Neuroethics & Law Blog

Schweitzer et al. on Lay Understanding of Neuroimages

Here's an important abstract on SSRN. The research on how we expect jurors to understand neuroimaging evidence grows ever more interesting:

"Neuroimages as Evidence in a Mens Rea Defense: No Impact" 
Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, Vol. 17, No. 3, pp. 357–393, 2011

NICHOLAS J. SCHWEITZER, Arizona State University
MICHAEL J. SAKS, Arizona State University (ASU) - Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law
EMILY R. MURPHY, Stanford Law School
ADINA L. ROSKIES, affiliation not provided to SSRN
WALTER SINNOTT-ARMSTRONG, affiliation not provided to SSRN
LYN M. GAUDET, Arizona State University (ASU) - Center for Law, Science, and Innovation
Recent developments in the neuropsychology of criminal behavior have given rise to concerns that neuroimaging evidence (such as MRI and functional MRI [fMRI] images) could unduly influence jurors. Across four experiments, a nationally representative sample of 1,476 jury-eligible participants evaluated written summaries of criminal cases in which expert testimony was presented in support of a mental disorder as exculpatory. The evidence varied in the extent to which it presented neuroscientific explanations and neuroimages in support of the expert’s conclusion. Despite suggestive findings from previous research, we found no evidence that neuroimagery affected jurors’ judgments (verdicts, sentence recom-mendations, judgments of the defendant’s culpability) over and above verbal neuroscience - based testimony. A meta-analysis of our four experiments confirmed these findings. In addition, we found that neuroscientific evidence was more effective than clinical psycho- logical evidence in persuading jurors that the defendant’s disorder reduced his capacity to control his actions, although this effect did not translate into differences in verdicts.

PEBS Neuroethics Roundup (JHU)

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Subscribe to our mailing list The Program in Ethics and Brain Sciences (PEBS) is a collaborative effort of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and the  Johns Hopkins Brain Sciences Institute . The goal of PEBS is to ensure that research in brain science proceeds with an informed understanding of ethical issues, and that philosophical and empirical analyses of the advances in brain research proceed with an informed understanding of the science.

PEBS Neuroethics Roundup (JHU)

Last Edition's Most Popular Article: Antipsychotic drugs grow more popular for patients without mental illness, The Washington Post In The Popular Press: Do Juvenile Killers Deserve Life Behind Bars?, National Public Radio A Neuroscientist's Quest to Reverse Engineer the Human Brain, Scientific American Wellcome Collection: Axon Game, Wellcome Trust Neuroethics (Music) Playlist, The Neuroethics Blog Stem cell brain injections ease Parkinson's, New Scientist  A World without Advertising?, Practical Ethics The Last of the Split-Brain Patients, Discover Magazine Nokia patents a tattoo that vibrates when you get a call, Los Angeles Times Neuroscience: Making connections, Nature Sex-starved fruit flies turn to drink, BBC News The Dark Side of Military-Funded Neuroscience, ABC News Brave Girl’s First Ski Jump — The Great Feelings of Overcoming Fear, The Scholarly Kitchen The Blinking Brain--A Problem For fMRI?, Neuroskeptic Think that’s not fair? Your serotonin transporters must be high, Scientific American Mind Wandering Is Linked to Your Working Memory, Scientific American  For the Record on the Propranolol/Implicit Racism Study, Neuroethics & Law Blog Understanding Why Autistic People May Reject Social Touch, Time Healthland The will is caused, not free, Practical Ethics How a Fertile Woman Affects the Way Men Talk, Time Healthland A True Bionic Limb Remains Far Out of Reach, Wired Science Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter, The Neuroethics Blog Study finds electrotherapy dampens brain connections, Reuters Fight your fate: Do advances in neuroscience give the lie to free will?, FT.com The God issue: New science of religion, New Scientist  Halftime at SXSW, Youtube Chimp prodigy shows signs of human-like intelligence, New Scientist  Face Blindness: '60 Minutes' Spotlights Mysterious Condition Of Prosopagnosia, Huffington Post Science The “Moral Side Effects” of Drugs, Neuroethics & Law Blog From the Academic Literature: Episodic autobiographical memory in amnestic mild cognitive impairment: What are the neural correlates?, Human Brain Mapping Species-specific response to human infant faces in the premotor cortex, Neuroimage  The Williams syndrome chromosome 7q11.23 hemideletion confers hypersocial, anxious personality coupled with altered insula structure and function, PNAS Electroconvulsive therapy reduces frontal cortical connectivity in severe depressive disorder, PNAS The Persistence of Thought: Evidence for a Role of Working Memory in the Maintenance of Task-Unrelated Thinking, Psychological Science Witnesses in Action: The Effect of Physical Exertion on Recall and Recognition, Psychological Science Obesity and the brain: how convincing is the addiction model?, Nature Reviews Neuroscience

