Decapitation and dismemberment of the corpse: A matricide case. Journal of Forensic Sciences, 55, 542-545.

Doichinov, I.D., Spasov, S.S., Dobrev, T. S., & Doichinova, J.A. (2007). Complete decapitation of a motorcyclist in a road accident. A case report. Folia Medica, 49(3-4), 80-83.

Hiss, J., Kahana, T., & Burshtein, I. (2011). Accidental fetal decapitation: a case of medical and ethical mishap. American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology, 32, 245-247

Ihama, Y., Miyazaki, T., Fuke, C., Niki, H., & Maehira, T. (2008). Complete decapitation of a motorcycle driver due to a roadblock chain. International Journal of Legal Medicine, 122, 511-515.

Kibayashi, K., Yonemitsu, K., Honjyo, K., & Tsunenari, S. (1999). Accidental decapitation: an unusual injury to a passenger in a vehicle. Medicine, Science, and the Law, 39(1), 82-84.

Kumral, B., Büyük, Y., Gündogmus, Ü. N., Sahın, E., & Sahın, M. F. (2012). Medico-legal evaluation of deaths due to decapitation. Romanian Journal of Legal Medicine, 20, 251-254.

Rashid, A. F., Aggarwal, A. D., Aggarwal, O. P., & Kaur, B. (2012). Accidental decapitation – An urban legend turned true. Egyptian Journal of Forensic Sciences, 2, 112-114.

Türk, E.E., Püschel, K., & Tsokos, M. (2004). Features characteristic of homicide in cases of complete decapitation. American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology, 25(1), 83-86.

Zoja, R., Gentile, G., Giovanetti, G. F., & Palazzo, E. (2011). Death by complete decapitation of motorcyclist wearing full face helmet: Case report. Forensic Science International, 207(1), e48-e50.

Net losses: Internet abuse and addiction in the workplace

The following article is a much extended version of an article that was originally published by The Conversation under the title ‘Tweets and cybersex: Workplace web use is a minefield’

A number of market research reports have indicated that many office employees in the UK spend at least one hour of their day at work on various non-work activities (e.g., booking holidays, shopping online, posting messages on social networking sites, playing online games, etc.) and costs businesses millions of pounds a year. These findings highlight that internet abuse is a serious cause for concern – particularly to employers. Furthermore, the long-term effects of internet abuse may have more far-reaching effects for the company that internet abusers work for than the individuals themselves. Abuse also suggests that there may not necessarily be any negative effects for the user other than a decrease in work productivity.

Back in the early 2000s (and using some of Kimberley Young’s work on types of internet addiction) I developed a typology of internet abusers. This included cybersexual Internet abuse, online friendship/relationship abuse, internet activity abuse, online information abuse, criminal internet abuse, and miscellaneous Internet abuse:

• Cybersexual Internet abuse: This involves the abuse of adult websites for cybersex and cyberporn during work hours. Such behaviours include the reading of online pornographic magazines, the watching of pornographic videos and/or webcams, or the participating in online sexual discussion groups, forums or instant chat facilities
• Online friendship/relationship abuse: This involves the conducting of an online friendship and/or relationship during work hours. Such a category could also include the use of e-mailing friends, posting messages to friends on social networking sites (e.g., on Facebook, Twitter, etc.), and/or engaging in discussion groups, as well as maintenance of online emotional relationships. Such people may also abuse the Internet by using it to explore gender and identity roles by swapping gender or creating other personas and forming online relationships or engaging in cybersex.
• Internet activity abuse: This involves the use of the internet during work hours in which other non-work related activities are done (e.g., online gambling, online shopping, online travel booking, online video gaming in massively multiplier games, online day-trading, online casual gaming via social network sites, etc.). This appears to be one of the most common forms of Internet abuse in the workplace.
• Online information abuse: This involves the abuse of internet search engines and databases (e.g., Googling online for hours, constantly checking Twitter account, etc.). Typically, this involves individuals who search for work-related information on databases etc. but who end up wasting hours of time with little relevant information gathered. This may be deliberate work-avoidance but may also be accidental and/or non-intentional. It may also involve people who seek out general educational information, information for self-help/diagnosis (including online therapy) and/or scientific research for non-work purposes.
• Criminal Internet abuse: This involves the seeking out individuals who then become victims of sexually-related Internet crime (e.g., online sexual harassment, online trolling, cyberstalking, paedophilic “grooming” of children). The fact that these types of abuse involve criminal acts may have severe implications for employers.
• Miscellaneous Internet abuse: This involves any activity not found in the above categories such as the digital manipulation of images on the Internet for entertainment and/or masturbatory purposes (e.g., creating celebrity fake photographs where heads of famous people are superimposed onto someone else’s naked body).

There are many factors that make Internet abuse in the workplace seductive. It is clear from research in the area of computer-mediated communication that virtual environments have the potential to provide short-term comfort, excitement, and/or distraction. These provide compelling reasons as to why employees may engage in non-work related internet use. There are also other reasons (opportunity, access, affordability, anonymity, convenience, escape, disinhibition, social acceptance, and longer working hours):

• Opportunity and access: Obvious pre-cursors to potential Internet abuse includes both opportunity and access to the Internet. Clearly, the internet is now commonplace and widespread, and is almost integral to almost all office workplace environments. Given that prevalence of undesirable behaviours is strongly correlated with increased access to the activity, it is not surprising that the development of internet abuse appears to be increasing across the population. Research into other socially acceptable but potentially problematic behaviours (drinking alcohol, gambling etc.) has demonstrated that increased accessibility leads to increased uptake (i.e., regular use) and that this eventually leads to an increase in problems – although the increase may not be proportional.
• Affordability: Given the wide accessibility of the internet, it is now becoming cheaper and cheaper to use the online services on offer. Furthermore, for almost all employees, Internet access is totally free of charge and the only costs will be time and the financial costs of some particular activities (e.g., online sexual services, online gambling etc.).
• Anonymity: The anonymity of the Internet allows users to privately engage in their behaviours of choice in the belief that the fear of being caught by their employer is minimal. This anonymity may also provide the user with a greater sense of perceived control over the content, tone, and nature of their online experiences. The anonymity of the Internet often facilitates more honest and open communication with other users and can be an important factor in the development of online relationships that may begin in the workplace. Anonymity may also increase feelings of comfort since there is a decreased ability to look for, and thus detect, signs of insincerity, disapproval, or judgment in facial expression, as would be typical in face-to-face interactions.
• Convenience: Interactive online applications such as e-mail, social media, chat rooms, online forums, or role-playing games provide convenient mediums to meet others without having to leave one’s work desk. Online abuse will usually occur in the familiar and comfortable environment of home or workplace thus reducing the feeling of risk and allowing even more adventurous behaviours.
• Escape: For some, the primary reinforcement of particular kinds of internet abuse (e.g., to engage in an online affair and/or cybersex) is the sexual gratification they experience online. In the case of behaviours like cybersex and online gambling, the experiences online may be reinforced through a subjectively and/or objectively experienced ‘high’. The pursuit of mood-modifying experiences is characteristic of addictions. The mood-modifying experience has the potential to provide an emotional or mental escape and further serves to reinforce the behaviour. Abusive and/or excessive involvement in this escapist activity may lead to problems (e.g., online addictions). Online behaviour can provide a potent escape from the stresses and strains of real life. These activities fall on the continuum from life enhancing to pathological and addictive.
• Disinhibition: Disinhibition is clearly one of the internet’s key appeals as there is little doubt that the Internet makes people less inhibited. Online users appear to open up more quickly online and reveal themselves emotionally much faster than in the offline world. What might take months or years in an offline relationship may only takes days or weeks online. As a number of researchers have pointed out, the perception of trust, intimacy and acceptance has the potential to encourage online users to use these relationships as a primary source of companionship and comfort.
• Social acceptability:The social acceptability of online interaction is another factor to consider in this context. What is really interesting is how the perception of online activity has changed over the last 15 years (e.g., the ‘nerdish’ image of the Internet is almost obsolete). It may also be a sign of increased acceptance as young children and adolescents are exposed to technology earlier and so become used to socializing using computers as tools. For instance, laying the foundations for an online relationship in this way has become far more socially acceptable and will continue to be so. Most of these people are not societal misfits as is often claimed – they are simply using the technology as another tool in their social armory.
• Longer working hours: All over the world, people are working longer hours and it is perhaps unsurprising that many of life’s activities can be performed from the workplace Internet. Take, for example, the case of a single individual looking for a relationship. For these people, the Internet at work may be ideal. Dating via the desktop may be a sensible option for workaholic professionals. It is effectively a whole new electronic “singles bar” which because of its text-based nature breaks down physical prejudices. For others, internet interaction takes away the social isolation that we can all sometimes feel. There are no boundaries of geography, class or nationality. It opens up a whole new sphere of relationship-forming.

Being able to spot someone who is an Internet abuser can be very difficult. However, there are some practical steps that employers can be taken to help minimize the potential problem.

