On the basis of this study, a multiaxial classification system of fire-setting is proposed.

Short unstructured social interactions between a volunteer interviewer, an adult with autism of Asperger type, and a control subject with a schizoid personality disorder were video-recorded. Asperger subjects tended to look less at the other person, to make more self-stimulatory gestures, and to look at the interviewer significantly less than normal subjects, and substantially less than schizoid subjects, during the periods when the interviewer was vocalizing although there were no such differences when the interviewer was listening. We suggest that the gaze avoidance of autism may in actuality be a lack of expected gaze (e.g., gaze when the other person is talking) rather than an absolute avoidance, and suggest that a lifelong absence of gaze response to social cues including speech could explain a number of the developmental features of autism including lack of joint attention with others, lack of understanding and affective response to others, and poor discrimination of facial expressions.

Parricide is an uncommon crime, so that many of the descriptive studies suffer from methodological shortcomings of small sample sizes and a non-representative ascertainment. We describe a consecutive series of mentally disordered offenders convicted of parricide who were admitted to high-security care and we compare their index characteristics with a group convicted of killing one or more strangers. The main ndings were that the parricides were more likely to suffer from schizophrenia but less likely to have had a disrupted childhood and criminal history, as compared with those who had killed a stranger. Those in the parricide group had made a previous attack on their victim in 40% of cases. Overall, the study con rmed some of the differences that one might expect between these two groups of homicides, which had entirely different relationships to their victims.

No abstract