Terrie E. Moffitt | |
---|---|
Born | |
Citizenship | American, British |
Alma mater | University of North Carolina, University of Southern California, University of California, Los Angeles, University of Wisconsin–Madison |
Known for | Developmental theory of crime, Gene-environment interaction |
Spouse | Avshalom Caspi |
Awards | Stockholm Prize in Criminology, Klaus J. Jacobs Research Prize |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Psychology |
Institutions | Duke University, King's College London |
Thesis | Genetic Influence of Parental Psychiatric Illness on Violent and Recidivistic Criminal Behavior (1984) |
Doctoral advisor | Sarnoff A. Mednick [1] |
Website | moffittcaspi.com |
Terrie Edith Moffitt MBE FBA (born March 9, 1955) is an American-British clinical psychologist who is best known for her pioneering research on the development of antisocial behavior and for her collaboration with colleague and partner Avshalom Caspi in research on gene-environment interactions in mental disorders.
Moffitt is the Nannerl O. Keohane University Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience at Duke University (USA) and Professor of Social behavior and Development in the Medical Research Council's Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Center at the Institute of Psychiatry Psychology an Neuroscience King's College London (UK). She is Associate Director of the Dunedin Longitudinal Study, which follows 1037 people born in 1972-73 in Dunedin, New Zealand. She also launched the Environmental-Risk Longitudinal Twin Study, which follows 1100 British families with twins born in 1994–1995.
Moffitt grew up in North Carolina, United States, and attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for her undergraduate degree (BA, Psychology 1977). She continued her training in clinical psychology at the University of Southern California (MA, Experimental Animal Behavior 1981; PhD, Clinical Psychology 1984) and completed postdoctoral training at University of California, Los Angeles Neuropsychiatric Institute. In 1985, Moffitt became an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she was promoted to full professor in 1995. Moffitt has subsequently served on the faculty at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, and Duke University.
Terrie Moffitt studies how genetic and environmental risks work together to shape the course of abnormal human behaviors and psychiatric disorders. Her particular interest is in antisocial and criminal behavior, but she also studies depression, psychosis, addiction, and cognitive aging. She is a licensed clinical psychologist, who completed her clinical hospital training at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute (1984). Her work on the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study in New Zealand has identified patterns of intimate as well as stranger crime, including discoveries about the role of females as initiators of violence. Professor Moffitt is also carrying out an important large-scale follow-up of twins in the UK to investigate biological, psychological, and social influences on development. Her work since 2010 is leading the Dunedin Study into the study of aging.
Moffitt is best known for her theory of adolescence-limited and life-course-persistent offender antisocial behavior. [2] [3] Moffitt's theory holds that there are two main types of antisocial offenders in society. Adolescence-limited offenders exhibit antisocial behavior only during adolescence. Life-course-persistent offenders begin to behave antisocially early in childhood and continue this behavior into adulthood. For her studies of crime and human development she was awarded the Stockholm Prize in Criminology. [4]
Moffitt is also known for her research on gene-environment interaction (GxE). Her two publications in the journal Science in 2002 and 2003 with her colleague and partner Avshalom Caspi were among the first reports of GxE in humans. The first paper showed that children who carried a polymorphism in the MAOA gene were more vulnerable to developing antisocial behavior following exposure to maltreatment during childhood. [5] The second paper showed that individuals who carried a polymorphism in the serotonin transporter gene (SLC6A4) were more vulnerable to developing depression following exposure to stressful life events. [6] Moffitt and her colleagues have authored a number of articles on theory and methods in GxE research in the fields of psychiatry, psychology, and neuroscience. [7] Moffitt’s research on GxE in the development of antisocial behavior has stimulated a global discussion of the idea of criminal intent and responsibility, as well as raising profound questions about humane strategies for crime prevention among abused children at risk of future violence. [8] The second Science paper, on the interaction of SLC6A4 and life stress has generated enormous controversy, [9] [10] culminating in meta-analyses published in leading journals in psychiatry and medicine. Some meta-analyses do not support the original finding, [11] some do, [12] [13] and animal and imaging work on the hypothesis should also be considered. [14] [15] However, the general approach of studying candidate genes, which was the only approach available when Moffitt and Caspi’s GxE work was done, has since 2010 been superseded by whole-genome approaches. [10] [16] [17]
Moffitt was awarded the Society of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology Distinguished Career Award in 2006. [35] Moffitt and Caspi jointly received the Klaus J. Jacobs Research Prize in 2010 for their innovative research on "the interplay between genetic disposition and environmental influences in the development of children." [36] Moffitt and Caspi were awarded the APA Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions in 2016; [37] the citation for their shared award emphasizes their research contributions demonstrating "how early life experiences shape health disparities and how genetic factors shape and are shaped by environmental factors." [38] In 2018, Moffitt was elected to the National Academy of Medicine. [39]