• Take the issue of internet abuse seriously. Internet abuse and addiction in all their varieties are only just being considered as potentially serious occupational issues. Managers, in conjunction with Personnel Departments need to ensure they are aware of the issues involved and the potential risks it can bring to both their employees and the whole organization. They also need to be aware that for employees who deal with finances, some forms of Internet abuse (e.g., Internet gambling), the consequences for the company can be very great.
• Raise awareness of internet abuse issues at work. This can be done through e-mail circulation, leaflets, and posters on general notice boards. Some countries will have national and/or local agencies (e.g., technology councils, health and safety organizations etc.) that can supply useful educational literature (including posters). Telephone numbers for these organizations can usually be found in most telephone directories.
• Ask employees to be vigilant. Internet abuse at work can have serious repercussions not only for the individual but also for those employees who befriend Internet abusers, and the organization itself. Fellow staff members need to know the basic signs and symptoms of Internet abuse. Employee behaviours such as continual use the Internet for non-work purposes might be indicative of an Internet abuse problem.
• Monitor internet use of staff that may be having problems. Those staff members with an internet-related problem are likely to spend great amounts of time engaged in non-work activities on the Internet. Should an employer suspect such a person, they should get the company’s I.T. specialists to look at their Internet surfing history as the computer’s hard disc will have information about everything they have ever accessed.
• Check internet “bookmarks” of staff. In some jurisdictions across the world, employers can legally access the e-mails and Internet content of their employees. One of the simplest checks is to simply look at an employee’s list of “bookmarked” websites. If they are spending a lot of employment time engaged in non-work activities, many bookmarks will be completely non-work related (e.g., online dating agencies, gambling sites).
• Develop an “Internet Abuse At Work” policy. Many organizations have policies for behaviours such as smoking or drinking alcohol. Employers should develop their own internet abuse policies via liaison between Personnel Services and local technology councils and/or health and safety executives.
• Give support to identified problem users. Most large organizations have counselling services and other forms of support for employees who find themselves in difficulties. In some (but not all) situations, problems associated with internet use need to be treated sympathetically (and like other more bona fide problems such as alcoholism). Employee support services must also be educated about the potential problems of internet abuse in the workplace.

Internet abuse can clearly be a hidden activity and the growing availability of internet facilities in the workplace is making it easier for abuse to occur in lots of different forms. Thankfully, it would appear that for most people internet abuse is not a serious individual problem although for large companies, small levels of internet abuse multiplied across the workforce raises serious issues about work productivity. For those whose internet abuse starts to become more of a problem, it can affect many levels including the individual, their work colleagues, and the organization itself.

Managers clearly need to have their awareness of this issue raised, and once this has happened, they need to raise awareness of the issue among the work force. Furthermore, employers need to let employees know exactly which behaviours on the Internet are reasonable (e.g., the occasional e-mail to a friend) and those that are unacceptable (e.g., online gaming, cybersex etc.). Internet abuse has the potential to be a social issue, a health issue and an occupational issue and needs to be taken seriously by all those employers who utilize the Internet in their day-to-day business.

Dr. Mark Griffiths, Professor of Gambling Studies, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

Further reading

Griffiths, M.D. (1995). Technological addictions. Clinical Psychology Forum, 76, 14-19.

Griffiths, M.D. (2002). Internet gambling in the workplace. In M. Anandarajan & C. Simmers (Eds.). Managing Web Usage in the Workplace: A Social, Ethical and Legal Perspective (pp. 148-167). Hershey, Pennsylvania: Idea Publishing.

Griffiths, M.D. (2002). Occupational health issues concerning Internet use in the workplace. Work and Stress, 16, 283-287.

Griffiths, M.D. (2003). Internet abuse in the workplace – Issues and concerns for employers and employment counselors. Journal of Employment Counseling, 40, 87-96.

Griffiths, M.D. (2004). Internet abuse and addiction in the workplace – Issues and concerns for employers. In M. Anandarajan (Eds.). Personal Web Usage in the Workplace: A Guide to Effective Human Resource Management (pp. 230-245).Hershey, Pennsylvania: Idea Publishing.

Griffiths, M.D. (2009). Internet gambling in the workplace. Journal of Workplace Learning, 21, 658-670.

Griffiths, M.D. (2010). Internet abuse and internet addiction in the workplace. Journal of Worplace Learning, 7, 463-472.

Griffiths, M.D. (2010). The hidden addiction: Gambling in the workplace. Counselling at Work, 70, 20-23.

Griffiths, M.D. (2012). Internet sex addiction: A review of empirical research. Addiction Research and Theory, 20, 111-124.

Griffiths, M.D., Kuss, D.J. & Demetrovics, Z. (2014). Social networking addiction: An overview of preliminary findings. In K. Rosenberg & L. Feder (Eds.), Behavioral Addictions: Criteria, Evidence and Treatment (pp.119-141). New York: Elsevier.

Kuss, D.J., Griffiths, M.D., Karila, L. & Billieux, J. (2014).  Internet addiction: A systematic review of epidemiological research for the last decade. Current Pharmaceutical Design, in press.

Widyanto, L. & Griffiths, M.D. (2006). Internet addiction: Does it really exist? (Revisited). In J. Gackenbach (Ed.), Psychology and the Internet: Intrapersonal, Interpersonal and Transpersonal Applications (2^nd Edition), (pp.141-163). New York: Academic Press.

Young K. (1999). Internet addiction: Evaluation and treatment. Student British Medical Journal, 7, 351-352.

Men of steal: A brief look at the psychology of shoplifting

In previous blogs I have examined activities like shopping as an addiction. One similar such behaviour is shoplifting. I have to admit that from a personal perspective I came from a family where at least two of my siblings were regular shoplifters and were both regularly caught by shop staff members and reported to the police. As a teenager, my brother was a habitual shoplifter. His behaviour was economically motivated at the start (i.e., we came from a very poor and impoverished family and he stole things because he couldn’t afford to buy things that his friends had) but was later carried out to help feed his addiction to slot machines (i.e., he would steal shop items, sell them, and use the money to gamble). This latter behaviour is common among adolescent gamblers and I have written about this in both of my published books on adolescent slot machine addiction as well as in a number of my published papers.

Last week, one of my regular blog readers, forensic psychologist Dr. John C. Brady, sent me a copy of his latest book Why Rich Women Shoplift – When They Have It All. It’s an engrossing and fascinating read (I sat an read it all in one sitting) and there are many references throughout to seeing some forms of shoplifting as an addiction. I will return to this topic in a future blog (along with a look at the related behaviour of kleptomania) but I thought I would use today’s blog to talk about something very specific in Dr. Brady’s book.

One of the many interesting things I read was Brady’s classification of 16 different types of shoplifters with seven underlying psychological dimensions. The classification included those that are (i) impulse driven (The Externalizer; The Compulsive; The Atypical Shoplifter), (ii) psychologically motivated (The Kleptomaniac; The Thrill Seeker; The Trophy Shoplifter; The Binge-Spree Shoplifter; The Equalizer; The Situational Shoplifter), (iii) economically influenced (The Professional; The Impoverished [Economically Disadvantaged] Shoplifter), (iv) age determined (The Provisional/Delinquent Shoplifter), (v) alcohol and substance connected (The Drug or Alcohol Addict), (vi) mentally/medically impaired (The Alzheimer’s Sufferer/Amnesiac; The Chemically/Alcohol Driven Shoplifter), and (vii) no identifiable psychosocial drivers (The Inadvertent/Amateur Shoplifter). Brady acknowledges that the typology is purely descriptive, not exhaustive and was not developed to be mutually exclusive. Here is a brief description of the 16 types:

