Antisocial Behavior Contagious For Some Married Couples

As any crime buff knows, Bonnie and Clyde were infamous American criminals back in the 1930s, operating as a husband-and-wife team, although they were not married.

However, there may be some “Bonnie and Clydes” running around today as well. The reason? When one spouse engages in antisocial behavior, the other has a good chance of doing so as well, a new study suggests.

A lot of research has been conducted, of course, on the familial transmission of antisocial behavior. Very few studies, however, have looked to see whether antisocial behavior might also be transferred from one spouse to another, or at least be a kind of behavior in which they both engage. So G. Gaulbaud du Fort, M.D., Ph.D., a psychiatric epidemiologist at the Sir Mortimer B. Davis-Jewish General Hospital in Montreal, Canada, and his colleagues decided to try to answer the question.

Their study included 519 pairs of spouses—that is, 1,038 subjects—randomly selected from a large, previously conducted general population survey. They used the Diagnostic Interview Schedule to determine how many of these 1,038 subjects engaged in antisocial behavior. Finally they used these findings to see whether those persons who engaged in antisocial behavior also had spouses who did so.

The answer was yes in some 20 percent of the cases, they reported in the November Psychological Medicine. “Our finding of a strong similarity between spouses for adult antisocial behavior has significant implications for both clinicians and researchers,” they wrote.

However, when they looked to see whether those subjects who had engaged in conduct disorder as children also had spouses who had done so, they found only a modest association—about 4 percent. What’s more, the spousal similarity for adult antisocial behavior was independent of the spousal similarity for conduct disorder, they discovered.

These findings, they believe, suggest that adult antisocial behavior should be considered a distinct diagnostic entity from child conduct disorder.

An abstract of the study, “Spouse Similarity for Antisocial Behavior in the General Population,” can be accessed on the Web at www.journals.cambridge.org by clicking on “Take the tour, “ then “Journal list,” then “Psychological Medicine.” ▪