Custodite perciò la luce della scienza, fatene uso e non fatene spreco, perché non avvenga che una pioggia di fuoco un giorno ci divori tutti quanti, si, tutti quanti.
(B. Brecht, Vita di Galileo, didascalia della scena XV) ... Non si può volare per aria su di un bastone, bisognerebbe che ci fosse dentro una macchina: ma una macchina così non esiste ancora e forse non esisterà mai: perché l'uomo è troppo pesante. Ma naturalmente, non si può dire. Ne sappiamo troppo poco, Giuseppe, troppo poco. Davvero: siamo appena al principio. (B. Brecht, Vita di Galileo scena XV) |
Aug 16, 2012. By Stanley M. Practicum - “The Silent Answer Test (SAT)” by Tuvya. City Police (FPD) and assisted by Alcohol. Centro Mexicano de Analisis Poligrafico y Psicologico, S.C. Primer 23, Plantar.
396 documenti
Ciro Grandi # Diritto penale e neuroscienze. Punti fermi (se mai ve ne siano) e questioni aperte https://dirittopenaleuomo.org/ 02.04.2019 1. Premessa. – 2. Le neuroscienze: minimi cenni ricostruttivi. – 3. Neuroscienze e diritto penale alla stregua del modello radicale-rifondativo. – 4. Neuroscienze e diritto penale alla stregua del modello moderato-compatibilista. – 5. Uno sguardo d’insieme sull’uso “prove neuroscientifiche” nella prassi. – 6. Neuroscienze e giudizio di imputabilità: un primo bilancio. – 7. L’impatto (ancora) limitato delle neuroscienze nel processo penale italiano. Diagnosi e prognosi. |
Giuseppe Gennari Non può, poi, non menzionarsi il riferimento alla prova scientifica, resa nel processo americano dall’expert witness, in cui viene sottolineata l’importanza del come l’esperto comunica i propri dati al giudice. Il confronto sperimentale tra la mera rappresentazione del dato (statistico) da parte dell’esperto e l’espressione di una convinzione positiva in ordine al grado di convincimento personale dell’esperto circa le implicazione del dato sulla colpevolezza («sulla base dei dati, penso che Tizio sia responsabile…») hanno evidenziato un incremento del 70% di decisioni sfavorevoli al defendant. |
Domenico Alessandro dè Rossi L’interazione tra il comportamento umano e l’ambiente appartiene ormai di diritto allo studio delle neuroscienze e di altre discipline collaterali... Le relativamente recenti discipline citate, ma più ancora un nuovo approccio sistemico in cui sia più marcato l’interesse olistico di meglio legare tra loro i fenomeni e le conoscenze, possono aiutare il progettista e auspicabilmente coloro che vivono e lavorano all’interno o in prossimità di queste particolari strutture, a sviluppare sempre più una consapevolezza allargata riguardante il ruolo e l’influenza che l’ambiente fisico assume in particolari circostanze. |
Owen D. Jones, Anthony D. Wagner # Law and Neuroscience: Progress, Promise, and Pitfalls https://papers.ssrn.com/ Vanderbilt Law Research Paper 18 - 32, July 2018 In this review, we have highlighted a few illustrative legal problems on which neuroscience research is beginning to yield potentially informative data, as well as others in which the science suggests it is premature to move from the lab to the courtroom (for other overviews, see Jones et al, 2013b; Jones et al, 2014a). Concurrently, we have considered the categories of potential relevance for neuroscience evidence, along with cross-cutting caveats. The growth of neurolaw – – which crucially depends on interdisciplinary interactions –– has produced significant progress and suggests promise. At the same time, there is ample cause for caution, lest over-exuberance pave a path to pitfall |
Andrea Bonomi # Le neuroscienze in rapporto alla libertà morale: aspetti di diritto costituzionale www.forumcostituzionale.it/ 26 gennaio 2018 1. Le neuroscienze e la libertà morale. – 2. La delimitazione del “concetto” di libertà morale. – 3. Libertà morale e Costituzione. – 4. Libertà morale, art. 13 Cost. e art. 188 cod. proc. pen.: rapporti reciproci. – 5. Alcune osservazioni sui principi del nemo tenetur se detegere e della dignità della persona umana: implicazioni con la libertà morale. – 6. Una proposta conclusiva. – |
Luca Santa Maria, Mario Iannucci # Prove di dialogo tra psichiatra-psicoanalista e giurista a proposito di neuroscienze e diritto penale www.penalecontemporaneo.it/ 11 gennaio 2018 Il problema mente – cervello è tra i più difficili. Che la mente non sia quando il cervello non c’è è sicuro almeno quanto il fatto che se il cervello c’è la mente può non essere, è chiaro. Come il cervello produca la mente, invece, è (ancora?) molto meno chiaro.... |
Mario Iannucci # Le neuroscienze, la 'neuropsicologia' e la pretesa 'rifondazione del diritto'. Il punto di vista di Ivan Karamazov e quello di Sigmund Freud www.penalecontemporaneo.it/ 8 gennaio 2018 Ci sarebbe da interrogarsi sull’interesse attuale del mondo giuridico a proposito del carattere innovativo e “scientifico” delle nuove neuroscienze nel campo della expertise sulla responsabilità del soggetto autore di reato. A partire dalle splendide considerazioni di Musil a proposito della vicenda Moosbrugger, quando ci rammenta come “l’angelo della medicina, dopo avere ascoltato per un po’ le dissertazioni dei giuristi, dimentichi molto spesso la propria missione. Egli ripiega allora le ali fruscianti, e si comporta nelle aule dei tribunali come un angelo di complemento della giurisprudenza”. |
Luca Santa Maria |
Fabio Basile, Giuseppe Vallar |
Raul Gonzalez, Ileana Pacheco-Colón, Jacqueline C. Duperrouzel, Samuel W. Hawes # Does Cannabis Use Cause Declines in Neuropsychological Functioning? A Review of Longitudinal Studies Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society (2017), 23, 893–902 The aim of this article is to provide a critical evaluation and review of research that uses longitudinal designs to examine the link between cannabis use and neuropsychological functioning. In summarizing the primary findings across these studies, this review suggests that cannabis use leads to neuropsychological decline. However, across most studies, these associations were modest, were present only for the group with the heaviest cannabis use, and were often attenuated (or no longer significant) after controlling for potential confounding variables... |