• The Externalizer: These are people who feel that they are not in control of their lives (“controlled by outside forces that serve as negative psychological drivers, lowering their moral threshold”) and have an external locus of control. Brady argues that shoplifting simply channels to express anger or help legitimize their personal aggression. All of Brady’s rich women that shoplift fit this particular profile.
• The Compulsive: From the descriptor, it is self-evident that this type of shoplifts as a compulsive behaviour and may also engage in other types of addictive behaviour such as gambling addiction and shopping/buying addiction. According to Brady they are generous individuals but do not care about themselves. When they are caught shoplifting they are full of remorse (and only feel good during or just after the shoplifting incident) but simply cannot resist the urge to shoplift.
• The Atypical Shoplifter: This type of shoplifter is based on the work of Dr. Will Cupchik and described in his 2011 book Why Honest People Shoplift or Commit Other Acts of Theft: Assessment and Treatment of ‘Atypical Theft Offenders. Brady describes such people as not shoplifting for any kind of personal economic gains. Such people claim they had no idea why they engaged in shoplifting except to say that it wasn’t economically motivated.
• The Kleptomaniac: Like atypical shoplifters, kleptomaniacs also steal and shoplift for no apparent reason (and do so impulsively). Many people may have the impression that most shoplifters are kleptomaniacs but as Brady is keen to point out, only 5% of shoplifters are kleptomaniacs. Brady claims this category is the most controversial although the classification in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (correctly) classes kleptomania as an impulse-control disorder and the behaviour is not carried out as an expression of anger or vengeance. (Dr. Brady spends a whole chapter in his book explaining why the DSM classification of kleptomania is poor).
• The Thrill Seeker: Brady describes this group of people (typically adolescents) as a “higher risk shoplifter” who shoplift for the intrinsic excitement of carrying out an illegal behaviour. They may also shoplift as part of a dare simultaneously with other shoplifters. Brady claims that shoplifting for thrill seekers gives them a sense of autonomy (and that the goal is “psychological overcompensation” for individuals that may have a history of failure in the lives).
• The Trophy Shoplifter: Brady claims there have been an increasing number of cases of trophy shoplifters reported in the media. Citing Terence Shulman (who also wrote the Foreword for Brady’s book), Brady quotes from Cluttered Lives, Empty Souls – Compulsive Stealing, Spending and Hoarding (Shulman’s 2011 book) and says trophy shoppers “tend to need to have the best of everything: they seek out that perfect object, be it fashion, art, car, etc. – the more special, unique, or rare, the better”. To me, this behaviour appears to be a by-product of being an ardent collector, and Brady does go on to say there is a “direct connection” between a collector and a trophy shoplifter.
• The Binge-Spree Shoplifter: According to Brady, binge-spree shoplifters are typically adolescents (but may carry on as an adult) where the person shoplifts in a short bout of thefts arising from a combination of weak impulses and doing it to impress their peers (i.e., or as Brady terms it “subcultural recognition”). Like binge drinking and binge gambling, the behaviour occurs in short specific bouts followed by appreciable periods of abstinence.
• The Equalizer: This category of shoplifter arose from some of Brady’s own case studies. Some of the shoplifters he interviewed felt that over the course of their lives, many things (both real and perceived) had been taken from them and that shoplifting was “retaliatory justification” for such past events. Brady also described such individuals as going through their lives with “a good-size chip on their shoulders” and who are agitated, edgy and resistant to treatment.
• The Situational Shoplifter: Brady describes the situational shoplifter as an opportunist that steals on the spur of the moment after seeing an item that has some kind of appeal to them. The process itself was described by Brady as “almost unconscious”. In many ways, the motivation is similar to the compulsive shoplifter but the activity is much more likely to be done on a very occasional basis.
• The Professional: Professional shoplifters are very simply those that steal (often expensive “high-end”) items for profit. A number of television shows in the UK have profiled such people and as Brady points out, this type of shoplifter shows no remorse if caught and will often try to resist arrest.
• The Impoverished [Economically Disadvantaged] Shoplifter: Like the professional shoplifter, the motivation to steal is economically motivated but is done out of necessity rather than for profit and/or greed. Items stolen may be basic necessities (food, toiletries, nappies, etc.) and when caught such people may show remorse (however, according to Brady they are hostile towards the “system” that has led to them being economically disadvantaged).
• The Provisional/Delinquent Shoplifter: This type of shoplifter is usually an adolescent delinquent that shoplifts as part of a wider group of antisocial behaviours in their “troubled teens”. There appears to be some crossover with thrill seeking shoplifters and binge-spree shoplifters as there are elements of both hedonism and peer pressure associated with the criminal act. The good news is that many teens appear to mature out of such behaviour.
• The Drug or Alcohol Addict: This type of shoplifter engages in shoplifting behaviour to support their addictive habit (and as such – and as Brady acknowledges – could technically be in the ‘economically influenced’ category of shoplifters. Brady claims they often take high risks and will try to steal as many items as quickly as possible and then run out of the shop. According to Brady, pre-planning is almost non-existent.
• The Alzheimer’s Sufferer/Amnesiac: This group of shoplifters includes those with severe memory problems and who simply walk out of shops without paying simply because they forgot and/or didn’t realize they hadn’t paid. Brady claims that this group of shoplifters is arguably the fastest growing group as we live in a society where the average age of dying is increasing all the time.
• The Chemically/Alcohol Driven Shoplifter: Brady claims that this group of shoplifters is distinct from drug and alcohol addicts because the shoplifting is not economically motivated and occurs because they are in an altered state of awareness (due to the psychoactive effects of the substances ingested). As Brady notes, their “mental state typically involves such symptoms as confusion, psychomotor agitation, memory lapse, disorientation, nervousness, and perceptual disturbance” (especially those high on cocaine or meth). From a public safety perspective, the police claim that it is these individuals that pose the biggest threat.
• The Inadvertent/Amateur Shoplifter: This final category refers to those without any kind of psychological or physiological disorder who simply “forget to pay” for an item. People may not even realize for some considerable time after that they didn’t pay for the item(s) and it is then up to the person’s conscience as to whether they return the “stolen” items.

I think this typology is intuitive and covers almost all the types of shoplifter that I can think of. I say ‘almost’ as my own brother’s late teenage shoplifting behaviour would not be included in any of the 16 types listed here. However, the ‘drug/alcohol addict’ category could be widened to ‘chemical or behavioural addict’ and then he would be able to be included.

Dr. Mark Griffiths, Professor of Gambling Studies, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

Further reading

Brady, J.C. (2013). Why Rich Women Shoplift – When They Have It All. San Jose, CA: Western Psych Press.

Cupchick, W. (1997). Why Honest People Shoplift or Commit Other Acts of Theft: Assessment and Treatment of ‘Atypical Theft Offenders. Toronto: Tagami Communication.

Griffiths, M.D. (1995). Adolescent Gambling. London: Routledge.

Griffiths, M.D. (2002). Gambling and Gaming Addictions in Adolescence. Leicester: British Psychological Society/Blackwells.

Griffiths, M.D. (2011). Adolescent gambling. In B. Bradford Brown & Mitch Prinstein(Eds.), Encyclopedia of Adolescence (Volume 3) (pp.11-20). San Diego: Academic Press.

Griffiths, M.D. (in press). Gambling and crime. In W.G. Jennings (Ed.), The Encyclopedia of Crime and Punishment. London: Sage.

Griffiths, M.D. & Sparrow, P. (1996). Funding fruit machine addiction: The hidden crime. Probation Journal, 43, 211-213.

Shulman, T.D. (2011). Cluttered Lives, Empty Souls – Compulsive Stealing, Spending and Hoarding. West Conshohocken, PA: Infinity Publishing.

Yeoman, T. & Griffiths, M.D. (1996). Adolescent machine gambling and crime. Journal of Adolescence, 19, 99-104.

From the university of perversity: An A to Z of non-researched sexual paraphilias (Part 3)

Today’s blog is the third part in my review of little researched (and in most cases non-researched) sexual paraphilias and strange sexual behaviours. (You can read Part 1 here, and Part 2 here). I’ve tried to locate information on all of these alleged sexual behaviours listed below and in some cases have found nothing more than a definition (some of which were in Dr. Anil Aggrawal’s book Forensic and Medico-legal Aspects of Sexual Crimes and Unusual Sexual Practices and/or Dr. Brenda Love’s Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices).

