If you were to interview one of the authors of the article Love Deprivation, Wechsler Performance > Verbal Discrepancy, and Violent Delinquency, Dr. Anthony Walsh would link this character activity to the character's need for love and acceptance. Walsh and his colleagues link these two needs to violence. In The Kite Runner you are introduced to a sociopath Assef who enjoys inflicting pain on others. The study carried out is able to shed light on Assef's actions throughout the book. When you meet Assef's parents, it's clear that they don't shower him with love. When the family enters Amir's birthday party, they enter “as if he were the parent, and they were his children” (Hosseini 95). Midway through the conversation with Assef and his parents, Amir wonders if “on some level, their son scared them” (Hosseini 96). These two points in the novel lead people to believe that Assef's parents are not giving him adequate love, therefore justifying his violent behavior. Walsh would say that Assef's actions are explainable by this experiment. The results they found demonstrated that lack of love “has a stronger impact on violent delinquency than any other variable” (Walsh, Beyer, Petee 181). Throughout the book Assef's sociopathic actions are seen as his lack of guilt and his violent behavior. Walsh found that psychopaths, who share many of the same characteristics as sociopaths, “have a low level of arousal in the hemisphere” and aggression is related to “inferiority of the left hemisphere relative to the capacity of the right hemisphere” ( Walsh, Beyer, Petee 179). Therefore, another reason explaining Assef's sociopathic actions is once again connected to the universal cause of love