Young criminals are driven by excitement and influenced by the crime they see around them

This won't come as a surprise to anyone who's familiar with books, movies, or television programs about juvenile delinquency (or who's known any juvenile delinquents, for that matter). As reported by the University of Portsmouth, February 24, 2020:

Young burglars are driven by a desire for excitement when they initially commit crime, new research from the University of Portsmouth has found.

The paper published today highlights the importance of positive emotion in the initial decisions to commit crime which drive the young person into habitual offending.

Researchers compared findings from younger (average age 20) with older, experienced residential burglars (average age 39) after they completed a ‘virtual burglary’ where participants use a simulated environment to choose and burgle a property. They were asked to ‘think aloud’ during the re-enactment and then were interviewed by researchers.

Participants were asked about the days and hours before the burglary to try and establish the processes that led them to be involved in the first place.

Dr Claire Nee, Reader in Forensic Psychology, who led the research, said: “It’s important to understand under what circumstances young people make that initial decision to commit a crime, so we can think about intervention. The role of emotion in driving the desire to commit crime is a much neglected area and our research indicates it could be key to stopping it in its tracks. The excitement drives the initial spate of offending, but skill and financial reward quickly take over resulting in habitual offending.

"What really struck me about the research is how young offenders can’t identify a clear initial decision to commit a burglary – it’s just part of the ‘flow’ of what they’re doing with their adolescent comrades."

The research shows that offenders tended to drift into crime rather than any distinct turning point. Offending was often considered an integral and almost inevitable part of participants’ lifestyles.

One young burglar said: “Like where I’m from… that’s what it’s like, it’s crime, like, that’s the norm.” An adult burglar expressed similar sentiments: “I was just born on the streets… that’s what people do.”

The research discovered a pattern which shows that initiation into burglary is linked originally to the desire for excitement and the ‘thrill’ of committing the offence, but this thrill reduces once the offender has repeatedly committed a crime.

Having completed one burglary, offenders became motivated by the experience of making quick, easy money. One participant said: “I just had so much money and I was thinking, wow, is this what 10 minutes of work is.”

Dr Nee said: “It is fascinating to explore the stages of a criminal’s career, so we can see what motivates them at the start, what continues to motivate them, and how we might be able to intervene.”

The paper is published in the British Journal of Criminology.

Click on the link for the original article Expertise, Emotion and Specialization in the Development of Persistent Burglary by Marco Otte, Zarah Vernham, Jean-Louis Van Gelder, Claire Nee, and Amy Meenaghan.

70 years ago: Time spent watching television is time not spent on other things

On February 7, 1950, a Washington survey reported that television set owners saw fewer films, read less, and listened to the radio less than they did before buying their sets.

People who have trouble falling asleep have the most anxiety--or is it the other way around?

Is it the anxiety that's making it difficult for people to fall asleep, or is it the inability to sleep that's causing the anxiety? Only the scientists know for sure, as reported by Mari Rian Hanger and Nancy Bazilchuk in ScienceNorway, October 9, 2019 (bold, link in original):

Sleeplessness, or insomnia, takes different forms. Some patients have trouble falling asleep at night. Others wake up very early in the morning, without being able to fall back asleep again. A third group struggles with constantly waking during the night.

Now, sleep researchers who have looked at these three types of insomnia have found differences in anxiety levels in people with the different types.

"Patients who have trouble falling asleep have significantly higher levels of anxiety than those who struggle with waking during the night or waking early in the morning," said the lead researcher behind the new study, Daniela Bragantini, a biologist at the Department of Mental Health at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).

The study was recently published in the journal Sleep Health.

Population-level study

The researchers had access to information from one of the largest health studies ever performed, called HUNT, the Nord-Trøndelag Health Study. This study of residents of the former county of Nord-Trøndelag includes a database with information on nearly 120,000 individuals. In this case, the researchers relied on data collected from 4317 people between 2006-2008 who had reported at least one symptom of insomnia to the HUNT researchers.

A total of 3616 controls, or people who did not have insomnia, were also included in the sleep study.

Participants had completed a questionnaire in which they answered questions about insomnia and also questions about anxiety.

“We compared their responses and saw that people with insomnia generally had a higher level of anxiety than those who slept well at night,” Bragantini says.

People with insomnia are known to suffer from more anxiety and depression than average. But few researchers have studied the differences between different types of sleep problems.

Trouble falling asleep associated with anxiety

People who had trouble falling asleep, whether combined with other types of sleep problems or alone, had the highest anxiety score.

Those who suffered from waking early in the morning, or waking multiple times at night, had lower levels of anxiety.

“It's interesting that having problems falling asleep is more closely related to anxiety than other insomnia symptoms,” says Bragantini.

She said that the anxiety levels in question were not very high and that not everyone needs professional help. But the differences between people with different symptoms were significant.

It seems that people who have trouble falling asleep struggle to turn off their brains.

“Their brains continue to think, even if it really supposed to be time to sleep. It is difficult to say which comes first, anxiety or insomnia — often the two disorders can sustain each other, so that it becomes a circle of stress. Sometimes it may also be that the anxiety comes first, but that the sleep problems become an independent disorder, which does not necessarily disappear even if the anxiety is treated,” she says.

Other research has shown that a patient’s mental disorders often get better when they are treated for insomnia.

Sleep anxiety can cause insomnia

Concerns over how important sleep is can also cause people to feel anxious, Bragantini said.

“It can be easy to think that it is bad for your health if you don’t get your eight hours of sleep. This type of information can be taken out of context and can feel daunting. It can cause people to develop even more anxiety about their lack of sleep, which makes it even more difficult to sleep at night,” she said.

Bragantini and her co-researchers believe a diagnosis of insomnia actually consists of several different subtypes, based on the symptoms the patients have.

“There may be different reasons for different types of insomnia. I am looking into the different biological causes behind these different types of insomnia,” she says.

Consequently, she thinks different types of insomnia may also require different treatment.

“A person who struggles with falling asleep may need treatment for anxiety, while those who wake up very early in the morning may benefit from other types of treatment. We want to continue this line of inquiry,” says Bragantini.

Most often, anxiety comes first

Ståle Pallesen, who is a professor at the Department of Psychosocial Science at the University of Bergen, says it’s not surprising that people who struggle to fall asleep have the most anxiety.

“If you have a lot of worries, and struggle with anxiety, it is not surprising that it can be difficult to turn off your cognitive activity in the evening when you are trying to sleep. Anxiety patients can also have physical symptoms that make it hard for them to fall asleep,” says Pallesen.

He believes that in some cases, having trouble falling asleep can also lead to anxiety.

“Not being able to sleep at night gives you more time to lie there and worry,” he says.

Still, he believes that in most cases, anxiety comes first, and leads to sleep problems in these patients.

Reference:

Daniela Bragantini et al.: Differences in anxiety levels among symptoms of insomnia. The HUNT study. Sleep Health, August 2019