• Agrexophilia: This behaviour refers to the gaining of sexual arousal from other people knowing that you are having sex. According to the online Probert Encyclopedia, agrexophilia is “sexual arousal from the knowledge that other people may become aware of the lovemaking, for example by being overheard or seen”.
• Brachioproctic eroticism: According to Dr. Anil Aggrawal, brachioproctic eroticism (also known as brachioproctism) refers to the “insertion of the arm into the rectum of another person for sexual pleasure”.
• Catagelophilia: This refers to being sexually aroused from being ridiculed. This appears to be the opposite of categelophobia (ridicule phobia).
• Dystychiphilia: According to Dt. Anil Aggrawal, dystychiphilia refers to those that derive sexual pleasure from accidents (although what “accidents” refers to in these cases is left undefined). The Squackle.com website provides the example of “dropping a plate on the floor”. The online Medical Dictionary defines it as “paraphilic sexuoeroticism linked to watching or participating in accidents” and adds that “it is not used to working medical parlance”.
• Endytolagnia: Most definitions of endytolagnia say it refers to sexual arousal from partners who are fully clothed. The Word Information website defines it as a “sexual perversion in which sexual intercourse is had with a fully dressed female”.
• Frictation: This is a form of frotteurism, and according to Dr. Anil Aggrawal, frictation is “a sexual practice in which two male partners achieve sexual satisfaction by rubbing against each other while in a face-to-face position. (The female counterpart is known as tribadism)”. (Tribadism as far as I am aware is the mutual rubbing of clitorises – sometimes called ‘tribbing’ – and gave rise to the term ‘Scissor Sisters’).
• Graophilia: This behaviour 9according to Dr. Anil Aggrawal) refers to sexual arousal from an older female partner. I’m assuming this refers to the woman being significantly older but no definition I have come across explicitly mentions what the age difference needs to be.
• Hygrophilia: This behaviour refers to arousal from body fluids or moisture (although it’s also the name of a plant. The Right Diagnosis website adds that hygrophilia is (i) sexual interest in body secretions, (ii) recurring intense sexual fantasies involving body secretions, and/or (iii) recurring intense sexual urges involving body secretions.
• Iantronudia: This behaviour refers to getting sexually aroused from exposing oneself to a physician, usually by faking an ailment. Some websites refer to it as “flashing a physician”.
• Jactitation: According to Wikipedia, in English Law, jactitation “is the maliciously boasting or giving out by one party that he or she is married to the other”. However, some online sites claim that it is a false boast that causes harm to others, and is sometimes sexual. The Right Diagnosis website claims jactitation “refers to sexual arousal or excitement derived from discussing their own sexual exploits”.
• Knissophilia: This behaviour may well be a sub-type of olfactophilia as (according to Dr. Anil Aggrawal) refers to the sexual attraction of incense-burning.
• Loutrophilia: This behaviour refers to the love of washing or bathing. Such a definition does not necessarily make this a sexual paraphilia although someone on the Kinkopedia website claimed they had loutrophilia. This may be a sub-type of aquaphilia that I examined in a previous blog.
• Mammagymnophilia: This refers to sexual arousal from female breasts and on various websites it has also been called breast fetishism, mazophilia, and breast partialism.
• Nemophilia: This behavioud has been defined as the love and/or sexual arousal from forests (and as such might be similar to dendrophilia that I discussed in a previous blog). The online Urban Dictionary defines nemophilia as “the love of spending time in forests or woodland; woodland survival training, as practised by the armed forces could, therefore, be considered the equivalent of sex”.
• Oikophilia: This behaviour has been defined by Dr. Anil Aggrawal as the sexual attraction to one’s home. The word has also been used (by such people as the philosopher Roger Scruton) to denote the love of houses but in this sense it has no sexual connotations whatsoever.
• Phallophilia: This behaviour refers to those individuals that have a large penis fetish or preference. The Right Diagnosis website defines it as “urges, preferences or fantasies involving [an] unusually large erect penis”
• http://www.rightdiagnosis.com/p/phallophilia/intro.htm
• Queeb fetish: Queeb fetish is actually another term for ‘queef fetish’ and refers to those individuals that are sexually aroused by vaginal farts (and which I examined in a previous blog on queefing).
• Raptophilia: According to the Right Diagnosis website, raptophilia refers to a “sexual interest in rape, an abnormal amount of time spent thinking about raping a victim, recurring intense sexual fantasies involving rape, and recurring intense sexual urges involving rape”. Other websites claim that this paraphilia only concerns the fantasy of raping someone rather than the act of actually doing it. According to Wikipedia, raptophilia is another name for biastophilia (a sexual paraphilia “in which sexual arousal is dependent on, or is responsive to, the act of assaulting an unconsenting person, especially a stranger”).
• Sarmassophilia: According to Dr. Anil Aggrawal, sarmassophilia refers to sexual arousal from kneading flesh (and appears to derive from its opposite, sarmassophobia). The Encyclo website defines it more generally as “a fondness for amorous caressing, necking, or stroking”.
• Toxophilia: I’m not sure if this related to the sexy image of Robin Hood, but according to Dr. Anil Aggrawal, toxophilia refers to sexual arousal from archery.
• Vincilagnia: There is actually loads of empirical research on vincilagnia as it is just an old scientific name for those that are sexually aroused from bondage (see the overview at the Nation Master website)
• Wind Fetish: This has nothing to do with eproctophilia (sexual arousal for flatulence), but is (according to Dr. Anil Aggrawal) is a “sexual attraction to being blown by the wind”.
• Xanthophilia: This behaviour refers to individuals that have an “abnormal affection” for the color yellow or the word yellow. Appears to be derived from its opposite (xanthophobia) so is likely to be more theoretical than actual.
• Yeast infection fetish: There appear to be some individuals that have a fetish for ‘thrush’ (yeast infections) as discussed at various online forums (such as one on the Reddit website). For instance one man confessed: “I have never told anyone in my life this before, but since I was young (about 12 years old) I used to love the smell when I put my face in my mom’s lap. It was a little fishy odd kind of odor but always super attractive to me. A while after this the smell went away and I was very disappointed. Later I found out that she had a yeast infection. To this day however i cannot resist the smell of the yeast infection vagina. It is like field of roses to me, ethereal, heavenly”.
• Zemmiphilia: According to a long list of obscure paraphilias at the Write World website, zemmiphilia refers to an “abnormal affection for the great mole rat”. I would guess this is theoretical rather than actual but I would never rule anything out.

Dr Mark Griffiths, Professor of Gambling Studies, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK 

Further reading

Aggrawal A. (2009). Forensic and Medico-legal Aspects of Sexual Crimes and Unusual Sexual Practices. Boca Raton: CRC Press.

Gates, K. (2000). Deviant Desires: Incredibly Strange Sex. New York: RE/Search Publications.

Love, B. (2001). Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices. London: Greenwich Editions.

Scorolli, C., Ghirlanda, S., Enquist, M., Zattoni, S. & Jannini, E.A. (2007). Relative prevalence of different fetishes. International Journal of Impotence Research, 19, 432-437.

Write World (2013). Philias. Located at: http://writeworld.tumblr.com/philiaquirks

Gambling addiction fiction: Philip Seymour Hoffman, addiction, and ‘Owning Mahowny’

Like many others around the world, last week I was genuinely shocked when I heard about the death of Oscar-winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman on February 2 (2014). One of my regular blog readers emailed me a couple of days ago asking if I would be writing a blog on him because of all his well publicized past drug and alcohol addiction. As the Wikipedia entry on his personal life noted:

“In a 2006 interview, Hoffman revealed he had suffered from drug and alcohol abuse and that after graduating from college at age 22, he went to rehab for drug and alcohol addiction. He said he had abused ‘anything I could get my hands on. I liked it all’. Hoffman relapsed more than 20 years later with heroin and addiction to prescription medications. He subsequently checked himself into a drug rehab for about ten days in May 2013”.

I had already decided I would do a belated tribute to Seymour Hoffman but not in relation to his chemical addictions – but in relation to his portrayal of gambling addiction in the 2003 film Owning Mahowny. Although my all-time favourite gambling film is the 1974 movie The Gambler starring James Caan (a film on which I’ve written academically – see ‘Further Reading’ below), Owning Mahowny runs a close second. One of the key strengths of Owning Mahowny was that it was based on a real person. Seymour Hoffman played ‘Dan Mahowny’ (whereas the real life person was Brian Molony).

Brian Malony worked as a Toronto-based bank clerk at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC). Over a one-and-a-half year period – and to fund his gambling addiction – Molony embezzled over $10million from the bank. His story was later the subject of a best-selling book by Gary Ross (called Stung: The Incredible Obsession of Brian Molony, and on which the screenplay to Owning Mahowny was based). Ross wrote his book following 4-5 hours of interviewing Molony every day for a month. Ross was asked what made Molony’s story so interesting:

“I was senior editor at ‘Saturday Night’ magazine at the time the fraud was discovered, right across the street from the Bay and Richmond (Toronto) branch of the CIBC. I assumed it was some sophisticated computer scam – how else could you liberate $10.2-million from a big bank? [I] was intrigued to learn from Eddie Greenspan, Brian Molony’s lawyer, that Molony was a compulsive gambler and that the frauds had been acts of improvised desperation rather than an elegant criminal scheme…Gambling addiction can be every bit as devastating, and as hard to treat, as a drug or alcohol dependency. It’s all the more insidious for being invisible, and it’s far more widespread than most people understand. A lot of social security checks, pay checks, and even liquidated homes end up on the casino’s bottom line”.

Additionally, and according to Molony’s Wikipedia entry:

“Molony, who had developed a passion for the race-track and gambling from the age of ten years, and acted as a bookie for his school-mates, graduated from the University of Western Ontario in London with a degree in journalism. Initially planning to be a financial writer, he did so well in a Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce aptitude test that he was put in their management-training program and hired right out of university. Molony spent a few weeks as a teller before working in savings, current accounts, foreign exchange and loan accounting, then ‘floating’ among some of the Bank’s huge network of some 1,600 branches, which gave him a further broad exposure to the bank’s highly regimented workings and familiarity with its systems and internal weaknesses. On a modest annual salary of about $10,000, Molony led an unassuming lifestyle in Toronto, wearing inexpensive, ill-fitting clothes and leaving carefully calculated seven per cent tips in restaurants, at the same time he was embezzling $10.2 million from CIBC to feed his gambling habit, writing loans in the names of both real and fictitious companies. Molony was then able to transfer millions of dollars out of the bank through a company called California Clearing Corp., a wholly owned subsidiary of Desert Palace, a Las Vegas casino. This corporation’s only purpose was to let people deposit sums of money into the casino without detection”.

After 18 months of spending his employer’s money (including $4,732,000 lost at Caesars between February 7, 1981 to April 23, 1982), Molony lost half a million dollars at the Caesars casino playing table games in Atlantic City (AC). Molony had led the life of a ‘high roller, and was being heavily ‘comped’ with free luxury hotel rooms and access to a Lear jet to fly between AC and Vegas. Molony was eventually arrested (April 27, 1982), the day after he lost the money at Caesars. Later in the year (November 1983), Molony admitted during his trial that he had embezzled all the money from CICB and served 30 months in jail. One of his activities since leaving prison has been to lecture publicly on gambling addiction. At the same time that Molony went to jail, CIBC filed a federal lawsuit claiming that Caesars’ staff members should have realized that the money Molony was gambling with was not his own. The case was eventually settled out of court with the terms of the settlement remaining private.

Seymour Hoffman’s portrayal of Molony was excellent and provides true insight into life as a problem gambler. Obviously there is some artistic license in the dramatization of Molony’s life but all the key elements in the film were true. The film is noteworthy because (like The Gambler) the story concerns the effects of gambling addiction on the gambler and those around him rather than the glitz and glamour of gambling in Vegas and AC. Gary Ross, author of Stung was asked whether Seymour Hoffman’s portrayal bore similarity with Brian Molony. He replied:

“Remarkably so. They have the same stocky build, bushy moustache, glasses, slightly unkempt look, and earnestness. And Philip somehow managed to assimilate the psychic essence of Molony – a yawning emptiness that nothing except gambling was able to fill…It’s remarkably faithful to what actually happened. I assumed a great many liberties would be taken in the transition from page to screen, and I’m pleased that the changes were minor and inconsequential. The pathos and grimness of what happened is there in the movie”. 