Meredith Cusick # Mens Rea and Methamphetamine: High Time for a Modern Doctrine Acknowledging the Neuroscience of Addiction Fordham Law Review, Vol. 85, No. 2417, 2017 Neuroscience research reveals that drug addiction results in catastrophic damage to the brain resulting in cognitive and behavioral deficits. Methamphetamine addiction is of particular interest to criminal law because it causes extensive neural destruction and is associated with impulsive behavior, violent crime, and psychosis. Furthermore, research has revealed important distinctions between the effects of acute intoxication and addiction. These findings have implications for the broader doctrine of mens rea and, specifically, the intoxication doctrines. This Note argues for the adoption of an addiction doctrine that acknowledges the effect of addiction on mens rea that is distinct from doctrines of intoxication. |
Giovanna Parmigiani, Gabriele Mandarelli, Gerben Meynen, Lorenzo Tarsitani, Massimo Biondi, Stefano Ferracuti # Free will, neuroscience, and choice: towards a decisional capacity model for insanity defense evaluations Libero arbitrio, neuroscienze e scelta: verso un modello basato sulla capacità decisionale per la valutazione dell’imputabilità Riv Psichiatr 2017; 52(1): 9-15 The theoretical debate on free will constitutes a topic of great interest for forensic psychiatrists as different views of free will could accordingly affect a defendant’s accountability in different ways. In this sense, the concept of free will is crucial in forensic psychiatry where at present evaluations rely mainly on notions such as sense of agency, capability to do otherwise and to act for an intelligible reason. |
Melissa R. Arbuckle, Michael J. Travis, DavidA. Ross |
Marta Bertolino # Le parole del diritto e le parole della scienza: un difficile dialogo su questioni di prova penale Vita e Pensiero, 2, 2017 1. Scienza e diritto di fronte alla prova. - 2. La scienza del processo: criteri di scientificità a confronto. - 3. Questioni aperte e rilievi critici a proposito dei giudizi di scientificità e affidabilità scientifica del sapere esperto. - 4. Quale giudice per quale conoscenza specialistica. |
Francis X. Shen # Law and Neuroscience 2.0 http://arizonastatelawjournal.org/ 2017 Neurolaw will succeed if it can do what other successful bodies of knowledge do: improve health, generate wealth, promote justice, and make the world a better place. The ingredients to do this are before us. We have rapidly developing and well-funded neuroscience. We have many pressing social and legal challenges to which that neuroscience might apply. And we have —thanks to the pioneers in the first waves of neurolaw— a strong foundation on which to build. But, as the quotes at the top of this Part suggest, we have to walk a tightrope. We need imagination, but not too much. We need excitement, but not over-exuberance. We need passion, but also patience... |
Matthias Mahlmann Human rights are not trivia. They are more than playthings to satisfy one’s intellectual ludic drive. Human rights are not means to solve all the world’s problems. But much depends on rights, including important goods of individuals, sometimes even their dignity and life. A decent level of civilization cannot be maintained without them. This is of great importance for those who suffer from human rights violations. It is of some significance as well for all those belonging to the perhaps not so small group of people who cannot breathe freely because of the continuing tragedy of human folly and pain and therefore long for the occasional relief of fresh air bestowed by some steps towards a culture of human decency. |
Alessandro Corda # L'incerto futuro dei metodi di esecuzione della pena di morte negli Stati Uniti. Scenari emergenti dopo la sentenza Glossip v. Gross Rivista Italiana di Diritto e Procdedura Penale, Anno LX Fasc. 1 - 2017 1. Introduzione. — 2. La pena di morte in America, oggi. — 3. I metodi di esecuzione e la giurisprudenza della Corte Suprema. — 4. La resistibile ascesa dell’iniezione letale: dagli esordi al caso Baze v. Rees. — 5. L’assedio globale alla pena capitale eseguita mediante iniezione letale. La strada verso Glossip v. Gross. — 6. Lamajority opinion del giudice Alito. — 7. L’opinione dissenziente del giudice Sotomayor. — 8. L’applicazione della pena di morte negli Stati Uniti tra passato e futuro. — 9. (Segue): L’iniezione letale tra rinnovamento e sostituzione. — 10. Considerazioni conclusive. |
Owen D. Jones |
Laura Pignatel, Victor Genevès Mission de recherche – Droit & Justice, 2016 |
Brian T.M. Mammarella |
Francis X. Shen |
Markus Heilig, David H. Epstein, Michael A. Nader, Yavin Shaham # Time to connect: bringing social context into addiction neuroscience Nat Rev Neurosci. 2016 September ; 17(9): 592–599 Social epidemiology has established a strong link between poor social integration and behaviours that result in alcohol and drug use. Although few neuroscientists would negate the importance of these social factors in addiction, aspects of social integration — such as social inclusion or exclusion — have so far typically not been incorporated into neurobiological studies of addiction. We think that the different ways in which social interactions — positive and negative — influence addiction can be incorporated into these studies. |
Debra Austin, Rob Dur # Emotion Regulation for Lawyers: A Mind Is a Challenging Thing to Tame Wyoming Law Review, Vol. 16, 2016 With a knowledge of brain structure, autonomic nervous system function, how emotions arise in the brain, brain optimization, and the importance of emotion regulation, lawyers are empowered to improve how they work with each other and how they serve clients. To enhance the neuro-capacity for emotion regulation, lawyers can embrace regular exercise and plan to get seven to eight hours of sleep each night. To increase focus, lawyers can learn and practice meditation. To minimize the stress response and improve awareness, lawyers can employ a mindfulness practice. Science shows that these recommendations can improve lawyer emotion regulation, wellbeing, and performance. |
