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.

Neuromarketing and Placebo Effects

Neil posted recently about a study that found placebo-related effects in female hotel room cleaners.  Here's another placebo-related effect:  In a forthcoming study, researchers report that people enjoy wine more when they believe it has a higher price tag.  It seems to be accepted wisdom that our reported perceptions of the quality of a product depend on our beliefs about the price of a product.  What's unusual about this study is that they purport to use brain imaging to support the view that we actually enjoy consuming a product more when we believe it is more expensive.  (Subjects in an fMRI scanner drank samples of various Cabernet Sauvignons that were pumped in to the scanner--I guess they drank it while lying down.) 

The paper is still in draft form, so I won't quote from it directly.  But it certainly is interesting.  They even note a possible similarity to pain placebo effects on p. 8.  The study fits nicely with placebo research findings that placebo efficacy increases as the price of the placebo increases.  So your homeopathic remedy works better when it costs you more. 

The Seventh Circuit recently affirmed a lower-court ruling against the makers of the Q-Ray bracelet and in favor of the Federal Trade Commission.  Now, Q-Ray did make all sorts of claims about how the bracelets work (ions and the like) that seem to have no basis in fact.  That's a problem.  But claims that the bracelets helped alleviate symptoms may well be legitimate--they created placebo effects.  In a double blind study, they won't perform better than "placebo" Q-Ray bracelets (ones that lack the Q-Rays!)  But that fact alone does not denigrate the power of the bracelet to ease some symptoms. 

Here's the kicker.  According to Judge Easterbrook, “Since the placebo effect can be obtained from sugar pills, charging $200 for a device that is represented as a miracle cure but works no better than a dummy pill is a form of fraud.”  Not so fast, I say.  We need to run a test that compares the efficacy of an expensive, hyped-up bracelet to a cheap sugar pill.  The smart money says that the bracelet will have the edge.  It may not be a $200 edge, but that's usually for the consumer to decide.  For a limited defense of clinical placebo deception, see here (the final version should appear here in the next couple of weeks). 

Informed Consent and Borderline Cases (Buccafusco)

I visited my parents for the holidays, and, as always, I enjoyed the time spent with my father, a neuropharmacologist, discussing contemporary scientific research and the law.  One conversation touched on a subject that might be of interest to readers of this blog. 

My father is director of the Alzheimer's Research Center at the Medical College of Georgia, and in Alzheimer's research (as with many other diseases) cases of borderline impairment provide some of the most fruitful research subjects.  In such cases, the subject is neither diagnosable as suffering from AD nor cognitively healthy, and her value to the research project is based on this ambiguous, transitional state.  The problem for law and medical ethics arises when the patient's informed consent is needed.  As complex as questions of informed consent often are for cases of obvious health or impairment, the application of informed consent protocols to marginally impaired patients seems particularly troubling.  Moreover, judges, IRBs, and others responsible for determining whether informed consent was given can't look to neuroscientists or mental health professionals for help, because the latter groups' assessments will necessarily be ambiguous - the ambiguity, after all, is what makes such subjects valuable.  We raised a number of questions but very few answers.  How should the law treat these subjects? Will general guidelines be possible or is a case-by-case analysis required?  What light do such cases shed on informed consent protocols for seemingly healthy or impaired patients?

I'd be interested to hear from others who know more about these issues.  I'd also be grateful for pointers to relevant literature. 

Monkey See, Robot Do

Researchers implanted electrodes in a monkey's brain in North Carolina and used signals from the monkey's brain to make a robot walk in Japan.  The monkey was trained on a treadmill, but they eventually stopped the treadmill and the monkey could still send the appropriate signals to make the robot walk.  Here's the first part of the experiment from the NYT (and see highlighted comment at the end):

In preparing for the experiment, Idoya was trained to walk upright on a treadmill. She held onto a bar with her hands and got treats — raisins and Cheerios — as she walked at different speeds, forward and backward, for 15 minutes a day, 3 days a week, for 2 months.

Meanwhile, electrodes implanted in the so-called leg area of Idoya’s brain recorded the activity of 250 to 300 neurons that fired while she walked. Some neurons became active when her ankle, knee and hip joints moved. Others responded when her feet touched the ground. And some fired in anticipation of her movements.

To obtain a detailed model of Idoya’s leg movements, the researchers also painted her ankle, knee and hip joints with fluorescent stage makeup and, using a special high speed camera, captured her movements on video.

The video and brain cell activity were then combined and translated into a format that a computer could read. This format is able to predict with 90 percent accuracy all permutations of Idoya’s leg movements three to four seconds before the movement takes place. [emphasis added-AK]

I found this last statement rather surprising/confusing/unclear.  Presumably Idoya forms intentions to move less than three to four seconds before the movement takes place.  So I don't understand how the computer can predict "all permutations of Idoya's leg movements" so far in advance.

Speaking of exoskeltons, here's a non-neuro achievement from Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology to help farmers:

Manufacturing a Heart in Rats

This is only indirectly a neuroethics story.  But its importance seems hard to overstate.  The New York Times reports that researchers have constructed a rat heart, capable of beating:

The researchers removed all the cells from a dead rat heart, leaving the valves and outer structure as scaffolding for new heart cells injected from newborn rats. Within two weeks, the cells formed a new beating heart that conducted electrical impulses and pumped a small amount of blood.

With modifications, scientists should be able to grow a human heart by taking stem cells from a patient’s bone marrow and placing them in a cadaver heart that has been prepared as a scaffold, Dr. Taylor said in a telephone interview from her laboratory in Minneapolis. The early success “opens the door to this notion that you can make any organ: kidney, liver, lung, pancreas — you name it and we hope we can make it,” she said.

The description above is odd ("removed all the cells from a dead rat heart"--what was left?), but I think I get the basic idea.  The story seems important enough that it should have made the front page.

Ameliorating Alzheimer's

This article in the Journal of Neuroinflammation identifies a drug that seems to have led to a fast, dramatic improvement in the condition of a patient with Alzheimer's:

Substantial basic science and clinical evidence suggests that excess tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-alpha) is centrally involved in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease. In addition to its pro-inflammatory functions, TNF-alpha has recently been recognized to be a gliotransmitter that regulates synaptic function in neural networks. TNF-alpha has also recently been shown to mediate the disruption in synaptic memory mechanisms, which is caused by beta-amyloid and beta-amyloid oligomers. The efficacy of etanercept, a biologic antagonist of TNF-alpha, delivered by perispinal administration, for treatment of Alzheimer's disease over a period of six months has been previously reported in a pilot study. This report details rapid cognitive improvement, beginning within minutes, using this same anti-TNF treatment modality, in a patient with late-onset Alzheimer's disease. Rapid cognitive improvement following perispinal etanercept may be related to amelioration of the effects of excess TNF-alpha on synaptic mechanisms in Alzheimer's disease and provides a promising area for additional investigation and therapeutic intervention. [AK: emphasis added]

(via BoingBoing)