Dr Mark Griffiths, Professor of Gambling Studies, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK 

Further reading

Griffiths, M. (2004). An empirical analysis of the film ‘The Gambler’. International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, 1(2), 39-43.

Ross, G. (1987). Stung: The Incredible Obsession of Brian Molony. London: Stoddart.

Wikipedia (2014). Brian Molony. Located at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Molony

Wikipedia (2014). Owning Mahowny. Located at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owning_Mahowny

Wikipedia (2014). Philip Seymour Hoffman. Located at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Seymour_Hoffman

No time for the crime: Excessive adolescent video game playing, social networking and crime reduction

On Sunday February 9, 1964, The Beatles made their debut on US television. Their appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show drew an estimated audience of 73 million people. One of the most quoted consequences associated with this particular show was that between 8pm and 9pm when the show was aired, a number of news reports claimed that there was no reported incidence of juvenile crime across America during the time of the broadcast.  The editor of Newsweek, B.F. Henry, went as far as to claim that “there wasn’t so much as a hubcap stolen” during the hour that The Beatles were on the show.

This apocryphal tale, at the very least, shows the apparent compelling logic in the argument that when an activity is so engrossing it has the capacity to stop people engaging in other types of activity such as crime. Inspired by a speculative blog post on the topic, my friend and research colleague Dr. Mike Sutton failed to disconfirm what Dr. Sutton and I have called the Crime Substitution Hypothesis. We recently published a small paper in the journal Education and Health that examined the extent to which popular youth activity (namely video gaming and social networking) may be having an effect on youth offending and victimization.

Young people’s use of technology (the so called ‘screenagers’ and ‘digital natives’) has increased greatly over the last two decades and a significant proportion of daily time is spent in front of various screen interfaces most notably videogames, mobile phones (e.g., SMS) and the internet (e.g., social networking sites like Bebo, Facebook). These ‘digital natives’ have never known a world without the internet, mobile phones and interactive television, and are therefore tech-savvy, have no techno-phobia, and very trusting of these new technologies.

One of the most empirically researched areas is in the area of adolescent video gaming. Negative consequences of gaming have included addiction, increased aggression, and a variety of medical consequences, such as repetitive strain injuries, obesity, and photosensitive epilepsy. There is certainly evidence that when taken to excess, videogame playing can in some cases be addictive, especially online videogame playing where the game never pauses or ends, and has the potential to be a 24/7 activity. However, there are many reported benefits that adolescents can get from playing videogames. These can be educational, social and/or therapeutic.

Another positive benefit of playing video games along with activities like social networking may be the capacity to reduce youth crime. The reason why videogames may have implications for crime reduction is their use as ‘distractors’ (such as in the role of pain management). The reasoning is that ‘distractor tasks’ consume some degree of the attentional capacity that would otherwise be devoted to pain perception. I have noted in a number of my academic papers that the main reasons that videogames make good distractors are because they:

• Are likely to engage much of a person’s individual active attention because of the cognitive and motor activity required.
• Allow the possibility to achieve sustained achievement because of the level of difficulty (i.e. challenge) of most games during extended play.
• Appear to appeal most to adolescents

For instance, one study reported the case of an eight-year-old boy with neurodermatitis being given a handheld videogame to prevent him from picking at his face. Where previous treatments had failed, the use of the game kept his hands occupied and within two weeks the affected area had healed. A number of studies have demonstrated that videogames can provide cognitive distraction for children undergoing chemotherapy. All these studies have reported that distracted child patients report less nausea after treatment (when compared with control groups), and that playing videogames reduced the amount of painkillers the children needed during treatment. The very reasons why video games may be of benefit therapeutically may also be applied to video games in a crime reduction context (i.e., the playing of video games is so cognitively distracting that that there is little time to do or think about anything else).

Consequently, there is a developing school of thought arguing that peoples’ participation (especially excessive use) in video gaming and social networking may be contributory factors that may partly explain the fall in crime rates in recent years. For instance, the economist Larry Katz was quoted in a 2010 issue of The Economist suggesting that the playing of video games may be playing a role in crime reduction. Katz’ reasoning is simple – keeping people busy keeps them out of trouble. There appears to be some statistical support for such a hypothesis as the decrease in US crime rates appears to show an inverse correlational relationship with increased sales of video game consoles and video games. Clearly this correlational evidence should be treated with caution as it says nothing about causation. However, it does provide a hypothesis that could be the subject of future empirical testing.

Could the rise in video game playing and social networking be a major cause of what criminologists claim is an unfathomable drop in crime, and if not, then why not? Routine Activity Theory predicts that if a substantial numbers of young people are not on the streets either as victims or offenders then overall high volume ‘crime opportunities’ would diminish, resulting in an overall drop in high volume crime rates. We have no idea yet whether what we might call the ‘crime substitution hypothesis’ is plausible. Therefore, in our recent paper, Dr. Sutton and I set out some ideas that support it as something possibly worthy of further exploration.

As highlighted above, research suggests some young people are spending many hours playing video games or social networking. Research also suggests that video games can be engrossing, addictive and in some cases compulsive. Additionally, research has failed to establish that violent media is either a necessary or sufficient condition for causing crime. Therefore, taking a Routine Activity Approach, it would seem that an increase in video gaming might feasibly lead to a rise in the illicit market for stolen computers and games consoles. However, there might be fewer thieves to supply it if:

• Fewer potential offenders are getting addicted to opiates and other drugs, and/or misusing alcohol out of boredom because they have escaped boredom in the real world by entering the more exciting world of cyberspace to play and interact with others.
• Potential offenders and victims are gaming excessively and/or compulsively checking Facebook and/or other social networking sites.
• The game players and other ‘netizens’ are playing at home so (a) fewer potential offenders on the streets and fewer potential victims, and (b) houses are occupied for longer and so less susceptible to burglary.
• Immersion and gaming prowess and reputation may be sufficient substitutes for the same things in the offline (real) world
• The Internet allows more people to work from home so teleworking may reduce the pool of “available” victims on the street and also ensure fewer homes are empty during the day.

The evidence provided for the ‘crime substitution hypothesis’ in our paper was anecdotal and/or correlational in nature but we would argue that this would provide a fruitful avenue for further research. Such research into ‘crime substitution’ and gaming/social networking might involve: (i) measuring time spent gaming and social networking by groups that empirical research predicts are at greater risk of becoming offenders, (ii) conducting ethnographic studies with young people to gauge whether, and if so to what extent, gaming and social networking are used as a substitute for risky activities in the offline (real) world, and do this in relation to both potential offending and victimization, (iii) examining issues of offline and online peer status and how this may impact on consequent behaviour (including criminal activity), and (iv) further examining the correlation between console and game sales – and any data on playing time and type of games – with the general crime trend over the past 20 years.

Dr Mark Griffiths, Professor of Gambling Studies, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

Further reading

Cole, H. & Griffiths, M.D. (2007). Social interactions in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing gamers. CyberPsychology and Behavior, 10, 575-583.

De Freitas, S. & Griffiths, M.D. (2008). The convergence of gaming practices with other media forms: what potential for learning? A review of the literature. Learning, Media and Technology, 33, 11-20.

Griffiths, M.D. (2005). Video games and health. British Medical Journal, 331, 122-123.

Griffiths, M.D. (2005b). The therapeutic value of videogames. In Goldstein J. & Raessens J. (eds.) Handbook of Computer Game Studies (pp. 161-171). Boston: MIT Press.

Griffiths, M.D. (2008). Internet and video-game addiction. In C. Essau (Ed.), Adolescent Addiction: Epidemiology, Assessment and Treatment (pp.231-267).  San Diego: Elselvier.

Griffiths, M.D. (2010). Trends in technological advance: Implications for sedentary behaviour and obesity in screenagers. Education and Health, 28, 35-38.

Griffiths, M.D. & Kuss, D. (2011). Adolescent social networking: Should parents and teachers be worried? Education and Health, 29, 23-25.

Griffiths, M.D. & Sutton, M. (2013). Proposing the Crime Substitution Hypothesis: Exploring the possible causal relationship between excessive adolescent video game playing, social networking and crime reduction. Education and Health, 31, 17-21.

Kuss, D.J. & Griffiths, M.D. (2011). Online social networking and addiction: A literature review of empirical research. International Journal of Environmental and Public Health, 8, 3528-3552.

Kuss, D.J. & Griffiths, M.D. (2011). Excessive online social networking: Can adolescents become addicted to Facebook? Education and Health, 29. 63-66.

Kuss, D.J. & Griffiths, M.D. (2012). Online gaming addiction in adolescence: A literature review of empirical research. Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 1, 3-22.

