Eric J. Connolly

Sam Houston State University | SHSU · Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology

Few studies have examined the relation between maternal caloric intake during pregnancy and growth in child academic achievement while controlling for important confounding influences. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, the current study examined the effects of reduced prenatal caloric intake on growth in scores on the Peabo...

An extensive line of research has identified delinquent peer association as a salient environmental risk factor for delinquency, especially during adolescence. While previous research has found moderate-to-strong associations between exposure to delinquent peers and a variety of delinquent behaviors, comparatively less scholarship has focused on th...

The Child and Young Adult Supplement of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (CNLSY) has been used extensively within criminology. A significant amount of criminological research, for example, has explored various issues related to the correlates, causes, and consequences associated with levels of self-control and delinquent involvement. The o...

In a recent article published in Criminology, Burt and Simons (2014) claimed that the statistical violations of the classical twin design render heritability studies useless. Claiming quantitative genetics is “fatally flawed” and describing the results generated from these models as “preposterous,” Burt and Simons took the unprecedented step to cal...

Prior research has identified relations between prenatal testosterone exposure and various antisocial and criminal behaviors. However, less is known about the association between prenatal testosterone exposure and personality traits, such as psychopathy. This study used self-report and biometric data from a sample of undergraduates (n = 491) at a l...

Objectives: Much remains unknown about the potential role of changes in poor sleep on the well-established association between changes in components of low self-control, such as impulsivity and sensation seeking, and antisocial behavior from adolescence to adulthood. Methods: A series of dynamic panel models with prospective data from a population...

Prior research suggests that childhood lack of guilt increases risk for involvement in the criminal justice system later in life. However, few studies have explored the role of moderating factors on this association across the life course, particularly parental incarceration during adolescence, which is commonly associated with child contact with t...

Objectives While a wealth of research reports a robust association between intimate partner victimization and depression, the relationship has not been tested using twin-based research designs to control for unmeasured genetic and shared environmental confounding.Methods Twin data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health a...

Developmental perspectives recognize the importance of the development of impulsivity and sensation seeking for later life educational attainment. The current study examines the effect of developmental trajectories of impulsivity and sensation seeking across adolescence and into young adulthood on educational attainment in adulthood. The study samp...

Background There is a vast literature on the negative associations between spanking in childhood and various psychosocial developmental outcomes; yet, control for potential genetic confounds is rare. Objectives The current research aimed to provide probable ranges of estimates of the degree to which genetic and nonshared environmental covariation...

The immigration experience in the United States has been linked to a wide range of behavioral and physical outcomes. Studies report that immigrants, relative to native-born citizens, are less likely to develop alcohol use habits despite facing hardships during the acculturation process. Limited research, however, has examined whether and to what ex...

General Strain Theory (GST) has received an impressive amount of empirical attention. However, much remains unknown about the role of sources of strain argued to be conducive to negative emotionality – such as perceived unjust treatment – on changes in anger and antisocial behavior over time. The current study aimed to begin to address this gap in...

Background: While much literature has focused on examining associations between neighbourhood characteristics and antisocial behaviour, little is known about the effect of perceptions of neighborhood disorder on emotions, mental health, and criminal justice contact. Aims: Our aim was to examine whether depressive symptoms mediate relations between...

Child maltreatment is a pervasive social problem often perpetuated by family members and is related to a wide array of negative life outcomes. Although substance use is an outcome commonly associated with experiences of child maltreatment, not all individuals who experience maltreatment struggle with such issues. Rather research suggests that genet...

In 2015, China passed legislation that criminalized domestic violence/child maltreatment and provided protections to victims of child maltreatment. Consistent with the intergenerational transmission of violence, prior cross-national research has demonstrated that the experience of child maltreatment is positively associated with supportive attitude...

Rationale: A growing body of research suggests that adolescents with problematic sleep patterns are more likely to engage in externalizing and delinquent behaviors. Few studies, however, have examined the role of between- and within-family effects on this association to establish whether poor sleep is related to delinquency after controlling for fa...

Childhood maltreatment and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are two primary forms of interpersonal victimization that have been associated with a host of deleterious health outcomes. Studies over the past decade have begun to use a range of biologically informed methods to better understand the role that biology plays in the relationship betwee...

Mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) is a developing public health problem. Evidence suggests that youth who experience mTBI experience worse outcomes than similar adults. However, the structure of long-term symptoms associated with mTBI is not well understood. The current study aims to determine if classes of youth psychopathology can be predicted b...