She received an honorary degree from the University of Basel in 2014. [40]
In November 2022 Moffitt, was awarded the Royal Society Te Apārangi's Rutherford Medal, along with the Dunedin Study, team leader Richie Poulton and team members Murray Thomson and Avshalom Caspi. [41]
Moffitt was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2023 Birthday Honours for services to social science. [42]
Moffitt is the most cited author of in several psychology journals such as Journal of Abnormal Psychology , Developmental Psychology , Psychological Review , Development and Psychopathology , and Criminology . [43]
Conduct disorder (CD) is a mental disorder diagnosed in childhood or adolescence that presents itself through a repetitive and persistent pattern of behavior that includes theft, lies, physical violence that may lead to destruction, and reckless breaking of rules, in which the basic rights of others or major age-appropriate norms are violated. These behaviors are often referred to as "antisocial behaviors", and is often seen as the precursor to antisocial personality disorder; however, the latter, by definition, cannot be diagnosed until the individual is 18 years old. Conduct disorder may result from parental rejection and neglect and can be treated with family therapy, as well as behavioral modifications and pharmacotherapy. Conduct disorder is estimated to affect 51.1 million people globally as of 2013.
Antisocial personality disorder, sometimes referred to as dissocial personality disorder, is a personality disorder characterized by a limited capacity for empathy and a long-term pattern of disregard for or violation of the rights of others, starting before one was 15 years old. Other notable symptoms include impulsivity, reckless behavior, a lack of remorse after hurting others, deceitfulness, irresponsibility, and aggressive behavior.
Sex differences in crime are differences between men and women as the perpetrators or victims of crime. Such studies may belong to fields such as criminology, sociobiology, or feminist studies. Despite the difficulty of interpreting them, crime statistics may provide a way to investigate such a relationship from a gender differences perspective. An observable difference in crime rates between men and women might be due to social and cultural factors, crimes going unreported, or to biological factors. The nature or motive of the crime itself may also require consideration as a factor. Gendered profiling might affect the reported crime rates.
Gene–environment interaction is when two different genotypes respond to environmental variation in different ways. A norm of reaction is a graph that shows the relationship between genes and environmental factors when phenotypic differences are continuous. They can help illustrate GxE interactions. When the norm of reaction is not parallel, as shown in the figure below, there is a gene by environment interaction. This indicates that each genotype responds to environmental variation in a different way. Environmental variation can be physical, chemical, biological, behavior patterns or life events.
Surgency is a trait aspect of emotional reactivity in which a person tends towards high levels of positive affect. The APA Dictionary of Psychology defines it as "a personality trait marked by cheerfulness, responsiveness, spontaneity, and sociability but at a level below that of extraversion or mania."
Monoamine oxidase A, also known as MAO-A, is an enzyme that in humans is encoded by the MAOA gene. This gene is one of two neighboring gene family members that encode mitochondrial enzymes which catalyze the oxidative deamination of amines, such as dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin. A mutation of this gene results in Brunner syndrome. This gene has also been associated with a variety of other psychiatric disorders, including antisocial behavior. Alternatively spliced transcript variants encoding multiple isoforms have been observed.
The Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study is a detailed study of human health, development and behaviour. Based at the University of Otago in New Zealand, the Dunedin Study has followed the lives of 1037 babies born between 1 April 1972 and 31 March 1973 at Dunedin's former Queen Mary Maternity Centre since their birth. Teams of national and international collaborators work on the Dunedin Study, including a team at Duke University in the United States. The research is constantly evolving to encompass research made possible by new technology and seeks to answer questions about how people's early years have an impact on mental and physical health as they age.
Personality development encompasses the dynamic construction and deconstruction of integrative characteristics that distinguish an individual in terms of interpersonal behavioral traits. Personality development is ever-changing and subject to contextual factors and life-altering experiences. Personality development is also dimensional in description and subjective in nature. That is, personality development can be seen as a continuum varying in degrees of intensity and change. It is subjective in nature because its conceptualization is rooted in social norms of expected behavior, self-expression, and personal growth. The dominant viewpoint in personality psychology indicates that personality emerges early and continues to develop across one's lifespan. Adult personality traits are believed to have a basis in infant temperament, meaning that individual differences in disposition and behavior appear early in life, potentially before language of conscious self-representation develop. The Five Factor Model of personality maps onto the dimensions of childhood temperament. This suggests that individual differences in levels of the corresponding personality traits are present from young ages.
