育児様式と殺人頻度についての通文化研究 : ジェイムス・プレスコット理論の再評価

抄録

James Prescott, a neuropsychologist, has set forth a theory (Prescott 1975) that: body pleasure gained through physical touch and movement, as against that through optic, auditory, olfactory or gustatory sense, stands in a direct counteraction with the urge of violence. If the former is turned on, the latter is off, and vice versa. Not only that one tends to become violent when he/she is deprived of body pleasure, but also that one tends to develop a personality of either violent stoic or nonviolent pleasure-seeker when such a neurotic circuit is repeatedly activated during his/her young ages. The author tested this hypothesis cross-culturally with five traits concerning child-rearing practices as the independent variables and the frequency of muder incidences as the dependent variable. The codings were taken from (Barry et. al. 1980) for the independent variables and from (Palmer 1970) for the dependent one. The correlations obtained were as follows: Murder with: Pain Infliction upon Child: Tau b=.275 p<.05 N=29 Child Indulgence: Tau b=.404 p<.01 N=26 Parental Response to Child's Crying: Tau b=.308 p<.05 N=23 Length of Post-Partum Sex Taboo: Tau b=.368 p<.05 N=26 Sleeping Proximity between Father and Child: Tau b=.364 p<.01 N=32 The correlations with pain infliction, child indulgence and child crying were interpreted as reflecting the causal linkage that fulfillment of body pleasure in early ages makes a nonviolent personality, a confirmation of the hypothesis, although there must have been involved a direct linkage, too, that nonviolent parents tended to attend to children tenderly. The correlations of post-partum sex taboo and of father-child sleeping proximity were thought as indicating the direct linkage between sex and violence in adult behavior rather than a child's developmental sequence. Namely, a prolonged post-partum sex taboo deprives the parents of their mutual sex. That the father sleeps apart from his child tends to represent that he sleeps also apart from his wife, the child's mother. Both are, thus, indices of the sexual deprivation. Besides this, a prolonged post-partum sex taboo tends to be seen with extensive polygynous families, where fathers tend to sleep apart from mother-children sleeping quarters, those two indicating the extent of polygyny. Now, the more polygyny, the more celibate men are present. And most murderers are men. Thus, in those two ways, those two correlations suggest that the more people are deprived of their sexual satisfaction, the more murder is committed. Thus, all the five associations presented here support, further, the theory of James Prescott.