In the late 1970s and early 1980s, several important reviews of the literature failed to establish a clear consensus on the relationship between economic conditions and violent crime. The research presented here applies the procedures of meta-analysis to 34 aggregate data studies reporting on violent crime, poverty, and income inequality. These studies reported a total of 76 zero-order correlation coefficients for all measures of violent crime with either poverty or income inequality. Of the 76 coefficients, all but 2, or 97 percent, were positive. Of the positive coefficients, nearly 80 percent were of at least moderate strength (>.25). It is concluded that poverty and income inequality are each associated with violent crime. The analysis, however, shows considerable variation in the estimated size of the relationships and suggests that homicide and assault may be more closely associated with poverty or income inequality than are rape and robbery.

Poverty, Income Inequality, and Violent Crime: A Meta-Analysis of Recent Aggregate Data Studies:

Outlines 5 models of the temperature-aggression hypothesis: negative affect escape, simple negative affect, excitation transfer/misattribution, cognitive neoassociation, and physiological-thermoregulatory. Reviews relevant studies. Aggression measures include violent crime, spouse abuse, horn-honking, and delivery of electric shock. Analysis levels include geographic regional, seasonal, monthly, and daily variations in aggression, and concomitant temperature-aggression effects in field and laboratory settings. Field studies clearly show that heat increases aggression. Laboratory studies show inconsistencies, possibly because of several artifacts. Specific models have not been adequately tested, but the excitation transfer/misattribution and cognitive neoassociation approaches appear most promising, whereas the negative affect escape appears the least viable. Suggestions for future work are made.

Temperature and aggression: Ubiquitous effects of heat on occurrence of human violence.

Is facial muscular movement capable of alterning emotional state? Facial feedback theories answer this question in the affirmative but do not specify the intervening process. Cognitive appraisal theories do not address this question at all. The vascular theory of emotional efference (VTEE) holds that facial muscular movement, by its action on the cavernous sinus, may restrict venous flow and thereby influence cooling of the arterial blood supply to the brain

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Feeling and facial efference: implications of the vascular theory of emotion.

Soybean yield prediction from UAV using multimodal data fusion and deep learning

Person, place, time: these are the basic elements of outbreak investigations and epidemiology. Historically, however, the focus in epidemiologic research has been on person and time, with little regard for the implications of place or space even though disease mapping has been done for over a hundred years. The development of geographic information systems (GISs) over the last 20 years has provided a more powerful and rapid ability to examine spatial patterns and processes. This, in turn, has fostered the discussion of such policyrelevant issues as health services and planning (1), as well as the use of GISs for epidemiologic investigations and disease surveillance. Methods of spatial analysis are given little, if any, introduction in modern epidemiology texts, and few epidemiologists have ventured further than making dot or choropleth maps, or listing geographic units along with rates of disease in tabular form (2-6). Spatial patterns are frequently intricate and complex, while most spatial methods used by epidemiologists can capture or identify only gross, simplistic patterns (2). Epidemiologists understand that disease processes have an historical (time) component, and formal methods of time series and hazard analyses are well-developed to study them. Few, however, recognize that every epidemic also has a geography (space). Some epidemiologists may not be aware that evaluation of the spatial distribution of measures of disease risk may provide etiologic insight. The logic of using geography to study disease or health care is derived from appreciation of factors causing non-uniformity of disease distribution (2). These fac-

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Spatial Analytical Methods and Geographic Information Systems: Use in Health Research and Epidemiology

Relations between human beings and the physical environment have been the foci of research and speculation for at least two millennia. One such focus has dealt with the relationships between climate and crime. This paper develops four hypotheses concerning the interaction between violent behavior and the thermal environment. These hypotheses relate to the structural density of local areas, alcohol consumption across the city, calendar effects, and neighborhood context. We developed a taxonomy of high-, medium-, and low-status residential areas (“neighborhoods”) in Dallas, Texas. These groupings formed the basis of several crosstabulations in which the relative frequency of aggravated assaults was the dependent variable. Neighborhood types differed markedly in the amplitude of their summer peaking of assaults, low-status neighborhoods having a peak not amenable to explanation entirely on the basis of month length or number of weekend days in the months. Assaults directly linked to alcohol sales es...

Seasonality and Assault: Explorations in Inter‐Neighborhood Variation, Dallas 1980

The role of population density in the generation or suppression of crime has been the subject of debate for decades. The classic argument is that high density offers opportunities for property crimes, given that it is a surrogate for the distribution of private property, much of which offers attractive targets to thieves. On the other hand, densely populated areas offer natural surveillance that has the effect of inhibiting violent crimes in so far as witnesses are more abundant and events are more likely to be reported to police. In this analysis, property and violent crimes were selected from a database of over 100,000 crimes reported in Baltimore County, Maryland, U.S.A., in the year 2000. Densities of population and of property and violent crimes were calculated for city blocks. Blocks with population densities above the mean of all blocks were then retained for further consideration. Analysis demonstrated that both property and violent crimes were moderately correlated with population density, and these crimes largely affected the same blocks. It was concluded that at the block level of geography, no evidence of a differential between property and violent crimes based on population density could be detected.

Property Crimes and Violence in United States: An Analysis of the influence of Population density

Extreme spatial variations in crime density in Baltimore County, MD

In the last few decades, social scientists have been reluctant to deal with the relationship between weather and human behavior, owing in part to the discredit brought to such studies by the excesses of the determinists. The few studies undertaken have generally relied on ambient temperature as a measure of stress. In the present work, a discomfort index was related to the incidence of aggravated assault in Dallas, Texas, for an eight-month period from March through October 1980. Some 4000 assault events were aggregated on a daily basis and related to three variables: discomfort index, day of the week, and month. The resulting model accounted for 71% of the variation in assault incidence. The discomfort index yielded significant F statistics whether entered first, second, or third in the model, indicating a significant main effect in spite of its collinearity with month. The analysis supports experimental laboratory evidence suggesting that heat stress is associated with aggressive behavior.

Determinism Revisited: Assault and Heat Stress in Dallas, 1980

Research in both laboratory and field settings has suggested a link between thermal stress and violent behavior, and both linear and curvilinear models have been investigated. A dearth of field studies prompted the analysis reported here, which is based on data for some 10,000 aggravated assaults occurring the City of Dallas in 1980 (a summer of severe heat stress) and 1981. This analysis replicates and extends certain aspects of recent work by Anderson and Anderson (1984) relating to the so-called linear and curvilinear hypotheses. Thermal stress is measured in two ways: a Discomfort Index (DI), which takes into account the influence of humidity acting in concert with temperature, and ambient temperature. Regression analyses were performed in two stages. In the first, data for all neighborhoods and all days of the study period were combined into ambient temperature and DI models. At the second stage, models differentiated between the three levels of neighborhood socioeconomic status. With weekend controlled, DI and ambient temperature were significant independent variables in the 'overall' model and in medium and low status neighborhoods. However, when linear effects were controlled, the curvilinear measures were never significant. The analysis generally tended to confirm Anderson and Anderson's suggestion that a reduction of aggression with increasing temperature does not appear to occur within the normal range of temperatures. This analysis further suggested that the hypothesized curvilinear effect is weak, if not entirely absent, even during conditions of extreme heat.

Keith D. Harries

Papers

Seasonality and Assault: Explorations in Inter‐Neighborhood Variation, Dallas 1980

Property Crimes and Violence in United States: An Analysis of the influence of Population density

Extreme spatial variations in crime density in Baltimore County, MD

Determinism Revisited: Assault and Heat Stress in Dallas, 1980

Heat and Violence: New Findings from Dallas Field Data, 1980-1981