Cultural neuroscience is a field of research that focuses on the interrelation between a human's cultural environment and neurobiological systems. The field particularly incorporates ideas and perspectives from related domains like anthropology, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience to study sociocultural influences on human behaviors. Such impacts on behavior are often measured using various neuroimaging methods, through which cross-cultural variability in neural activity can be examined.
Biosocial criminology is an interdisciplinary field that aims to explain crime and antisocial behavior by exploring biocultural factors. While contemporary criminology has been dominated by sociological theories, biosocial criminology also recognizes the potential contributions of fields such as behavioral genetics, neuropsychology, and evolutionary psychology.
Kenneth S. Kendler is an American psychiatrist best known for his pioneering research in psychiatric genetics, particularly the genetic causes of schizophrenia. Kendler is one of the highest cited psychiatry researchers. Between 1990 and 1998 he was the 2nd highest cited psychiatrist, and for the 1997–2007 decade he was ranked 4th by Thomson Reuters' Science Watch. He has authored over 1,200 papers and in 2016 his h-index was 126. Kendler's group was also noted for the replication of a study of Avshalom Caspi on the interaction of stressful life events and a serotonin transporter polymorphism in the prediction of episodes of major depression.
In 1993, American psychologist Terrie Moffitt described a dual taxonomy of offending behavior in an attempt to explain the developmental processes that lead to the distinctive shape of the age crime curve. Moffitt proposed that there are two main types of antisocial offenders in society: The adolescence-limited offenders, who exhibit antisocial behavior only during adolescence, and the life-course-persistent offenders, who begin to behave antisocially early in childhood and continue this behavior into adulthood. This theory is used with respect to antisocial behavior instead of crime due to the differing definitions of 'crime' among cultures. Due to similar characteristics and trajectories, this theory can be applied to both females and males.
Callous-unemotional traits (CU) are distinguished by a persistent pattern of behavior that reflects a disregard for others, and also a lack of empathy and generally deficient affect. The interplay between genetic and environmental risk factors may play a role in the expression of these traits as a conduct disorder (CD). While originally conceived as a means of measuring the affective features of psychopathy in children, measures of CU have been validated in university samples and adults.
M. Brent Donnellan is a professor of psychology at Michigan State University. He is known for research on social psychology and personality psychology.
Barbara Maughan is a Professor of Developmental Epidemiology at the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre, Institute of Psychiatry. Her research focuses on mental health problems in children and adolescents.
Avshalom Caspi is an Israeli-American psychologist. He is the Edward M. Arnett Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience in the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences at Duke University and Professor of Personality Development at King's College London's Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience. His research has focused on mental health and human development, much of which was conducted with his wife and longtime research partner, Terrie Moffitt. He is a co-editor of the Annual Review of Developmental Psychology.
Richie Graham Poulton was a New Zealand psychologist and the director of the University of Otago's Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health & Development Research Unit, which runs the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study. He was also a professor of psychology at the University of Otago, the 2007 founder and co-director of the National Centre for Lifecourse Research, the founder in 2011 of the Graduate Longitudinal Study, New Zealand, and the chief science adviser of the Ministry of Social Development in the New Zealand government.
Louise Arseneault is a Canadian psychologist and Professor of Developmental Psychology in the Social, Genetic & Developmental Psychiatry Centre in the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King's College London, where she has taught since 2001.
Gene-environment interplay describes how genes and environments work together to produce a phenotype, or observable trait. Many human traits are influenced by gene-environment interplay. It is a key component in understanding how genes and the environment come together to impact human development. Examples of gene-environment interplay include gene-environment interaction and gene-environment correlation. Another type of gene-environment interplay is epigenetics, which is the study of how environmental factors can affect gene expression without altering DNA sequences.
Candice Lynn Odgers is a Canadian developmental and quantitative psychologist who studies how early adversity and exposure to poverty influences adolescent mental health. Her team has developed new approaches for studying health and development using mobile devices and online tools, with a focus on how digital tools and spaces can be improved to support children and adolescents. Odgers is currently a professor of Psychological Science at the University of California, Irvine and a research professor at Duke University. Odgers is also the co-director of the Child and Brain Development Program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.