Neuroethics & Law Blog

Involuntary Relationships between Victims and Offenders? (Madeira)

In my dissertation research, I explored the ways in which victims' families and survivors came to comprehend and cope with the Oklahoma City bombing through membership in community groups as well as through attendance and participation in Timothy McVeigh's prosecution and execution (see the link here for a summary).  After hearing numerous interviewees state that McVeigh would "tell the families" hurtful informaiton, and that he attempted to "jab" at and "hurt" victims families through the media, I concluded that victims' families/survivors felt trapped in an involuntary relationship with McVeigh.  This relationship is similar to a communication theory concept known as a parasocial relationship, a one-sided interaction between a media personality and audience members in which audience members feel that the media personality is/would be a member of their primary social group to which they maintain loyalty.  Instead of being a voluntary, positive parasocial relationship, however, the victim-offender relationship would be an involuntary, negative relationship that fettered victims' families and survivors to the bombing. 

I'm now writing an article describing this involuntary relationship in the context of the Oklahoma City bombing.  However, I'm also wondering how far this concept may be extended.  It seems logical that involuntary relationships may form in the aftermath of crimes with mass victimage, or crimes that receive heavy media coverage.  But I also believe that such an involuntary relationship may also be present in other crimes as well.  Courtrooms are communicative forums, and victims and victims' families may learn quite a bit about the defendant during the trial (particularly in capital trials where mitigating evidence is introduced).  In addition, they may feel trapped in an involuntary relationship with the offender for years afterwards as they keep apprised of the outcome of appeals and/or potential release dates. 

I'd love to hear how far others think this concept can be stretched.   

Special Commentary Section in Nature on Cognitive Enhancement (Reiner)

The Correspondence section of Nature is featuring a special section with highlights of the responses to Sahakian & Morein-Zamir's Commentary entitled "Professor's little helper" that ran in the 20 Dec, 2007 issue. At the same time, Nature is launching an online survey, much like the one that Sahakian and Morein-Zamir used in querying selected academic colleagues about their use of cognitive enhancers. Finally, there is still ample opportunity to comment on the target article.

"Implicit Social Cognition and Law"

Kristin Lane (Bard, Psychology), Jerry Kang (UCLA, Law), and Mahzarin Banaji (Harvard, Psychology) have posted (just the) abstract of Implicit Social Cognition and Law to SSRN.   The full document appears at Annual Review of Law & Social Science, Vol. 3, December 2007. Here is the abstract:

Experimental psychology has provided substantial evidence that the human mind can operate in automatic, uncontrollable fashion as well as without conscious awareness of its workings and the sources of influence on it. With methods available to measure implicit or less conscious aspects of social cognition, especially group-specific attitudes and stereotypes, several aspects of the nature of implicit social cognition are now regarded as well established. Such results primarily include the pervasive and robust implicit favoritism for one's own groups and socially dominant groups, the dissociation between implicit and explicit social cognition, the ability of both to predict behavior, the greater impact of the former on certain discriminatory behaviors, and the sensitivity of seemingly implicit thoughts, feelings, and behaviors to change in response to situational features and experience. Legal scholarship and judicial opinions are beginning to consider how the law can and should adapt to such findings, in particular how they call into question existing assumptions regarding the notion of intent, and their relevance for anti-discrimination law.

If you are interested in receiving a copy of the full paper, please contact Professor Kang via e-mail.

UPDATED: Memory Enhancement/Alzheimer's Treatment

UPDATED: As Neil Levy notes in the comments, one ought to be particularly cautious about the claims made for this device.  See here.

The Daily Mail reports on an early-stage device that developers say may reverse symptoms of Alzheimer's.  Here's an excerpt:

The helmet is the creation of Dr Gordon Dougal, a director of Virulite, a medical research company based in County Durham.

It follows a study at the University of Sunderland which found infra-red light can reverse memory loss in mice.

Dr Dougal claims that only ten minutes under the hat a day is enough to have an effect.