Subscribe to our mailing list The Program in Ethics and Brain Sciences (PEBS) is a collaborative effort of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and the  Johns Hopkins Brain Sciences Institute . The goal of PEBS is to ensure that research in brain science proceeds with an informed understanding of ethical issues, and that philosophical and empirical analyses of the advances in brain research proceed with an informed understanding of the science.

Hanson's "Ideology, Psychology, and Law"

Recently Posted to SSRN:

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"Ideology, Psychology, and Law" 
Ideology, Psychology and Law, 2012

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JON D. HANSON, Harvard Law School

Formally, the law is based solely on reasoned analysis, devoid of ideological biases or unconscious influences. Judges claim to act as umpires applying the rules, not making them. They frame their decisions as straightforward applications of an established set of legal doctrines, principles, and mandates to a given set of facts. As most legal scholars understand, however, the impression that the legal system projects is largely an illusion. As far back as 1881, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. made a similar claim, writing that “the felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow-men, have a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed.”

More than a century later, we are now much closer to understanding the mechanisms responsible for the gap between the formal face of the law and the actual forces shaping it. Over the last decade or so, political scientists and legal academics have begun studying the linkages between ideologies, on one hand, and legal principles and policy outcomes on the other. During that same period, mind scientists have turned to understanding the psychological sources of ideology. This book is the first to bring many of the world’s experts on those topics together to examine the sometimes unsettling interactions between psychology, ideology, and law, and to better understand what, beyond and beneath the logic, animates the law.

This introductory chapter describes why this volume came together when it did and provides an overview of the general sections and the individual chapters and comments in the book. It begins with a brief, loose, and highly stylized history of the relationships between ideology, psychology, and law — a history premised on the oversimplifying assertion that something changed around the year 2000.

Keren's "Consenting Under Stress"

Recently Posted to SSRN:

"Consenting Under Stress" 

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HILA KEREN, Hebrew University of Jerusalem - Faculty of Law, Southwestern Law School
This article highlights a disturbing gap between what is currently known about stress across a range of disciplines and the way stress is treated at law. It does so by focusing on parties who seek relief from harmful contracts, on the grounds that they consented under stress. The article first exposes the leading legal view that stress is merely a subjective feeling and therefore merits no legal recognition. It then provides a pragmatic synthesis of the rich study of stress, in order to counter that misguided legal presumption and to offer a better understanding of the physical, social and psychological dimensions of stress.

Exploring both scientifically accepted causes of stress (stressors) and its known outcomes, the article offers a new framing of stress and a set of analytic tools that allow better legal access to the problem. It argues that legal actors can and should use the non-legal scientific understanding of stress to evaluate the arguments of those who claim to have consented to an unwanted contract while under stress. The article concludes that informed evaluation of stress arguments is not only pragmatically necessary, but also conceptually required for any legal system that, like contract law, relies on the power of choice and consent.

Moreno and Haidt at the NYU Bookstore

The event is March 29 from 6:30-8pm. Matt Liao will moderate. Details here--> Download flyer.