Iris Vilares, Michael Wesley, Woo-Young Ahn, Richard J. Bonnie, Morris B. Hoffman, Owen D. Jones, Stephen J. Morse, Gideon Yaffe, Terry Lohrenz, Read Montague # Predicting the Knowledge-Recklessness Distinction in the Human Brain, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences PNAS Early Edition, 2016 |
Sarah W. Feldstein Ewing, Susan F. Tapert, Brooke S.G. Molina # Uniting adolescent neuroimaging and treatment research: Recommendations in pursuit of improved integration Neurosci Biobehav Rev. 2016 March ; 62: 109–114 Many clinicians who provide mental health treatment find developmental neuroscience discoveries to be exciting. However, the utility of these findings often seem far removed from everyday clinical care. Thus, the goal of this article is to offer a bridge to connect the fields of applied adolescent treatment and developmental neuroscience investigation. An overview of the relevance of developmental neuroscience in adolescent direct practice and a rationale for how and why this integration could benefit adolescent treatment outcomes is provided. Finally, a series of practical suggestions is generated for enhancing collaborative, interdisciplinary work that ultimately advances treatment response for this important clinical population. |
Jason P. Kerkmans, Lyn M. Gaudet # Daubert on the Brain: How New Mexico's Daubert Standard Should Inform Its Handling of Neuroimaging Evidence New Mexico Review, vol. 46, n. 2, 2016 In their rejection of Frye and adoption of a Daubert approach, the New Mexico Supreme Court indicated that courts should favor current scientific understanding over jurisprudential recognitions of scientific understandings.The Court has also required the state’s trial courts to independently determine if reliability is sufficiently established. Similarly, there are federal level appellate courts that have favored admitting testimony based on conflicting science if support is shown for the general scientific theory or technique being proffered. |
Gwyneth Zai et al. # Rapporteur summaries of plenary, symposia, and oral sessions from the XXIIIrd World Congress of Psychiatric Genetics Meeting in Toronto, Canada, 16–20 October 2015 Psychiatric Genetics 2016, 26:229–257 The XXIIIrd World Congress of Psychiatric Genetics meeting, sponsored by the International Society of Psychiatric Genetics, was held in Toronto, ON, Canada, on 16–20 October 2015. Approximately 700 participants attended to discuss the latest state-of-the-art findings in this rapidly advancing and evolving field. The following report was written by trainee travel awardees. Each was assigned one session as a rapporteur. This manuscript represents the highlights and topics that were covered in the plenary sessions, symposia, and oral sessions during the conference, and contains major notable and new findings. |
John B. Meixner, Jr. This is a wonderful time for those interested in law and neuroscience because the field is so new, and significant basic work remains to be done. This set of papers provides one such critical early impact. The papers provide strong evidence that neuroscience has an important future in the law, and while there are undoubtedly limited uses of neuroscience evidence as the science currently stands, those limitations are likely to become smaller as technology and knowledge improve. Research on the courts’ use of neuroscience evidence, like these studies, will thus continue to be important as the field grows. |
Matthew Ginther |
John R. Shook, James Giordano # Neuroethics beyond Normal. Performance Enablement and Self-Transformative Technologies Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics (2016), 25 , 121 – 140 Genuinely neuroethical recommendations should be guided by authentically neuroethical deliberations. The need for those deliberations has become urgent. Essential matters on which familiar legal rules and ethical principles are predicated—the nature of the human “body,” the “person” worthy of respect, and the “self” in its autonomy—are no longer fi xed landmarks for drawing rigid baselines. |
Manish A. Fozdar |
Stephen J. Morse |
Ed Johnston |
Karolina Sörman, John F. Edens, Shannon Toney Smith, John W. Clark, Marianne Kristiansson, Olof Svensson |
Jennifer S. Bard “After decades of concerted effort on the part of neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers, only one proposition about how the brain makes us conscious—how it gives rise to sensation, feeling, subjectivity—has emerged unchallenged: we don’t have a clue.” |
Paul Catley |
Elizabeth Shaw |
Lisa Claydon, Caroline Rödiger |
Yanli Zhang-James, Stephen V. Faraone # Genetic Architecture for Human Aggression: A Study of Gene–Phenotype Relationship in OMIM Am J Med Genet Part B 171B:641–649, 2016 Genetic studies of human aggression have mainly focused on known candidate genes and pathways regulating serotonin and dopamine signaling and hormonal functions. These studies have taught us much about the genetics of human aggression, but no genetic locus has yet achieved genome-significance. We here present a review based on a paradoxical hypothesis that studies of rare, functional genetic variations can lead to a better under-standing of the molecular mechanisms underlying complex multifactorial disorders such as aggression... |
Hannah Wishart |
Joshua W. Buckholtz, Valerie Reyna, Christopher Slobogin |
Andrea Lavazza Ciò che oggi sappiamo con maggiore certezza riguarda il fatto che il crimine non è provocato soltanto da un ambiente sfavorevole, dove per ambiente si intende i genitori, l’abitazione, il vicinato... Il crimine è causato anche da un cattivo funzionamento del cervello a livello biologico. Si tratta di un’idea che è stata contrastata dagli scienziati sociali, ma non sembra vi siano più dubbi, almeno dal punto di vista scientifico, sul ruolo della biologia nella genesi del crimine. Siamo però all’inizio. # Elisabetta Sirgiovanni, Le origini del cervello criminale, Il Sole 24 Ore, 28 febbraio 2016 |
