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Low-Resting Heart Rates

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Take sixty seconds to check your heart rate. If it’s lower than sixty beats per minute, you might be “physiologically predisposed” to commit violent crimes. A Biological Basis for Criminal Behavior? Scientists have long entertained the idea that there is a biological basis for criminal behavior. A number of studies in the past have linked low resting heart rates to antisocial behaviors, but most involved small sample sizes and limited their collections of observations to short periods of time. So recently, a group of researchers from the Karolinska Institute near Stockholm decided to examine data collected by the Swedish government for “conscription assessments” of young men entering the armed forces. The data, which included records of the resting heart rates of over 700,000 people, spanned multiple decades. The researchers worked to control for all kinds of variables that could potentially impact either a man’s heart rate or risk of criminal behavior, such as height, weight, blood pressure, body mass index, socioeconomic status, IQ, psychiatric health, and physical fitness (as determined by an exercise test). Still, they found that subjects with the lowest resting heart rates at age 18 were definitively more likely to engage in criminal behavior as they got older. …show more content…

The men in the slowest group had heart rates of between 35 and 60 beats per minute. The heart rates of the men in the fastest group were between 83 and 145 beats per minute. Upon analysis, researchers determined that the men with the slowest heart rates were forty-nine percent more likely to commit violent crimes than the fastest group, as well as thirty-three percent more likely to be convicted of nonviolent offenses. They were also forty-one percent more likely to be injured in an assault and thirty-one percent more likely to be injured in an

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