Previous studies have found that individual, environmental, geographic, and demographic factors correlate with adolescent gun carrying. Comparatively less research has focused on identifying correlates of adolescent gun carrying to schools. The current study examined whether previously identified factors associated with adolescent gun carrying sim...

The current study examined the genetic and environmental architecture of early life parent-child relations and intimate partner relationship quality later in life. A series of univariate ACE and bivariate Cholesky decomposition models were fitted to a sample of monozygotic and same-sex dizygotic twins drawn from the Midlife in the United States Stu...

A large body of work has investigated the associations between spanking and a wide range of psychosocial outcomes across development. A comparatively smaller subset of this literature, on a narrower range of psychosocial outcomes, has employed genetically-informative research designs capable of estimating the degree to which observed phenotypic eff...

The current study provides a test of General Strain Theory by examining the relations between strain, negative emotions, and biological hormones in the prediction of antisocial behavior across gender. Findings from a diverse sample of 512 undergraduate students reveal that strain and the ratio between testosterone to cortisol reactivity are associa...

Since the Domestic Violence (DV) Law was passed in China in 2015, knowledge of this mandate has been relatively unexplored. Data from 401 police cadets attending Zhejiang Police College in Hangzhou, China are analyzed. A pre-test/post-test design was used to assess changes in attitudes toward DV after a thirty-minute lecture on DV. The influence of...

Purpose: Previous research has revealed that variation in levels of self-control is associated with violent victimization. Absent from this line of research is an evaluation of whether unique components of self-control, reflective of the dual-systems model, are uniquely associated with violent victimization from adolescence through young adulthood....

Research suggests that adolescent gang membership increases the likelihood of adverse behavioral and mental health outcomes during adolescence. Less research, however, has examined whether gang membership is associated with adverse outcomes in young adulthood, and if these associations remain after controlling for genetic and shared environmental f...

The Social Structure and Social Learning (SSSL) model for crime and deviance has received an impressive amount of empirical support in the United States and other Western industrialized countries. Comparatively less research, however, has examined whether the SSSL model offers a viable framework for explaining variation in delinquent behavior in ot...

During adolescence, many teens begin to experiment with substances and engage in delinquent behavior. The current study seeks to examine whether and to what extent genetic and environmental factors contribute to the association between substance use (i.e., marijuana and alcohol) and different forms of delinquent offending (i.e., violent and nonviol...

Research suggests victims of violent crime are more likely to suffer from major depressive disorder (MDD) compared to non-victims. Less research has utilized longitudinal data to evaluate the directionality of this relationship or examined the genetic and environmental contributions to this association across the life course. The current study eval...

A developing line of research suggests that adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) increase the risk for antisocial behavior and future victimization. However, the mechanisms that underlie this association remain largely speculative. To address this gap in the existing body of research, data on full siblings from a large population-based sample of yo...

A developed line of research has found that psychopathic personality traits and criminal behavior are correlated with one another. While there is little question about the association between psychopathic personality traits and criminal behavior, what remains less clear is whether psychopathic traits exert a direct effect on criminal behavior. An a...

An extensive line of research has found that children who experience multiple forms of adversity are more likely to engage in higher levels of delinquent behavior during adolescence. Several studies examining this association have used a range of multivariate statistical techniques capable of controlling for observable confounds. Fewer studies have...

Purpose: Emerging scientific evidence and media accounts document an association between mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) and deleterious mental health outcomes in adulthood. This study focuses on exploring the relationship between mTBI and increased risk for psychopathology in a sample of adolescent youth. Methods: Longitudinal data from adoles...

Little is known about the longitudinal effect of peer victimization on deviant behavior in non-Western cultural contexts and the mediating role of theoretically relevant variables, such as anger, on this association. The current study aimed to address this gap by analyzing data from a nationally representative sample of South Korean youth. Peer vic...

Purpose Research reports a positive relationship between parental rejection and antisocial behavior in adolescents and young adults. Studies also report a positive association between testosterone and antisocial behavior. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether testosterone moderates the influence of parental rejection on antisocial behavi...

Existing research suggests that repeated bullying victimization is associated with lower levels of educational attainment. However, it is difficult to ascertain whether a true causal association exists since previously reported associations may be confounded by genetic and shared environmental factors that affect both repeated bullying victimizatio...