Sutton, M (2010) Routine Activities Theory, the Internet and the 15-Year crime drop. Criminology: The Blog of Mike Sutton. Best Thinking: http://www.bestthinking.com/thinkers/science/social_sciences/sociology/mike-sutton?tab=blog&blogpostid=9634,9634

Stats entertainment (Part 2): A 2013 review of my personal blog

My last blog of 2013 was not written by me but was prepared by the WordPress.com stats helper. I thought a few of you might be interested in the kind of person that reads my blogs. I also wanted to wish all my readers a happy new year and thank you for taking the time to read my posts.

Here’s an excerpt:

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 860,000 times in 2013. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 37 days for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

My fiction ‘addiction’: The psychology of Hannibal Lecter

If I ever went on the BBC television show Mastermind, one of my potential specialist subjects would be the fictional serial killing psychiatrist Hannibal ‘The Cannibal’ Lecter (in print and on screen). I have devoured all four of Thomas Harris’ original books and all the DVDs (all five films and the TV series). In short, I am an obsessive Lecterite. While I was at university in the 1980s doing my undergraduate psychology degree, I was also the Entertainment Editor of the University of Bradford’s newspaper (Fleece). One of the perks of my part-time (unpaid) job was that I got to watch all the latest cinema releases for free and review them for Fleece. In 1986, one of the films that I watched (and loved) was Manhunter directed by Michael Mann. At the time, I didn’t realize that the film was based on Thomas Harris’ second book Red Dragon (first published in 1981 following his 1975 non-Lecter novel Black Sunday). However, I do remember the great (and understated) performance by Scottish actor Brian Cox playing the serial killing psychiatrist (spelled ‘Lecktor’ rather than Lecter in that particular film).

It was in 1991 that my real fascination with Lecter began after seeing The Silence of the Lambs directed by Jonathan Demme (and starring Anthony Hopkins as Lecter). I went to see it in the first week it was out as I was a big fan of Demme’s work particularly his musical documentary of Talking Heads in Stop Making Sense (1984), and films such as Melvin and Howard (1980), Swing Shift (1984), and Something Wild (1986). I came out of the cinema and within the space of a few weeks I had seen the film three times (and I was delighted when the film won all five of the main Oscar categories in 1992 – only the third film ever to have done so). At the time, I was a psychology lecturer at the University of Plymouth, and was teaching a weekly criminal psychology module to police inspectors on the university’s BA in Social and Organizational Studies. I was enthralled by the film’s use of behavioural profiling of criminals and the fact that the star of the film was a strange and bizarre paradox – a highly intelligent and highly cultured psychiatrist that also happened to be a serial killing cannibal.

It was at this point that I bought the two Thomas Harris novels that featured Lecter (i.e., Red Dragon and the 1988 sequel The Silence of the Lambs). I was gripped. Harris had clearly done his psychological and criminological research well (and I found the two books even better than the films). From then on I sought out anything Lecter-related and bought Harris’ further sequel (Hannibal, 1999) and prequel (Hannibal Rising, 2006), and watched and bought the big-budget Hollywood films Hannibal (2001, directed by Ridley Scott), Red Dragon (2002, directed by Brett Ratner) and Hannibal Rising (2007, directed by Peter Webber and starring Gaspard Ulliel as the young Hannibal), and most recently the US television series Hannibal (2013, starring Mads Mikkelsen as Lecter). My good friends also started buying me Lecter-related gifts (such as Daniel O’Brien’s excellent 2001 book The Hannibal Files).

So why am I – and millions of others worldwide – so fascinated, and – for want of a better word – ‘hooked’ on Hannibal the Cannibal’s fictional exploits? In 2005, the American Film Institute voted Hannibal Lecter the No.1 villain of all time (and who would argue against?). I suppose one of the scariest things about Lecter is that he’s the composite of real serial killers. People like Lecter actually exist and Harris clearly did his homework in writing his novels. In July 2013, Harris gave a rare interview and claimed that his inspiration for Lecter was a real-life Mexican murdering doctor (that he gave a pseudonym ‘Dr. Salazar’) and that he met in the 1960s while he was a newspaper crime reporter. Harris claimed that ‘Salazar’ had a “certain elegance”. It has also been noted that Harris attended the trial of Pietro Pacciani, a suspected serial killer nicknamed the ‘Monster of Florence’. The Wikipedia entry on Lecter claims that Pacciani’s serial killing modus operandi was used in his Hannibal novel. The Wikipedia entry also went on to say:

“According to David Sexton, author of The Strange World of Thomas Harris: Inside the Mind of the Creator of Hannibal Lecter, Harris once told a librarian in Cleveland, Mississippi, that Lecter was inspired by William Coyne, a local murderer who had escaped from prison in 1934 and gone on a rampage that included acts of murder and cannibalism. In her book Evil Serial Killers, Charlotte Greig asserts that the serial killer Albert Fish was the inspiration, at least in part, for Lecter. Greig also states that to explain Lecter’s pathology, Harris borrowed the story of serial killer and cannibal Andrei Chikatilo’s brother Stepan being kidnapped and eaten by starving neighbours (though she states that it is unclear whether the story was true or whether Stepan Chikatilo even existed)”.

I was surprised to find that there are dozens of academic papers written from many perspectives including psychology, psychiatry, criminology, media/film studies, and literary criticism (and I may well come back and write further blogs on Lecter using some of these). However, the rest of today’s blog concentrates on a really interesting trilogy of papers about Lecter written by Professor James Oleson in the Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture (during 2005-2006). Oleson did a thorough review of various academic literatures and noted (in his 2005 paper) the following in relation to (i) the appeal of serial killers, and (ii) the appeal of Lecter more specifically:

“Apter (1992) suggests that serial killers transfix people because dangerous things – like serial killers – tend to create a state of invigorating psychological arousal. To neutralize the feelings of anxiety that accompany dangerous threats – like serial killers – we use protective frames such as narrative explanations or criminological theories. In explaining the serial killer’s behavior, we allow ourselves to succumb to the exciting magnetism of evil (Kloer, 2002) and can thereby ‘experience the excitement of arousal without being overwhelmed by anxiety’ (Ramsland, 2005)…Why do we love Lecter? Perhaps because he is the ‘perfect gothic hero’ (Dunant, 1999) or because he is the perfect gothic antihero (Dery, 1999). Perhaps it is because the heroic and the villainous co-exist within him. Because he is Obi Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader rolled into one (Hawker, 2001), because he is Darth Vader and Superman rolled into one (Cagle, 2002), or because he is Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty rolled into one (Sexton, 2001)”.

Professor Oleson spends a lot of the first paper examining whether Lecter fits any of the serial killer typologies that various criminologists have formulated over the last three or four decades. According to Oleson, various researchers have identified two key precursors that have a high association with serial homicide – a pathological fantasy life and childhood trauma. Oleson argues that Lecter fits “this basic etiological model” because “he enjoys a rich and detailed fantasy life” and “he suffered serious childhood trauma”. Oleson also recounted the FBI’s research into ‘organized’ and ‘disorganized’ serial killers, and argued that there was evidence across all Harris’ books that Lecter displayed all 14 profile characteristics of an organized serial killer: (i) average to above-average intelligence, (ii) socially competent, (iii) skilled work preferred, (iv) sexually competent, (v) high birth order status, (vi) father’s work stable, (vii) inconsistent childhood discipline, (viii) controlled mood during crime, (ix) use of alcohol with crime, (x) precipitating situational stress, (xi) living with partner, (xii) mobility with car in good condition, (xiii) follows crime in news media, and (xiv) may change jobs or leave town.

Oleson also notes there are some models of serial killing that Lecter does not fit at all. For instance, the ‘addiction model’ of killing argues that some serial killers have a compulsion to kill and that they become addicted to killing (as put forward in the 1988 book Serial Killers by Dr. Joel Norris, and the 1996 book The Psychopathology of Serial Murder by Dr. Stephen Giannangelo). Another psychological model associated with serial killers is the concept of ‘sociopathy’ and ‘psychopathy’ (now termed ‘antisocial personality disorder’). Throughout Harris’ novels there are various references to Lecter being a sociopath and in the films he is described as being a psychopath (most notably by the psychiatrist Dr. Frederick Chilton, Director of the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where Lecter was sent after being caught by his former profiling partner at the FBI (Will Graham). Oleson uses Dr. Robert Hare’s commonly used Psychopathy Checklist (first published in a 1980 issue of the journal Personality and Individual Differences) and convincingly shows that there is little evidence that Lecter is a psychopath.

Another model that Lecter does not fit is the “homicidal triad” of warning-sign behaviours (i.e., bed-wetting, animal cruelty, and fire starting) outlined in the many books of the FBI’s Dr. John Douglas and Mark Olshaker. This FBI research asserts that these three warning behaviours (particularly when they co-occur in adolescence) signal an elevated risk of subsequent serial homicide. However, Oleson shows that Lecter does not fit this profile at all. In his second (2006) paper, Oleson also assesses to what extent Lecter is insane. According to the M’Naughten test for insanity:

“It must be clearly proved that, at the time of committing the act, the party accused was laboring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing, or that [if] he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong (Finkel, 1988)”.

