Understanding violence

Violence is one of the most important social and public health problems worldwide. Despite great interest in understanding the major causes of violence and in developing effective prevention and intervention programs, knowledge generated by experts on different fields is nowadays fragmented and generally circumscribed to the circles where it is generated. Violent behavior is related to complex environmental and social circumstances, but heritable and other biological factors are also implicated. An integrated view of the causes of violence should take into account sociological and psychological aspects, together with biological, evolutionary and modeling approaches.

We would like to gather articles which discuss major recent advances in, among others, biological (genetic risk factors; stress; hormonal alterations; neuroimaging data on brain function alterations), psycho-sociological (hierarchical relationships and population health; elements of the micro-context; developmental trajectories) and modeling approaches (virtual reality and emotions; computational models on the development of hierarchical societies). All authors working on these research topics and in these fields are encouraged to submit a contribution.