Esther Lau # Connectome: dancing through neuronal circuits www.thelancet.com/ January 19, 2016 “I am more than my genes! What am I? I am my connectome.” Such were the words of computational neuroscientist Sebastian Seung (Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Princeton, NJ, USA) in his TED Conference speech in 2010. He proposed that our connectome, the particular wiring of our brain, is what shapes our identity... |
Nita A. Farahany |
Gerben Meynen |
Nicholas Scurich, Paul Appelbaum |
Simone Penasa # Giudice “Ercole” o giudice “Sisifo”? Gli effetti del dato scientifico sull’esercizio della funzione giurisdizionale in casi scientificamente connotati www.forumcostituzionale.it/ 17 dicembre 2015 L’esempio più paradigmatico è senza dubbio rappresentato da quei casi, tendenti a valutare la responsabilità in ambito penale, nei quali applicazioni avanzate dell’analisi neuronale – le neuroscienze – e di quella genetica vengono utilizzate al fine della configurabilità di un elemento del reato (imputabilità). Nella sentenza sul caso conosciuto come Bayout, la Corte d’Assise d’Appello di Trieste ha basato la decisione di rivalutare la decisione operata dal G.U.P. in primo grado di non concedere la riduzione di pena di un terzo per difetto parziale di imputabilità sulle risultanze di indagini genetiche svolte sul DNA dell’imputato, le quali avevano riscontrato la presenza degli alleli (per il gene MAOA) che «in base a numerosi studi internazionali riportati sinora in letteratura, sono stati riscontrati conferire un significativo aumento del rischio di sviluppo di comportamento aggressivo, impulsivo (socialmente inaccettabile)». |
Georgia Martha Gkotsi, Jacques Gasser |
Luca Sammicheli, Giuseppe Sartori |
Umberto Castiello, Raffaele Caterina, Mario De Caro, Luisella De Cataldo, Stefano Ferracuti, Antonio Forza, Natale Fusaro, Guglielmo Gulotta, Francesco Mauro Iacoviello, Cataldo Intrieri, Andrea Lavazza, Andrea Mascherin, Silvia Pellegrini, Pietro Pietrini, Rino Rumiati, Luca Sammicheli, Giuseppe Sartori, Giulio Squassoni, Andrea Stracciari |
Raz Yirmiya, Neta Rimmerman, Ronen Reshef |
Benedict Carey, # Head of Mental Health Institute Leaving for Google Life Sciences, www.nytimes.com/ Sept. 15, 2015 Antonio Regalado, # Why America’s Top Mental Health Researcher Joined Alphabet. Tom Insel explains why he’s ready to give Silicon Valley a try, www.technologyreview.com/ MIT Technology Review, September 21, 2015 Heidi Ledford, # Director of US mental-health institute leaves for Google. Thomas Insel turned the institution's focus towards biological roots of psychiatric disorders, www.nature.com/ 15 September 2015 Alexei Oreskovic, # Google is doubling down on biotech, http://uk.businessinsider.com/ Aug. 21, 2015 |
Davide Rigoni, Luca Sammicheli, Giuseppe Sartori |
Samuel Occhi, Manuela Martinez, Luis Moya-Albiol # Il ruolo della neurocriminologia nella costruzione di un profilo criminologico dell’omicida seriale Rivista di Criminologia, Vittimologia e Sicurezza – Vol. IX – N. 2 – Maggio-Agosto 2015 La frequenza degli omicidi seriali negli Stati Uniti ha avuto un picco storico negli anni ’80 del XX secolo e la maggior parte dei casi ha visto come protagonisti persone di razza bianca. Il fenomeno italiano segue il trend europeo ed è assai ridotto rispetto a quello statunitense. Una delle classificazioni più diffuse è quella proposta dalla Federal Bureau of Investigation che suddivide gli omicidi seriali in tre categorie. Il mass murder o omicida di massa... Lo spree murder o assassino compulsivo... Il serial murder o serial killer... |
Diego Fernandez-Duque1, Jessica Evans1, Colton Christian2, and Sara D. Hodges2 # Superfluous Neuroscience Information Makes Explanations of Psychological Phenomena More Appealing Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 27:5, pp. 926–944, 2015 Finally and most intriguingly, superfluous neuroscience information might increase the perceived scientific quality of explanations if people’s lay theories of the mind embrace the idea that the brain is the best explanans of mental phenomena (i.e., a brain-as-engine-of-mind hypothesis). If so, superfluous explanations should fool participants into seeing the explanations as informative, but giving the superfluous information a “neuro” flavor would be essential; this hypothesis predicts that other jargon or scientific cues would not work as effectively... |
John Pyun |
C.H. de Kogel, E.J.M.C. Westgeest |
Jean Decety, Jason M. Cowell # Empathy, justice, and moral behavior AJOB Neurosci. 2015 ; 6(3): 3–14 The purpose of this article is to examine the intersection of neuroscience and psychology on the study of empathy and moral decision-making. Substantial progress has been made in recent years towards a comprehensive understanding of the evolutionary processes that have favored the development of complex social behaviors in humans, along with the brain architecture that supports them. In particular, research in social neuroscience, relying on multi-level integrative analysis studies (from genes to social interactions) provides a mechanistic comprehension of empathy and caring for others... |
Peter H. Venables, Adrian Raine Overall, findings on the multifactorial assessment of schizotypy provide a basis upon which further etiological and clinical work on schizotypy may build. The future clinical challenge lies in understanding what social and biological processes lead some individuals to remain stably schizotypal over time, while others change. |
Thomas Insel # Something Interesting is Happening www.nimh.nih.gov/ June 5, 2015 Although the Precision Medicine Initiative at NIH is still under development, one consistent message has been that we will be creating not only a new cohort but a new culture for biomedical research. Research driven by patients, or maybe I should say “volunteers,” could create a research platform that might not look like academic research or private sector research. As people share their experiences with treatments that work or don’t work, they may see patterns that were never evident in randomized clinical trials. I don’t know where this will lead. But isn’t that exactly the potential of a new kind of clinical research – built by and for the people who have the most at stake? |
Robert B. McCaleb |
