Our job should be like any other forensic scientist's - we should be truth seekers who are not partisan, who do not have any interest in the outcome, who call it as we see it no matter the consequences. But it seems a lot easier for chemists and anthropologists and pathologists to take that neutral role than it does for psychiatrists.

You condition a vulnerable boy at puberty to become aroused by brutality. It's the violence, not the nudity. Frankly, I wouldn't mind if every teenage boy had a subscription to Playboy. They'd be looking at attractive naked female bodies while they masturbated, not eviscerated female bodies.

One of the few times I'm hit emotionally is when I listen to the tapes sadists make of torturing their victims. There the person is currently suffering, you can hear them suffer, and that calls out for an empathic response. But when they're dead, when they're no longer suffering, when it's over, it's hard to feel empathetic for the corpse.

Counter to the public's thinking, the celebrities who attract the largest number of stalkers - and typically it's not "if" a celebrity has a stalker, it's "how many" - are neither the most glamorous nor obnoxious, but rather the ones who seem the sweetest and most wholesome. They appear approachable.

One of the problems with studies that examine the effects of violent imagery is that they typically use mentally healthy psychology students. If you want to do a meaningful study, show movies like Body Double and Copycat to a group of sexual psychopaths the day before you release them.

With rare exceptions, people are responsible for what they do.

Consider surgeons and their work. It's unthinkable to put your hands in the warm blood of another human's gut. Even with rubber gloves on. Who'd want to do that? But surgeons get over it.