The “Moral Side Effects” of Drugs (Terbeck)

Sylvia Terbeck, the first author of the "propranolol/implicit racism" study that is making big headlines internationally, has written and submitted the following guest post:

Recently, we published a study in the journal Psychopharmacology finding that propranolol reduced implicit negative racial attitudes. Prof. Kolber kindly already wrote a helpful blog post about this study. We do fully agree – and hope that this initial study might trigger further research; for example to study the effect of Propranolol in the course of clinical treatment, or to research if the effects would indeed affect people’s real life choices etc. etc. ...

This study has, however, received a lot of media attention. For example, one piece had the title: “Pill cures racism.”

Most interesting I found a comment from one reporter on news Canada TV, who said: “ ... this seems like a movie plot, that you can take a drug and change who you are.”

In this blog here I wanted to address 2 questions:

a)      Can a drug change who you are?

b)      Should you take it for that purpose?

For question a) I also refer to a recent post of mine on the forum for science + religion, about ethical side effects of drugs.

For a long time, we have known about studies showing that drugs not only have physical but also psychological effects. Also, recent studies on antidepressant drugs indicate that they might also change moral and social judgments in healthy volunteers. I can understand, however, that our study might shed new light into this debate, because people might feel that their racial prejudice is more “part of who they are”, the way they brought up, the social norms they are exposed to... However, we do need to acknowledge that everything – also social experience – ultimately lead to changes in the brain. Interestingly, also quite primitive emotions-–such as fear-–might play a role in relatively higher order processes, such as morality or some forms of prejudice. Indeed a very interesting line of research, I hope to follow up.

Question b):  Should you, if further research would validate drugs with “moral side effects”, take them for that purpose. I am a psychologist, so I feel that I do not have the necessary background to answer this question. I could only answer this question as a layperson in ethics, and as a person frightened by the side effects of Paracetamol  ... so you probably know the answer.

Thus, I would like to refer to a comment from my colleague and co-authour of this study Dr. Guy Kahane:

“Even if the effect we found will be fully validated by future research, no one could seriously suggest handing out propranolol to reduce racism—and remember that it anyway doesn’t affect the nastiest forms of explicit racism.

“I suppose a more interesting question is whether it could be used in a more targeted way in contexts where we have reason to think that implicit attitudes may bias decisions—for example in legal contexts when judges or juries are making a decision, or in a hiring committee. I don’t think we are anywhere near giving juries propranolol, but in the longer term, this is the kind of idea we might need to seriously think about.”

Finally, I have recently written a paper (currently under review) in which I demonstrate that from our current understanding of brain anatomy and functioning it would be inconceivable that there would ever (!) be a drug with just the desired effect and no side effects.

PEBS Neuroethics Roundup (JHU)

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Subscribe to our mailing list The Program in Ethics and Brain Sciences (PEBS) is a collaborative effort of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and the  Johns Hopkins Brain Sciences Institute . The goal of PEBS is to ensure that research in brain science proceeds with an informed understanding of ethical issues, and that philosophical and empirical analyses of the advances in brain research proceed with an informed understanding of the science.

For the Record on the Propranolol/Implicit Racism Study

I blogged here recently about the very interesting new study by Terbeck et al. which suggests that propranolol may reduce measures of implicit racial bias. I was recently quoted about the research in this article and thought I'd use the blog to make a correction and to clarify the discussion.

Here is the relevant discussion from the article (in black type) with my comments (in blue type):

Neuroskeptic on the fMRI Eye Blink Study

I think the Neuroskeptic's blog is fantastic. I'm glad this study was brought to my attention.

"Nudging Healthy Lifestyles – Informing Regulatory Governance with Behavioural Research"

Recently Posted to SSRN:

"Nudging Healthy Lifestyles – Informing Regulatory Governance with Behavioural Research" 

European Journal of Risk Regulation, Vol. 3, No. 1, January 2012 

Alberto Alemanno, HEC Paris - Law Department
On Amir, University of California, San Diego (UCSD) - Rady School of Management
Luc Bovens   
Adam Burgess   
Orly Lobel, University of San Diego School of Law; Harvard Law School 

Kyle.Powys Whyte, Michigan State University - Department of Philosophy                                                

Evan.Selinger, Rochester Institute of Technology - Department of PhilosophyDepartment of Philosophy             

