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This issue includes a series of three articles dealing with the multifactorial model of disease transmission. The first describes the model and its use in psychiatry. In the second, which explores sociopathy (antisocial personality), it is noted that more males than females are affected. The greater prevalence of disturbance among relatives of sociopathic women than among relatives of sociopathic men, coupled with the more disturbed parental home situation of the women, "suggests that the sex difference in the prevalence of sociopathy is due to sex-related cultural or biological factors causing the threshold for sociopathy to be more deviant in women than in men." Sociopathy in women would then represent a more deviant manifestation of the same etiological process. The good fit of the multifactorial model of transmission to the data would support a transmission based either on strong genetic influence or on a situation in which the genetic effect is small, relative to environmental factors that include many events whose effects are additive. This finding gives further support to the hypothesis of a similar etiological process, with female sociopathy representing a more deviant manifestation. Additional supportive evidence is offered.
In the third paper, the familial relationship between sociopathy and hysteria (Briquet's Syndrome) is explored. While the former is more common among men, the latter is more common in women. Several clinical and family studies have suggested for some cases a common etiology and pathogenesis, based on the observation that the two disorders often occur in the same family and in the same individual more often than would be expected by chance. Use of the model with three thresholds related to severity and sex can account for the population and family data about these disorders. This is "consistent with the hypothesis that hysteria is a more prevalent and less deviant manifestation of the same process that causes sociopathy in wome