Itiel E. Dror # Cognitive neuroscience in forensic science: understanding and utilizing the human element Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B, 2015 A new view of a cognitively informed forensic science suggests a proactive approach. Rather than being reactive once crimes are committed, being proactive would take forensic steps before a crime is ever committed. A proactive forensic science goal is to ‘try to foresee trends in future crime and develop preventative measures ahead of time. In other words, they are trying to be one step ahead of the criminals, so that when the trend changes they will be ready’ . |
The Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues # GRAY MATTERS. Topics at the Intersection of Neuroscience, Ethics, and Society www.bioethics.gov/ March 2015 Enhancing justice by using neuroscience evidence is especially important because of the potentially severe and far-reaching consequences of legal and policy decisions. In the criminal context, punishment can involve deprivation of liberty by imprisonment or the death penalty in some jurisdictions. Such severe consequences warrant particular attention to improving the accuracy of conviction and sentencing. |
Deborah W. Denno |
Brady Somers # Neuroimaging Evidence: A Solution to the Problem of Proving Pain and Suffering? Seattle University Law Review, Vol. 39:1391, 2015 In order to understand why neuroimages should not be admitted as evidence to prove pain and suffering at this stage, it is imperative to have a basic understanding of the technology itself. This Part first provides background information on structural and functional neuroimaging techniques. It then discusses the structural regions of the brain believed to be implicated in pain perception and explains how the current technology may be used to prove pain and suffering... |
Thomas Levy # Altering brain chemistry makes us more sensitive to inequality http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/ March 19, 2015 |
Nancy Gertner |
Andrew S Kayser, Jennifer M Mitchell, Dawn Weinstein, Michael J Frank |
Richard C. Wolf, Michael Koenigs |
Francis Shen, Dena Gromet |
Alessandra Griffa, Philipp Sebastian Baumann, Carina Ferrari, Kim Quang Do, Philippe Conus, Jean-Philippe Thiran, Patric Hagmann # Characterizing the Connectome in Schizophrenia With Diffusion Spectrum Imaging Human Brain Mapping 36:354–366 (2015) Schizophrenia is a complex psychiatric disorder characterized by disabling symptoms and cognitive deficit. Recent neuroimaging findings suggest that large parts of the brain are affected by the disease, and that the capacity of functional integration between brain areas is decreased... |
Jesse Meijers, Joke M. Harte, Frank A. Jonker, Gerben Meynen |
Mohita Shrivastava, Madhuri Behari |
Nina Koivula, Nina Ferreira, Petar Lozev, Franziska Böhlke, Birgit Thun, Janika Bockmeyer, Jan Smits |
Giovanni Maria Flick |
Carlo Umiltà |
Owen D. Jones, Joshua W. Buckholtz, Jeffrey D. Schall, Rene Marois |
Sarah Knapton |
Alessandro Corda # Neuroscienze forensi e giustizia penale tra diritto e prova (Disorientamenti giurisprudenziali e questioni aperte) ArchivioPenale, n. 3, 2014 1. Introduzione. – 2. Scienza, neuroscienza e giustizia penale. – 3. Sapere neuroscientifico e neuroscienze forensi. – 4. Novel science e prova penale. L’emblematico caso dell’irrompere delle neuroscienze nel dibattito sulla capacità di intendere e volere. – 5. La “rivoluzione promessa” dalle neuroscienze rispetto al diritto penale. – 6. La casistica giurisprudenziale. – 7. Prova scientifica “nuova” e ragionevole dubbio nella prospettiva dell’accusa e della difesa. – 8. Metodo scientifico tra ammissione e valutazione della prova. – 9. Cattiva scienza versus cattivo utilizzo processuale del sapere scientifico. – 10. L’esame del ricordo autobiografico e i limiti normativi espressi. – 11. Il (potenziale) conflitto di interessi tra produttori e portatori del sapere neuroscientifico all’interno del processo penale. – 12. Riflessioni conclusive. |
Armando Freitas da Rocha, Eduardo Massad, Fabio Theoto Rocha, Marcelo Nascimento Burattini |
Gerardo Salvato, Roy Dings, Lucia Reuter |
Francis X. Shen # Sentencing Enhancement and the Crime Victim’s Brain Loyola University Chicago Law Journal, vol. 46, 2014 The Article argues that classification of “mental” harms as wholly distinct from “physical” harms is problematic in light of modern neuroscientific understanding of the relationship between mind and brain. There is no successful justification for treating mental injuries as categorically distinct from other physical injuries. To do so would be to perpetuate an archaic dualist view of the mind that few, if any, studying the brain would endorse... |
Bruce N. Cuthbert |
So Yeon Choe |
Azim F. Shariff, Joshua D. Greene, Johan C. Karremans, Jamie B. Luguri, Cory J. Clark, Jonathan W. Schooler, Roy F. Baumeister, Kathleen D. Vohs # Free Will and Punishment: A Mechanistic View of Human Nature Reduces Retribution Psychological Science 1 –8 (2014) If free-will beliefs support attributions of moral responsibility, then reducing these beliefs should make people less retributive in their attitudes about punishment. Four studies tested this prediction using both measured and manipulated free-will beliefs. |
Nikolas Rose, Joelle Abi-Rached |
Ceren Akdeniz, Heike Tost, Fabian Streit, Leila Haddad, Stefan Wüst, Axel Schäfer, Michael Schneider, Marcella Rietschel, Peter Kirsch, Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg |
Thomas Douglas |
Hannah Maslen, Nadira Faulmüller,Julian Savulescu4 |
Rebecca Roache # Can Brain Scans Prove Criminals Unaccountable? AJOB Neuroscience, 5(2), 2014 Leonard Berlin (2014) reports that neuroscientific data have been presented in court by lawyers wishing to argue that their clients have reduced or absent moral responsibility for their behaviour because their brain function is impaired. Berlin cites evidence showing that such neuroscientific data can influence judges to pass more lenient sentences, and he anticipates that advances in “the neurology of criminal behavior”may lead courts to view certain criminals as having reduced accountability for their actions... |
