Boys with low heart rate, more likely to be criminals
The heart knows.
A study published online by JAMA Psychiatry shows that boys with low resting heart rates (RHR) are more likely to commit violent crimes when they grow up.
Resting heart rate is the number of beats per minutes the heart makes while the body is at rest. Having a low RHR may mean (1) a low level of psychological arousal, which may lead to seeking stimulating experiences, or (2) weakened responses to aversive and stressful stimuli, which can lead to reckless behaviour.
Antti Latvala, of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and the University of Helsinki in Finland is the lead author of the study. Her team studied 710,264 Swedish men born between 1958 and 1991. These participants were monitored for up to 35.7 years. Their average age was 18 when they had RHR and blood pressure measured. A total 40,093 were convicted of a violent crime in the years that followed.
Of the participants, 139,511 men had high RHR of 83 beats per minute, and 132,595 men had the lowest RHRs of 60 beats per minute of less.
Researchers found out that compared with men with high RHRs, those with low RHRs are 39% more likely to be convicted of violent crime and 25% more likely to be convicted of non-violent crimes.
“Our results confirm that, in addition to being associated with aggressive and antisocial outcomes in childhood and adolescence, low RHR increases the risk for violent and nonviolent antisocial behaviours in adulthood,” says the authors.