"Currently all you can do with dementia is to slow down the rate of decay - this new process will not only stop that rate of decay but partially reverse it," he said.

Low level infra-red red is thought to stimulate the growth of cells of all types of tissue and encourage their repair. It is able to penetrate the skin and even get through the skull. . . .

The study at Sunderland found that exposing middle-aged mice to infrared light for six minutes a day for ten days improved their performance in a three-dimensional maze. In the human trials, due to start this summer, the scientists will use levels of infra-red that occur naturally in sunlight.

I guess we shall see if this actually works.  The last bit of text above suggests that the device has an enhancement effect on mice (assuming that middle-aged mice are not thought memory deficient.) (Hat tip: boingboing.net)

Death Penalty and the Emotions by Bandes

Susan A. Bandes (DePaul, Law), currently visiting at the University of Chicago School of Law, has posted The Heart Has Its Reasons: Examining the Strange Persistence of the American Death Penalty to SSRN.  Here is the abstract:

The debate about the future of the death penalty often focuses on whether its supporters are animated by instrumental or expressive values, and if the latter, what values the penalty does in fact express, where those values originated, and how deeply entrenched they are. In this article I argue that a more explicit recognition of the emotional sources of support for and opposition to the death penalty will contribute to the clarity of the debate. The focus on emotional variables reveals that the boundary between instrumental and expressive values is porous; both types of values are informed (or uninformed) by fear, outrage, compassion, selective empathy and other emotional attitudes. More fundamentally, though history, culture and politics are essential aspects of the discussion, the resilience of the death penalty cannot be adequately understood when the affect is stripped from explanations for its support. Ultimately, the death penalty will not die without a societal change of heart.

Emotions and Legal Institutions Conference at the Univ. of Chicago (Buccafusco)

On May 9-10, the University of Chicago Law School is hosting a conference on Emotion in Context: Exploring the Interaction between Emotions and Legal Institutions. 

From the description:

The design of legal institutions is based on implicit and explicit assumptions about human behavior, for example assumptions about how people individually or collectively respond to new information, assess risks, or decide whom to trust or fear, about what motivates people to forgive or to seek vengeance, or about how to promote or discourage empathy. The interdisciplinary study of emotion has offered valuable insights into whether these assumptions about human behavior are well grounded. The next step is to explore how generalizable these insights are: that is, whether emotional dynamics remain stable across institutional contexts. For example, rules seeking to promote forgiveness might be workable and desirable in victim-offender mediation involving juvenile offenders, but not in capital litigation, domestic violence court or national truth and reconciliation commissions. Individual risk preferences may vary depending on institutional settings, and these preferences may affect the design of health plans, environmental protections, or contract enforcement mechanisms. The dynamics of emotional contagion in jury deliberations may differ from those in negotiation settings or stratified workplaces.

This conference will bring together scholars working in philosophy, neuroscience, neuroeconomics, sociology, psychology, political science and other disciplines exploring the complex interaction between emotion and social structure to consider both how institutional context affects the experience and expression of emotion, and how emotion norms affect the shape and operation of legal institutions. It will be open to the public. Further information will be posted shortly. Contact Susan Bandes at sbandes@uchicago.edu or Marjorie Holme at mholme@uchicago.edu with any questions.

Brain Versus Brawn in the Enhancement Debate (Reiner)

Dr. Peter Reiner at UBC writes in to the Neuroethics & Law Blog with the following interesting observations:

The enhancement debate in professional and amateur athletics has primarily focused on the use of performance enhancing drugs, in particular anabolic steroids, growth hormone, and erythropoetin. As the New York Times reports, at a meeting of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform earlier this week, Representative John F. Tierney appears to have changed the focus to psychostimulants when he asked a pointed question about the number of professional baseball players that have recently been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder: 103 players had the diagnosis this past season whereas only 28 suffered the malady in 2006. Remarkably, representatives of major league baseball including commissioner Bud Selig were caught off-guard by the question, and have been scrambling to provide explanations ever since.

