Journal of Threat Assessment and Management, Vol 12(3), Sep 2025, 149-168; doi:10.1037/tam0000229
Explicit threats of violence are relatively common and can evoke stress and fear in their recipients. Although explicit threats are rarely enacted, a portion are a genuine precursor to violent behavior, and little guidance exists on how to evaluate threats effectively. The previous research has preliminarily identified characteristics of threats and their perpetrators that may be indicative of higher violence risk, but it is limited by the small number of variables and specific settings examined. The present study—using a sample of individuals who had made an explicit threat, recruited from the general population via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (N = 257)—investigated the association between a broad range of historical and dynamic risk factors, as well as threat characteristics and warning behaviors, and violence following a threat. All historical and dynamic risk factors, except insight into mental illness or violent behavior, were significantly predictive of violence. The presence of several threat characteristics and a higher number of warning behaviors also predicted postthreat violence. When the predictive ability of all examined factors was compared via multivariate regressions, historical problems with violence and treatment/supervision, number of warning behaviors, perceived rejection by the victim, and recent substance use emerged as the most robust predictors of violence following a threat. These results imply that structured violence risk assessment instruments may be helpful when evaluating risk of explicit threats made by a known perpetrator and support additional consideration of warning behaviors and specific threat characteristics in addition to traditional risk factors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)