Vincent D. Costa, Valery L. Tran, Janita Turchi, Bruno B. Averbeck # Behavioral Neuroscience. Dopamine Modulates Novelty Seeking Behavior During Decision Making Behavioral Neuroscience , June 9, 2014. These findings demonstrate that increases in extracellular dopamine levels underlie the positive valuation of novel stimuli to promote exploratory behavior. They also suggest that alterations in dopamine reuptake may contribute to excessive novelty seeking and impulsivity |
G.A. Capra, B. Forresi, E. Caffo |
Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues # Gray Matters. Integrative Approaches for Neuroscience, Ethics, and Society - Vol. 1 www.bioethics.gov/ Washington, D.C. May 2014 This report provides practical, conceptual, and methodological tools that can be applied directly in neuroscience research by funders, scientists, and other stakeholders. It calls for adequate resources to be allotted for successful integration of science and ethics. It also provides analysis and recommendations to guide institutions in developing necessary infrastructure for early integration of ethics into neuroscience research. |
Ekaterina Pivovarova, Judith G. Edersheim, Justin Baker, Bruce H. Price |
Kimberly R. Urban, Wen-Jun Gao # Performance enhancement at the cost of potential brain plasticity: neural ramifications of nootropic drugs in the healthy developing brain www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ frontiers in systems neurosciences, 13 may 2014 Cognitive enhancement, and the ethical considerations that go along with it, is one of the hottest current topics in the neuroscience community. There are many comprehensive reviews and articles published on the ethical concerns of cognitive enhancement; however, literature on the safety of consuming these drugs in youth is starkly lacking despite the significant increase in teen misuse and abuse of stimulants reported in a recent national study |
David Wasserman, Josephine Johnston |
Owen D. Jones, Richard J. Bonnie, B. J. Casey, Andre Davis, David L. Faigman, Morris Hoffman, Read Montague, Stephen J. Morse, Marcus E. Raichle, Jennifer A. Richeson, Elizabeth Scott, Laurence Steinberg, Kim Taylor- Thompson, Anthony Wagner, Gideon Yaffe # Law and neuroscience: recommendations submitted to the President’s Bioethics Commission Journal of Law and the Biosciences, March 2014 Comments of The MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Law and Neuroscience to The Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues of the Department of Health and Human Services Comments on the Ethical Considerations of Neuroscience Research and the Application of Neuroscience Research Findings March 31, 2014 |
Amanda C. Pustilnik |
Nina Koivula, Nina Ferreira, Petar Lozev, Franziska Böhlke, Birgit Thun, Janika Bockmeyer, Jan Smits Rehabilitation of sexual offenders: clearing the stage forneuroscience? | In how far are neurological rehabilitation methods for criminal offenders compatible with the concept of human dignity? | Probation and effective rehabilitation – an alternative to incarceration? Using neuroscience to facilitate rehabilitation methods | A neuroscientific perspective on cognitive and volitional impairment in criminal irresponsibility assessments: a case for a capacity-based approach | To what extent is the taking and use of neuroscientific evidence compatible with the rights enshrined in the European Convention of Human Rights? | Violation of Article 19 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child: An analysis from a neurobiological point of view with regard to criminal behaviour |
Sara Reardon # NIH rethinks psychiatry trials. Mental-health division will no longer fund research aiming to relieve symptoms without probing underlying causes Nature, 20 March 2014 The NIMH, based in Bethesda, Maryland, has decided to stop funding clinical trials that aim merely to ease patients’ symptoms. “Future trials will follow an experimental medicine approach in which interventions serve not only as potential treatments, but as probes to generate information about the mechanisms underlying a disorder”... |
Adam B. Shniderman |
Lora M.Cope, Gina M.Vincent, Justin L.Jobelius, Prashanth K.Nyalakanti, Vince D.Calhoun, Kent A.Kiehl |
Ashley Bridwell, MacDonald Ross A traumatic brain injury (TBI) is caused by a blow or jolt to the head or a penetrating head injury that disrupts the normal function of the brain. Not all blows or jolts to the head result in a TBI. The severity of a TBI may range from “mild,” i.e., a brief change in mental status or consciousness to “severe,” i.e., an extended period of unconsciousness or amnesia after the injury, Among male prisoners, history of TBI is strongly associated with perpetration of violence and other kinds of violence. Women inmates who are convicted of a violent crime are more likely to have sustained a pre crime TBI and/or some other form of physical abuse. |
Femke T.A. Buisman-Pijlman, Nicole M. Sumracki, Jake J. Gordon, Philip R. Hull, C. Sue Carter, Mattie Tops |
Benedict Carey # Blazing Trails in Brain Science www.nytimes.com/ Feb. 3, 2014 “My philosophy is really based on humility,” he said. “I don’t think we know enough to fix either diagnostics or therapeutics. The future of psychiatry is clinical neuroscience, based on a much deeper understanding of the brain.” |
Nicole A Vincent # Neurolaw and Direct Brain Interventions Crim Law and Philos (2014) 8:43–50 This issue of Criminal Law and Philosophy contains three papers on a topic of increasing importance within the field of ‘‘neurolaw’’—namely, the implications for criminal law of direct brain intervention based mind altering techniques (DBI’s). To locate these papers’ topic within a broader context, I begin with an overview of some prominent topics in the field of neurolaw, where possible providing some references to relevant literature. The specific questions asked by the three authors, as well as their answers and central claims, are then sketched out, and I end with a brief comment to explain why this particular topic can be expected to gain more prominence in coming years. |
Nicole A Vincent |