The concern rests on the fact that a diagnosis of ADD allows professional baseball players to get prescriptions for and use psychostimulants such as Ritalin and Adderall, potentially enhancing their performance via increased concentration rather than brute strength.  It is hardly surprising that players might want to get some help focusing their attention when they are trying to hit a ball traveling 90 mph in a cavernous room filled with tens of thousands of screaming fans.  The pithy quote came from Dr. Allan Lans, psychiatrist for the Mets from 1985 – 2003.

“The No. 1 drug use of sports is really amphetamines,” he said. “Amphetamines are the real performance-enhancing drugs that people should always have been worried about.”

In the blink of an eye, neuroethics moves to center stage in the enhancement debate in sport.

Egregious Guardianship Practices in MA (Madeira)

The Boston Globe recently ran a story (linked here) about the troubling process by which elderly individuals can be declared infirm and under the custody of a guardian in MA.  Supposedly, this can occur without the senior citizen having a right to be present in the courtroom or to be represented by counsel; guardianships are also allegedly made permanent in two-minute hearings in MA probate courts.  To make matters worse, courts don't insist on required minimal medical documentation, and approve guardianships without asking about the senior's long term prognosis for recovery and without determing whether an independent fact-finder must become involved.  When a petition for guardianship is filed, the proposed ward is merely given a piece of paper, and may not be able to understand the petition or be able to appear in court to oppose it.  This is especially problematic for "unbefriended elders" who don't have anyone to protect their interests, and hospitals or nursing homes are the parties who insist that these individuals are incapacitated.  And according to estimates this happens to more than 2,000 people each year.

However, the problem does not end there.  Once placed in the guardianship, senior citizens are deprived of needed services.  Courts can't or won't track their whereabouts or monitor treatment.  Moreover, guardians rarely file initial asset inventories or annual financial reports.  Suffolk Probate Court recently examined five years of records and found that in one case a man was committed after a judge ruled that an elderly man was mentally ill "based on the six-word diagnosis - "Alcohol-related brain degeneration. Korsakoff's syndrome" - and an anecdote related by the hospital's lawyer about the man's loss of short-term memory."  In 72% of the cases the medical certifications were unbelievably brief (a few sentences) or so vague that they fell far short of the requirement that the petitioner "describe in detail the diagnosis" requiring commitment.  Significantly, corporations such as Partners Healthcare often own the  hospitals that petition for guardianship and the nursing homes where these individuals are then committed.  Finally, guardians are not licensed and do not have training requirements; many professional guardians are lawyers or social workers.and probate courts have no way of tracking how many wards a guardian has.

Hat tip:  John Grohol at PsychCentral

Against Happiness

Here's an essay adapted from Eric Wilson's new book Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy.

More on the Wine Study

In a comment to my previous post on the wine study (you may want to read that first), Daniel Goldberg helpfully links to this post at Marginal Revolution, where Alex Tabarrok argues that the wine study seems like a waste of money: we can just do a behavioral study and ask people their blinded preferences about wines when they're uncertain or misled about wine prices. 

I agree that the study has gotten so much attention because people find the behavioral results interesting.  And, if you're a marketer, I can understand why that would be your focus.  But if you're a neuroscientist, you may be interested in the results because they add to a body of evidence about the brain. 

Now, they're appears to be a suggestion in the paper that people's expressed preferences (as discovered in behavioral studies) may diverge from the actual qualitative experience of wine drinking that we might discover through brain imaging.  This involves a thorny problem in neuroscience and neuroethics research related to interpersonal comparisons of utility.  Our evidence for what the brain is doing comes, at some level, from behavioral observations.  It takes some rather powerful theories about brain function to get us to favor neuroscientific evidence that, in some sense, contradicts or diverges from the sort of behavioral evidence that led us to develop our neuroscientific theories in the first place.  But if you believe that it is possible to develop theories of brain function that would lead us to favor those theories over behavioral data (which seems at least plausible to me), well then, we've got to start somewhere.