Research suggests victims of violent crime are more likely to suffer from major depressive disorder (MDD) compared to non-victims. Less research has utilized longitudinal data to evaluate the directionality of this relationship or examined the genetic and environmental contributions to this association across the life course. The current study eval...

Purpose: Examine whether parental offending is directly associated with male and female offspring patterns of delinquent behavior during adolescence and indirectly associated with risk for criminal conviction in young adulthood. Methods: Latent growth curve models and growth mixture models are estimated using intergenerational data from the Nationa...

During adolescence, many teens begin to experiment with substances and engage in delinquent behavior. The current study seeks to examine whether and to what extent genetic and environmental factors contribute to the association between substance use (i.e., marijuana and alcohol) and different forms of delinquent offending (i.e., violent and nonviol...

Criminological explanations of juvenile delinquency have primarily relied upon sociological concepts and variables. Recent developments in disciplines outside criminology have highlighted the ways in which biology can help improve our understanding of human behavior. Informed by these multiple disciplines, biosocial criminology incorporates both bi...

The collective view of Asian Americans as model minorities is evident with the extensive amount of statistical data showing support for the academic and socioeconomic success of Asian Americans in the United States. This perception, however, often presents an inaccurate portrayal of Asian Americans, in general, as it overlooks many of the difficult...

Research over the past decade has found that head injuries are associated with negative outcomes including lower levels of self-control and a greater prevalence of delinquent behavior. Despite this pattern of findings, previous research remains unclear as to whether head injuries influence subsequent levels of self-control and delinquency, or wheth...

An extensive line of research has demonstrated that low socioeconomic status (SES) is a risk factor for adolescent delinquent behavior. The possibility that low SES affects adolescent’s risk for engaging in delinquent behavior has garnered a significant amount of empirical and public attention given its implications for delinquency prevention. Howe...

An impressive number of researchers have devoted a great amount of effort toward examining various predictors of criminal justice processing outcomes. Indeed, a vast amount of research has examined various individual- and aggregate-level predictors of arrests, incarceration, and sentencing decisions. To this point, much less attention has been devo...

An impressive number of researchers have devoted a great amount of effort toward examining various predictors of criminal justice processing outcomes. Indeed, a vast amount of research has examined various individual- and aggregate-level predictors of arrests, incarceration, and sentencing decisions. To this point, less attention has been devoted t...

Objectives The current study examines whether head injuries suffered earlier in the life course are associated with subsequent changes in self-control and delinquency. Methods Latent growth curve models and path analysis are used to analyze the developmental trajectories of self-control and delinquency as well as the potential associations between...

Previous research illustrating a robust, negative association between self-control and various forms of delinquent and criminal behavior has resulted in a more concentrated focus on the etiological development of self-control. The current study aims to contribute to this literature using a sample of twin and sibling pairs from the National Longitud...

Objective: Developmental/life-course (DLC) criminologists often study the age-graded trajectories of traits and behaviors known to correlate with antisocial outcomes. Much of this work has attempted to discern whether traits like impulse control are relatively stable across different portions of the life course. A range of statistical techniques ha...

Researchers have expended considerable effort to understand the causes and correlates of criminal victimization. More recently, scholars have focused on identifying individual-level traits that increase the odds of victimization. Generally absent from this line of research, however, is examining the extent to which previously unmeasured genetic and...

Researchers have expended considerable effort to understand the causes and correlates of criminal victimization. More recently, scholars have focused on identifying individual-level traits that increase the odds of victimization. Generally absent from this line of research, however, is examining the extent to which previously unmeasured genetic and...

Recent research has found that repeated bullying victimization increases the risk of developing several unhealthy habits later in life including periodic substance use. Comparatively less research, however, has examined whether the effects of repeated bullying victimization on the development of substance use vary by sex. The present study addresse...

An extensive line of research suggests that children who experience multiple forms of victimization, commonly referred to as poly-victimization, are more likely to engage in higher levels of delinquency during adolescence. Much of this research has employed a range of multivariate statistical techniques to control for measurable confounds. Fewer st...

Political ideology represents an imperfect yet important indicator of a host of personality traits and cognitive preferences. These preferences, in turn, seemingly propel liberals and conservatives towards divergent life-course experiences. Criminal behavior represents one particular domain of conduct where differences rooted in political ideology...