M. Casellato, D. La Muscatella, S. Lionetti # Tra prassi e teoria. La responsabilità colpevole tra libero arbitrio e neodeterminismo biologico. Profili psicologici e forensi dei nuovi strumenti delle neuroscienze Il vaso di Pandora. Dialoghi in psichiatria e scienze umane - Vol. XXII, N. 1, 2014 Lo psicologo, psichiatra o neuroscienziato che afferma di lavorare sulla “mente”, è a tutti gli effetti figlio di una tradizione cartesiana che sottintende una differenziazione fra la res cogitans e la res extensa (fra la mente e il corpo, appunto). Il costo dell’eredità cartesiana, dell’impostazione filosofica basata sul dualismo mente/corpo, è evidente tutt’oggi nell’attività clinica e forense, dove è di prassi diagnosticare problemi di carattere organico distinguendoli da quelli psicologici. |
David W. Opderbeck |
Paul S. Appelbaum, Nicholas Scurich |
Alessia Farano |
Jason Michael Chin |
Andrea L. Glenn, Adrian Raine |
Claudio Sarra Di tutte le possibili intersezioni tra neuroscienze e diritto, ve n’è una ritenuta epocale data dalla finalmente dischiusa possibilità di consentire l’accesso dell’osservazione scientifica a tutte le funzionalità del cervello, vera “stanza dei bottoni” di ogni funzione umana. In effetti, la possibilità di “tracciare” ed osservare in azione le dinamiche neuronali di un soggetto agente, alza notevolmente il grado empirico delle conoscenze sui meccanismi del comportamento umano, prima solo indirettamente e più incertamente inferibili. |
Alberto Gaiani # Riduzionismo e neuroscienze: il dibattito filosofico recente Etica & Politica / Ethics & Politics, XVI, 2014, 2, pp. 47-63 ... Si tratta di mettere alla prova temi che storicamente sono stati appannaggio della riflessione filosofica: coscienza, decisione, libertà, percezione, arte, responsabilità, educazione, empatia, credenza, immaginazione, emozione, volontà, intenzionalità, autocoscienza... Alla luce dei risultati ottenuti attraverso le tecniche di neuroimaging le concezioni che storicamente sono state proposte vengono interrogate, messe in questione, sollecitate. E qui non si tratta semplicemente di sostituire idee confuse con visioni perspicue, fondate su dati osservazionali inattaccabili. Non è in questione un passaggio di scettro, la sostituzione di un sovrano con un altro... |
McLellan AT, Starrels JL, Tai B, Gordon AJ, Brown R, Ghitza U, Gourevitch M, Stein J, Oros M, Horton T, Lindblad R, Jennifer McNeely J. |
James Gorman # The Brain, in Exquisite Detail www.nytimes.com/ Jan. 6, 2014 Everyone knows the object of study is the brain. The difficulty of comprehending the brain may be more aptly compared to a poem by Wallace Stevens, “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” Each way of looking, not looking, or just being in the presence of the blackbird reveals something about it, but only something. Each way of looking at the brain reveals ever more astonishing secrets, but the full and complete picture of the human brain is still out of reach. |
John Rumbold |
Owen D. Jones, Rene´ Marois, Martha J. Farah, Henry T. Greely # Law and Neuroscience The Journal of Neuroscience, November 6, 2013•33(45) Most of the scholarly discussion about law and neuroscience has revolved around questions of responsibility. If neuroscience can help us connect physical states of the brain with subjective mental states, that should indeed prove useful. However, neuroscience seems poised to offer law much more. For example, neuroscience should improve our predictions of future mental states and consequent behavior... |
Lorenzo Simonetti, Marco Mendola, Francesco Salamone Tramite l’espressione “prova scientifica”, tradizionalmente, si fa riferimento o alla cd. “prova esperta” (su tutte, la perizia) ovvero al cd. “metodo scientifico”, inteso quest’ultimo come un modus procedendi sulla cui base è possibile pervenire ad un giudizio non solo giuridicamente plausibile ma anche fattualmente accettabile... |
Giovanni Barroccu |
Manuela Fumagalli, Alberto Priori # Il cervello morale e il comportamento criminale Psicologia e Giustizia, Anno 14, numero 2, Luglio-Dicembre 2013 Comprendere il cervello morale ha importanti potenziali implicazioni cliniche, forensi e legali. Da un punto di vista clinico, la diagnosi precoce di disturbi neurologici che possono generare alterazioni del comportamento morale o violento consentirebbe la migliore gestione di tali patologie e la possibilità di prevenirne le conseguenze sociali e familiari. Conoscere meglio tali disturbi permetterebbe di promuovere lo sviluppo di trattamenti specifici, dai farmaci alla neuromodulazione alla psicoterapia, per favorire la neuroplasticità cerebrale che potrebbe ripristinare un corretto funzionamento del circuito cerebrale morale. |
Daniel J. Smith, Barbara I. Nicholl, Breda Cullen, Daniel Martin, Zia Ul-Haq, Jonathan Evans, Jason M. R. Gill, Beverly Roberts, John Gallacher, Daniel Mackay, Matthew Hotopf, Ian Deary, Nick Craddock, Jill P. Pell UK Biobank is a landmark cohort of over 500,000 participants which will be used to investigate genetic and nongenetic risk factors for a wide range of adverse health outcomes. This is the first study to systematically assess the prevalence and validity of proposed criteria for probable mood disorders within the cohort (major depression and bipolar disorder). Methods: This was a descriptive epidemiological study of 172,751 individuals assessed for a lifetime history of mood disorder in relation to a range of demographic, social, lifestyle, personality and health-related factors... |
Stefano Lionetti, Marco Casellato, Donato La Muscatella # La responsabilità colpevole tra libero arbitrio e neodeterminismo biologico. Profili psicologici e forensi dei nuovi strumenti delle neuroscienze Brainfactor 11 ottobre 2013 I nuovi strumenti delle Neuroscienze hanno acquisito, negli ultimi anni, una posizione di sempre maggior rilievo nel campo delle Scienze Forensi, modificando entità e natura del loro contributo al Sistema Giustizia, che si trova così di fronte alla riproposizione di interrogativi riguardanti l’oggetto, i mezzi ed i criteri di conduzione dell’indagine sullo stato mentale del reo. Gli autori, da prospettive in costante relazione, tentano di rispondere a queste domande, approfondendo il rapporto tra libero arbitrio e responsabilità colpevole, anche alla luce delle più recenti innovazioni della clinica. |