At a time when policy makers want to change the behaviour of citizens to tackle a broad range of social problems, such as climate change, excessive drinking, obesity and crime, a promising new policy approach has appeared that seems capable of escaping the liberal reservations typically associated with all forms of regulatory action. The approach, which stems from the increasingly ubiquitous findings of behavioural research, is generally captured under the evocative concept of ‘nudge.’ Inspired by ‘libertarian paternalism,’ it suggests that the goal of public policies should be to steer citizens towards making positive decisions as individuals and for society while preserving individual choice. As governments are taking considerable interest in the use of ‘nudging,’ this collection of essays provides a pioneering analysis of this innovative policy approach as it is currently experimented in the United Kingdom and the United States. In particular, it aims at critically examining the application of nudging approaches to the current efforts of regulating lifestyle choices, such as tobacco use, excessive use of alcohol, unhealthy diets and lack of physical exercise. In his opening essay, Nudging Healthy Lifestyles, Adam Burgess provides a critical assessment of the introduction of behavioural, nudging approaches to correct lifestyle behaviours in the UK. His thought-provoking analysis triggered a lively debate that has been framed along the subsequent essays signed by On Amir and Orly Lobel, Evan Selinger and Kyle Powys White, Alberto Alemanno and Luc Bovens. Each of these essays critically reflects upon the effectiveness as well as legitimacy of ‘nudging’ approaches.

More on the Propranolol/Implicit Bias Study

Earlier, I wrote about the recent propranolol/implicit bias study. Amanda Pustilnik offers her thoughts here.

"Post traumatic Stress Disorder, Neuroscience, and the Law"

See here for a recently published article on PTSD in the International Journal of Law Psychiatry by Barbara Bottalico and Tommaso Bruni.

And here is the abstract:

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a complex psychiatric condition, the effects of which can be seriously debilitating. As it originates from a specific traumatic event, it often impacts soldiers and victims of violent crime. It is currently one of the most frequently litigated mental diseases. Neuroscience is slowly discovering the neural bases of PTSD and other psychiatric ailments and is building tests to distinguish actual patients from non-suffering individuals. We examine the current state of neuroscientific research on PTSD and its biomarkers, focusing on a recent experiment by Apostolos Georgopoulos and coworkers. Then we analyze the legal consequences of these scientific advances, both in civil and criminal law, from a comparative perspective. Neuro-technology is likely to provide courts with a new kind of evidence, which will not replace but add to older behavioral evidence. Furthermore, it will weaken the so far standing distinction between physical and emotional harm. However, even extremely sensitive tests (> 95%) can have insufficient accuracy if the prevalence of a condition in the tested population is low. Therefore, the law ought to take into account the prevalence of PTSD and other psychiatric conditions when the decision whether to admit neuro-evidence in courts or not is made.

PEBS Neuroethics Roundup (JHU)

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Subscribe to our mailing list The Program in Ethics and Brain Sciences (PEBS) is a collaborative effort of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and the  Johns Hopkins Brain Sciences Institute . The goal of PEBS is to ensure that research in brain science proceeds with an informed understanding of ethical issues, and that philosophical and empirical analyses of the advances in brain research proceed with an informed understanding of the science.

TBI in U.S. Soldier Accused of Afghanistan Rampage

According to this news story, the U.S. soldier in Afghanistan accused of a brutal, murderous rampage has suffered a mild traumatic brain injury in the past. It's not clear from the piece, however, that it played any role in his conduct:

An official told ABC News that the soldier has suffered a mild traumatic brain injury (TBI) in the past, either from hitting his head on the hatch of a vehicle or in a car accident. He went through the advanced TBI treatment at Fort Lewis and was deemed to be fine.

He also underwent mental health screening necessary to become a sniper and passed in 2008. He had routine behavioral health screening after that and was cleared, the official said.

When the soldier returned from his last deployment in Iraq he had difficulty reintegrating, including marital problems, the source told ABC News, .[sic] But officials concluded that he had worked through those issues before deploying to Afghanistan.