This study examined the association between sexual orientation and nonviolent and violent delinquency across the life course. We analyzed self-reported nonviolent and violent delinquency in a sample of heterosexual males (N=5220–7023) and females (N=5984–7875), bisexuals (N=34–73),gay males (N=145–189), and lesbians (N=115–150) from the National Lo...

Internalizing and externalizing problems and parenting: Results from a Saudi Arabian sample Relatively few studies have attempted to identify factors that contribute to variation in parental behavior. The literature has revealed associations between both internal and external factors in the variation in parenting behaviors. In addition, the vast ma...

Despite the wealth of knowledge on subclass formation for antisocial behavior among youth from the United States and other Western industrialized countries, very little is known about the subclass structure for antisocial behavior among youth growing up in other geographical contexts. Using validated measures of aggression, psychopathy, and low sel...

There has been significant interest in examining the developmental factors that predispose individuals to chronic criminal offending. This body of research has identified some social-environmental risk factors as potentially important. At the same time, the research producing these results has generally failed to employ genetically sensitive resear...

There has been a significant amount of interest in understanding some of the key issues related to school suspensions and expulsions. One of the more intriguing and studied of these issues has to do with factors that contribute to variation in school disciplinary sanctions. To date, however, no research has examined the genetic architecture to eith...

The current study examined whether adolescent IQ predicted risk for mortality by the age of 32. Analyses of data from the Add Health revealed that IQ was related to mortality risk, such that respondents with relatively lower IQs were significantly more likely to experience early life mortality when compared with respondents with comparatively highe...

Introduction A topic often overlooked in the criminological literature is whether and to what extent biological or developmental male characteristics explain variation in fighting ability during adolescence. The current study was designed to add to the existing literature on this topic by examining whether two physical attributes—height and bulk—we...

An impressive literature has revealed that variation in virtually every measurable phenotype is the result of a combination of genetic and environmental influences. Based on these findings, studies that fail to use genetically informed modeling strategies risk model misspecification and biased parameter estimates. Twin-and adoption-based research d...

Psychopathic personality traits have been shown to increase the odds of a wide range of antisocial outcomes. Very little research, however, has examined the association between psychopathy and the risk of personal victimization. The current study address this gap in the literature by examining the association between scores on the Levenson Self-Rep...

A considerable amount of research has examined patterns of substance use and the potential explanations of it among samples from the United States and other industrialized nations. To date, however, no research has explored these issues in a sample of Saudi Arabian youth. The current study addressed this gap in the literature and examined the lifet...

KEYWORDS: biosocial, assumptions, twinsIn their initial article, Burt and Simons (2014) laid out a range of specific criticismsof twin-based research. They argued that violations of the statistical assumptions thatunderpin this line of work result in upwardly biased estimates of heritability and down-wardlybiasedestimatesofenvironmentaleffects.Accor...

The role of parenting in the development of criminal behavior has been the source of a vast amount of research, with the majority of studies detecting statistically significant associations between dimensions of parenting and measures of criminal involvement. An emerging group of scholars, however, has drawn attention to the methodological limitati...

Emerging evidence from longitudinal research suggests that bullied children are more likely to develop antisocial tendencies and mental health problems later in life. Less research, however, has used genetically sensitive research designs to control for genetic confounding and examine whether the well-supported association between bullying victimiz...

The goal of this chapter is to provide an overview of the existing literature pertaining to evolutionary behavioral genetics and violent criminal behaviors. In doing so, we provide an introduction to the methodologies that are used to estimate the heritability of violent crime, and we review studies that have estimated the heritability of violent c...

Psychopathic personality traits have consistently been found to predict a range of negative and dysfunctional outcomes. As a result, it is somewhat surprising that the research to date has failed to empirically examine the potential association between psychopathic personality traits and parenting quality. The current study addressed this omission...

Handgun and gang violence represent two important threats to public safety. Although several studies have examined the factors that increase the risk for gang membership and handgun carrying, few studies have explored the biosocial underpinnings to the development of both gang involvement and carrying a handgun. The current study addressed this gap...

A body of empirical research has revealed that there are associations among language skills, peer interactions, and behavioral problems in childhood. At the same time, however, there has been comparatively less research devoted to exploring the mutual unfolding of these factors over the first few years of life. The current study is designed to part...

A body of empirical research has revealed that there are associations among language skills, peer interactions, and behavioral problems in childhood. At the same time, however, there has been comparatively less research devoted to exploring the mutual unfolding of these factors over the first few years of life. The current study is designed to part...