Oleson argues that Lecter “flunks the M’Naughten test on all counts”. In fact he goes on to say that:

“[Lecter] does not suffer from a defect of reason – if anything, as a genius with an infinitely rare IQ score, he may suffer from a superhuman perfection of the reason… Similarly, Lecter knows perfectly well the nature and quality of the crimes he commits, and he knows that they are denounced as wrong by society…The character of Hannibal Lecter would be deemed sane under more recently developed tests for insanity, as well. Lecter, in perfect command of his will, does not commit his crimes because he is compelled. Accordingly, he would not be insane under any formulation of the irresistible impulse test (Finkel, 1988). Nor would he be found insane under the American Law Institute test. ‘A person is not responsible for criminal conduct if at the time of such conduct as a result of mental disease or defect he lacks substantial capacity either to appreciate the criminality of his conduct or to conform his conduct to the requirements of law’ (Finkel, 1988). Lecter possesses both near-infallible cognitive ability and an iron will. He in no way fits the categories of insanity articulated under prevailing rules”.

Oleson’s papers also examine the idea that Lecter may be a non-human monster, a vampire, a superhuman, and/or the Devil. He also speculates that his crimes may be the product of his superhuman intellect (as Lecter’s IQ is so high that it cannot be assessed by any instruments that are currently used). As Oleson concludes in the second of his three papers:

“It has been suggested that the character of Hannibal Lecter is so memorable because he emerges from paradox…It could simply be the case, however, that Lecter is such a successful villain because we love monster stories…because we need monsters…and because the Lecter novels skillfully combine the police procedural with particularly resonant elements of the supernatural horror story”.

I (for one) love the paradox of Lecter’s personality and character. Both (super)man and monster. I admire some of his character traits but (of course) despise others. He is a highly flawed criminal genius and polymath. A serial killer and a cannibal. Victim and villain. In his third paper on Lecter, Oleson asserts something that I agree (and will leave you) with:

“By asking why Hannibal Lecter commits his crimes, criminologists may be able to use the Lecter novels and movies as a catalyst for the study of the etiology of serial homicide. The character of Hannibal Lecter is, after all, based on real life serial killers, and provides readers and viewers with an intimate (if hyperbolic) case study of an organized serial killer. Characters drawn from novels can serve as valuable heuristic devices…teaching us a great deal about the nature of crime and evil”.

Dr Mark Griffiths, Professor of Gambling Studies, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

Further reading

American Film Institute. (2005). Heroes and villains. Located at: http://www.afi.com/tvevents/100years/handv.aspx

Finkel, N. J. (1988). Insanity on Trial. New York: Plenum Press.

Hare, R.D. (1980). A research scale for the assessment of psychopathy in criminal populations. Personality and Individual Differences, 1, 111-119.

Hare, R.D. (1996). Psychopathy: A clinical construct whose time has come. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 23, 25-54.

Hare, R. D. (2003). Manual for the Revised Psychopathy Checklist (2nd ed.). Toronto, ON, Canada: Multi-Health Systems.

Hickey, E. W. (1991). Serial Murderers and Their Victims. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole.

Oleson, J. C. (2003). The celebrity of infamy: A review essay of five autobiographies by three criminal geniuses. Crime, Law, and Social Change, 40, 409-16.

Oleson, J. C. (2005). King of killers: The criminological theories of Hannibal Lecter, part one. Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, 12, 186-210.

Oleson, J. C. (2006). Contemporary demonology: The criminological theories of Hannibal Lecter, part two. Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, 13, 29-49.

Oleson, J. C. (2006). The devil made me do it: the criminological theories of Hannibal Lecter, part three. Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, 13, 117-133.

Raine, A. (1993). The Psychopathology of Crime. New York: Academic Press.

Sexton, D. (2001). The Strange Mind of Thomas Harris. London: Faber and Faber.

Wikipedia (2013). Hannibal Lecter. Located at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannibal_Lecter

Completing the ‘killection’: A brief look at ‘murderabilia’

In a previous blog, I examined the psychology of collecting and whether collecting can (in extreme cases) be classed as an addiction. Yesterday, the Daily Mail’s front page story was about collectors that buy ‘Holocaust memorabilia’ on eBay such as the striped pyjamas that prisoners were forced to wear in Nazi concentration camps during Word War II. This type of collecting is closely related to collectors that buy ‘murderabilia’. Although the word ‘murderabilia’ is fairly new (and is an amalgam of ‘murder memorabilia’), the act itself has a long history and basically refers to collectibles that relate to murder, murderers and/or violent crimes (including such items as artwork produced by incarcerated serial killers, as well as houses, vehicles, clothes, and weapons used in crimes by mass murderers).

The fact that people collect such extreme memorabilia doesn’t surprise me in the least. To me, such behaviour is only one step removed from ‘disaster tourism’ where people pay money to see places, sites, and/or artefacts related to death and disaster. One recent example involved a travel company selling €10 tours to see the sunken cruise liner Costa Concordia off the Tuscan island of Giglio (Italy). Another related type of collecting are the thousands of people that collect Nazi memorabilia (including high profile cases such as the lead singer of Motörhead – Lemmy). As Lemmy’s Wikipedia entry notes:

“Lemmy collects German military regalia, and has an Iron Cross encrusted on his bass, which has led to accusations of Nazi sympathies. He has stated that he collects this memorabilia for aesthetic values only, and considers himself an anarchist or libertarian, and that he is ‘anti-communism, fascism, any extreme’ saying that ‘government causes more problems than it solves’. According to Keither Emerson’s autobiography, two of Lemmy’s Hitlerjugend knives were given to Emerson by Lemmy during his time as a roadie for The Nice. Emerson used these knives many times as keyholders when playing the Hammond Organ during concerts with The Nice and Emerson, Lake & Palmer”.

As I noted in my previous blog on collecting as an addiction, Dr. Ruth Formanek suggested five common motivations for collecting in a 1991 issue of the Journal of Social Behavior and Personality. These were: (i) extension of the self (e.g., acquiring knowledge, or in controlling one’s collection); (ii) social (finding, relating to, and sharing with, like-minded others); (iii) preserving history and creating a sense of continuity; (iv) financial investment; and (v), an addiction or compulsion. Formanek claimed that the commonality to all motivations to collect was a passion for the particular things collected. None of these motivations beyond passion appears to explain why people collect murderabilia (unless the collectors themselves identify with the person and/or actions of the murderabilia they collect). Crime writer Leigh Lundin claims such individuals may be interested in the macabre, and that many believe by collecting such items offers the collector power and control. My own opinion is that such collectors want to possess unique items that no-one else has and also believe that possess a piece of history (even if the item is connected with actions or people that are sadistic, depraved and/or deluded). Arguable this latter motivation may be related to the motivation of ‘preserving history’.

Back in May 2001, eBay banned the sale of murderabilia items but all this has done is move the murderabilia industry elsewhere (for instance, on websites like Supernaught.com that claims on its’ homepage that it is “the first and longest running website providing true crime collectibles”; among the items they were selling were bricks from [Milwaulkee Cannibal] Jeffrey Dahmer’s apartment at $300 a time). The Australian Caslon Analytics website also noted that:

“Contemporary murderabilia has included items owned or created by serial killers, including postcards from Charles Manson, what are claimed as his fingerprint cards, the license plate of the van used by John Wayne Gacy, a murder weapon used by Gary Gilmore, letters from the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ [Peter Sutcliffe] and the ‘Acid Bath Killer’ [John George Haigh] in the UK, drawings by Gacy and other US killers, the radiator cap from the Bonnie & Clyde ‘death car’, Heinrich Himmler’s limousine, earth supposedly from the house where Gacy buried some of his victims and the clothing of some killers. 2009 saw artworks by UK gang leaders Ronnie and Reggie Kray auctioned for £17,125, along with £3,105 for a canvas by poisoner Graham Young”.

The academic literature on murderabilia is mostly in the field of law and/or morality. However, I did unearth a few interesting academic pieces on the topic. There are also some interesting pieces written from a media studies perspective. For instance, Dr. Melinda Wilkins in her PhD ‘A Comfortable Evil’ noted that:

“The serial murder epidemic also generated within the popular media a lucrative moral controversy to negotiate via films, television movies, docu-dramas, true-crime accounts, novels, and memoirs. There were serial-killer comic books and serial killer trading cards to sell; there were serial-killer records to play, taped interviews with Edmund Kemper, Ted Bundy, Henry Lee Lucas, and Kenneth Bianchi billed as ‘honesty about violence’; and for a while during the early 2000s, there was even an eBay web site devoted to the sale of ‘Murderabilia’, memorabilia of one sort and another from various notorious murderers in prison. The epidemic provided American journalists with an apparently inexhaustible topic guaranteed to draw readers and viewers”.

One US academic – Professor David Schmid – has written a number of articles and books on the general public’s consumption of fame including murderabilia including one on this very topic in the M/C Journal (an academic journal concerning media and culture). As Professor Schmid observes:

“The sale of murderabilia is just a small part of the huge serial killer industry that has become a defining feature of American popular culture over the last twenty-five years. This industry is, in turn, a prime example of what Mark Seltzer has described as ‘wound culture,’ consisting of a ‘public fascination with torn and open bodies and torn and opened persons, a collective gathering around shock, trauma, and the wound’. According to Seltzer, the serial killer is ‘one of the superstars of our wound culture’ and his claim is confirmed by the constant stream of movies, books, magazines, television shows, websites, t-shirts, and a tsunami of ephemera that has given the figure of the serial murderer an unparalleled degree of visibility and fame in the contemporary American public sphere”

Schmid’s paper examined how the celebrity culture concerning serial killers has developed and the ethics of collecting such items. He provided examples of how collectors buy the hair and nail clippings of murderers as if they were religious icons. Citing from an old book chapter by US sociologist Leo Lowenthal (‘Biographies in Popular Magazines’), Lowenthal argued that magazine biographies underwent a striking change in the first half of the twentieth century with a new type of social biography emerging. His main argument was that biographies had changed from ‘idols of production’ (those in politics, science, sports, business, etc.) to ‘idols of consumption’ (those in film, music, literature, etc.). This latter group has also evolved to include the lives of infamous criminals. As Schmid then notes:

“With Lowenthal in mind, when one considers the fact that the serial killer is generally seen, in Richard Tithecott’s words, as ‘deserving of eternal fame, of media attention on a massive scale, of groupies’, one is tempted to describe the advent of celebrity serial killers as a further decline in the condition of American culture’s ‘mass idols’. The serial killer’s relationship to consumption, however, is too complex to allow for such a hasty judgment, as the murderabilia industry indicates”.

Schmid also discusses the 2000 US documentary Collectors (directed by Julian P. Hobbs) and discusses some of the multiple connections between serial killing and consumerism.

“Hobbs points out that the serial killer is connected with consumerism in the most basic sense that he has become a commodity, ‘a merchandising phenomenon that rivals Mickey Mouse. From movies to television, books to on-line, serial killers are packaged and consumed en-masse’…But as Hobbs goes on to argue, serial killers themselves can be seen as consumers, making any representations of them implicated in the same consumerist logic: ‘Serial killers come into being by fetishizing and collecting artifacts – usually body parts – in turn, the dedicated collector gathers scraps connected with the actual events and so, too, a documentary a collection of images’…Hobbs implies that no one can avoid being involved with consumerism in relation to serial murder, even if one’s reasons for getting involved are high-minded”.

Schmid then goes on to say:

“The reason why it is impossible to separate neatly ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ expressions of interest in famous serial killers is the same reason why the murderabilia industry is booming; in the words of a 1994 National Examiner headline: ‘Serial Killers Are as American as Apple Pie’. Christopher Sharrett has suggested that: ‘Perhaps the fetish status of the criminal psychopath…is about recognizing the serial killer/mass murderer not as social rebel or folk hero…but as the most genuine representative of American life’. The enormous resistance to recognizing the representativeness of serial killers in American culture is fundamental to the appeal of fetishizing serial killers and their artifacts”.

Even if the murderabilia market carries on ‘making a [financial] killing out of a killing’, it is unlikely to wane in popularity (unless the mass media stops reporting such behaviour). Furthermore, even if legislation outlaws such a practice, the activity will simply go (and likely burgeon) underground. There will always be individuals that are fascinated by the macabre (myself included) and no law will ever stop people collecting such items, however immoral, bizarre and/or depraved.

Dr Mark Griffiths, Professor of Gambling Studies, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

Further reading

Chang, S. (2004). Prodigal son returns: An assessment of current Son of Sam laws and the reality of the online murderabilia marketplace. Rutgers Computer and Technology Law Journal, 31, 430.

Daily Mail (2012). ‘Disaster tourism’ boom for Giglio as day-trippers visit the Costa Concordia site. August 15. Located at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/article-2188623/Costa-Concordia-tragedy-Disaster-tourism-boom-Giglio-day-trippers-visit-stricken-ship.html

Formanek, R. (1991). Why they collect: Collectors reveal their motivations. Journal of Social Behavior and Personality, 6(6), 275-286.

Jarvis, B. (2007). Monsters Inc.: Serial killers and consumer culture. Crime, Media, Culture, 3(3), 326-344.

Lowenthal, L. (1961). The Triumph of Mass Idols. Literature, Popular Culture and Society (pp.109-140). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Schmid, D. (2004). Murderabilia: Consuming fame. M/C Journal: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7(5). Located at: http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/10-schmid.php

Sharrett, C. (1999). Introduction. Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media. (pp. 9-20). Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Tithecott, R. (1997). Of Men and Monsters: Jeffrey Dahmer and the Construction of the Serial Killer. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Wikipedia (2013). Murderabilia. Located at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murderabilia

Wilkins, M. P. (2004). A Comfortable Evil. Doctoral Dissertation, Pennsylvania State University).

Stock tales: Is financial trading a form of gambling?

One of the questions I am most asked by my students and the media alike is whether trading on the stock market is a genuine form of gambling. That might sound a simple question, but it all comes down to what definition of gambling you are using. My own view on gambling is that it boils down to the staking of money (or something of financial value) on a future event. When I first started my research into gambling back in the mid-1980s, there were four fundamental types of gambling:

• Gaming – Staking of money during a game (e.g. slot machines, roulette, blackjack, etc.)
• Betting – Staking money on a future event, typically sports events (e.g. horse race betting, greyhound betting, football betting, etc.)
• Lotteries – The distribution of money by lot (e.g. National Lottery)
• Speculation – Staking money on stock markets (e.g., investment in shares, day trading, etc.)

In a previous blog I briefly examined whether stock market speculation was a legitimate form of gambling. However, back in the 1980s, psychologists were only interested in studying the first three of these activities (i.e., gaming, betting and lotteries). Although a few academics accepted ‘speculation’ as a true form of gambling, the majority of researchers in the gambling studies field did not (including me). The prevailing view at the time was that ‘speculation’ was viewed as involving a fair amount of skill and/or relied on ‘insider information’ and therefore was not a legitimate form of gambling compared to other forms of gambling. Although there were clearly accepted forms of gambling that had skilful elements (e.g., poker, blackjack), academic psychologists still rejected speculation as a form of gambling worth investigating.

However, this all changed after the introduction of spread betting. I argued in a number of articles at the end of the 1990s that spread betting had taken the mechanics of stock market trading and applied it to sporting events. For me, this was a game changer in terms of studying the psychology of gambling. No longer could we say that speculation shouldn’t be studied because spread betting was clearly a form of speculation and it was something that appealed to a new type of gambler because it involved sporting events that many people think they know a lot about.

There was also one other key factor in changing psychologist’s perceptions of speculation as gambling – the ‘Nick Leeson effect’. In 1995, Leeson single-handedly brought down the UK’s oldest investment bank (Barings). Leeson was a derivatives broker whose fraudulent gambling caused the spectacular collapse of one of the UK’s most established financial institutions. From the early 1990s, Leeson made countless speculative (and unauthorised) gambles on the stock market that at first made large profits for his employers. However, as with most gamblers, his ‘beginner’s luck’ soon ran out and he started to lose huge amounts of money. Leeson’s losses eventually reached £827 million. Leeson’s psychology and behaviour was identical to that of a problem gambler (except he was gambling with much larger amounts of money and with someone else’s money).

There was perhaps another reason why speculation was seen as psychologically different from gaming, betting and lotteries. Unlike these other forms of gambling, speculation is a type of gambling where the gambler does not know how much they are going to win or lose on the gamble. If I put £1000 on a horse to win the Grand National or on black to come up on a roulette wheel, I know that losing will cost me £1000. On most stock market trades or spread bets, no-one knows beforehand what the losses could be. However, there are financial trades that could perhaps be argued to be more like betting than speculation. For instance, binary options look as though they are going to grow in popularity over the next year or two as the gambling payoff is more traditional than usual financial trading.

In binary option betting, a cash-or-nothing binary option will pay a fixed amount of money if the option traded on expires in-the-money (i.e., it is a simple ‘win-or-lose’ bet as the potential return it offers is certain and known before the purchase is made). One of the attractions of binary options is that they can be bought on virtually any financial product and can be bought in both up and down directions of trade. The simplicity is likely to attract more people especially if they feel they know something about the product being traded upon. This is the same reason why spread betting took off in such a big way because people feel they know about the market (e.g., football) that they are betting on, even if there is a huge element of chance (which there invariably is). My guess is that most people who work in the financial markets don’t see binary options as an investment opportunity – they see it for what it really is – a pure gamble.

Dr Mark Griffiths, Professor of Gambling Studies, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

Further reading

Griffiths, M.D. (1991). ‘Gambling and Speculation: A Theory, History, and a Future of some Human Decisions’ by R. Brenner and G.A. Brenner. Journal of Economic Psychology, 12, 197-201.

Griffiths, M.D. (1998). Gambling into the Millenium: Issues of concern and potential concern. GamCare News, 3, 4.

Griffiths, M.D. (2000). Day trading: Another possible gambling addiction? GamCare News, 8, 13-14.

Griffiths, M.D. (2006). An overview of pathological gambling. In T. Plante (Ed.), Mental Disorders of the New Millennium. Vol. I: Behavioral Issues. pp. 73-98. New York: Greenwood.

Griffiths, M.D. (2007). Gambling Addiction and its Treatment Within the NHS. London: British Medical Association (ISBN 1-905545-11-8).

Griffiths, M.D. & Auer, M. (2013). The irrelevancy of game-type in the acquisition, development and maintenance of problem gambling. Frontiers in Psychology, 3, 621. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00621.

Griffiths, M.D. (2013). Financial trading as a form of gambling. i-Gaming Business Affiliate, April/May, 40.