Phoebe Beth Harrop |
Owen D. Jones, Anthony D. Wagner, David L. Faigman, Marcus E. Raichle |
Giulia Volpatti #Imputabilità e neuroscienze: problematiche e prospettive Università degli studi di Trieste, 2013 Nei confronti delle neuroscienze l’opinione dominante serba un atteggiamento diffidente ed alle volte anche di totale rigetto di queste nuove tecnologie. La motivazione risiede nella paura che le nuove scoperte, se amplificate e portate agli estremi, possano cancellare il principio del libero arbitrio dell’uomo, possano portare all’assurdo di considerare gli uomini come tutti inimputabili perché dominati dal cervello ed incapaci, quindi, di autodeterminarsi nel mondo esterno... Nessuna rivoluzione copernicana, l’uomo resta sempre l’essere libero e capace di muoversi tra motivi antagonistici operando delle scelte consapevoli, senza essere dominato dal suo sistema nervoso... |
Eric Kandel |
Luca Casartelli, Cristiano Chiamulera # Which future for neuroscience in forensic psychiatry: theoretical hurdles and empirical chances Frontiers in Psychiatry, July 2013 We suggest that the preliminary condition to introduce neuroscience data in FPE (forensic psychiatric examination) is the assumption of a new perspective overcoming classical dualist models. Such new perspective permits to rule out misleading assumptions (i.e., the deterministic link between “mental defect” and specific behavior). Noteworthy, it is a necessary but not sufficient condition to introduce neuroscience data in FPE, given that such data has to be evaluated case by case. |
Robert P. Granacher, Jr |
Francis X. Shen # Legislating Neuroscience: The Case of Juvenile Justice Loy. L.A. L. Rev. 985 (2013) Using the illustrative case of juvenile justice and focusing on state legislatures, this Article begins to explore how neuroscience is being used in the statehouse. I find that juvenile justice policy discussion in state legislatures includes mention of adolescent brain science. It is unclear what effect this science has on policymaking, but brain science is being presented at legislative hearings, cited by legislators, and integrated into some new laws... |
Bernice B. Donald |
Peggy Larrieu, Bernard Roullet, Colin Gavaghan (eds) # Neurolex sed ... dura lex? L’impact des neurosciences sur les disciplines juridiques et les autres sciences humaines: études comparées Comparative Law Journal of the Pacific, New Zealand 2013 La rencontre du droit et des neurosciences: une contradiction? Sans apporter de réponse précise et immédiate, ce qui n'est d'ailleurs jamais de bon augure pour la discipline juridique qui par définition a besoin de temps, le regard comparé sur la question de l'utilisation des neurosciences par le droit a le mérite de susciter des interrogations d'ordre épistémologique. Elle permet aussi et surtout, dans une démarche réflexive, de revisiter les bases de notre culture juridique dont on a bien souvent plus conscience. |
Benedikt Habermeyer, Fabrizio Esposito, Nadja Händel, Patrick Lemoine, Markus Klarhöfer, Ralph Mager, lker Dittmann, Erich Seifritz, Marc Graf #Immediate processing of erotic stimuli in paedophilia and controls: a case control study BMC Psychiatry 2013, 13:88 Our event related study design confirmed that erotic pictures activate some of the brain regions already known to be involved in the processing of erotic pictures when these are presented in blocks. In addition, it revealed that erotic pictures of prepubescent children activate brain regions critical for choosing response strategies in both groups, and that erotically salient stimuli selectively activate a brain region in paedophilic subjects that had previously been attributed to reward and punishment, and that had been shown to be implicated in the suppression of erotic response and deception |
Jean Decety, Chenyi Chen, Carla Harenski, Kent A. Kiehl |
Joyce W. Lacy, Craig E. L. Stark #The neuroscience of memory: implications for the courtroom www.usdistrictcourtconferencenv.com/ Nature | Neurosciences | Vol 14, September 2013 Findings from basic psychological research and neuroscience studies indicate that memory is a reconstructive process that is susceptible to distortion. In the courtroom, even minor memory distortions can have severe consequences that are partly driven by common misunderstandings about memory — for example, that memory is more veridical than it may actually be. |
D. A. Baker, N. J. Schweitzer, Evan F. Risko, Jillian M. Ware #Visual Attention and the Neuroimage Bias www.plosone.org/ Volume 8 | 1 September 2013 The influence of neuroimages on recidivism judgments can potentially be attributed to differences between the types of evidence that might be considered when making judgments related to what a person has done in the past versus what a person might do in the future. |
Maia Pujara, Julian C. Motzkin, Joseph P. Newman, Kent A. Kiehl, Michael Koenigs #Neural correlates of reward and loss sensitivity in psychopathy http://koenigslab.psychiatry.wisc.edu/ SCAN Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci (2013) Psychopathy is a personality disorder associated with callous and impulsive behavior and criminal recidivism. It has long been theorized that psychopaths have deficits in processing reward and punishment. Here, we use structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine the neural correlates of reward and loss sensitivity in a group of criminal psychopaths. Forty-one adult male prison inmates (n = 18 psychopaths and n = 23 non-psychopaths) completed a functional magnetic resonance imaging task involving the gain or loss of money. |
Robert B. Michael, Eryn J. Newman, Matti Vuorre, Geoff Cumming, Maryanne Garry |
Jaak Panksepp, Jules B. Panksepp |
Alessia Farano Il discorso delle neuroscienze, cioè, afferisce all'uomo inteso come idem, dunque a ciò che nell'uomo non muta, il suo corpo, ma anche la sua indole, le predisposizioni genetiche, laddove la responsabililtà rileva dell'identità intesa come ipseità, cioè quella permanenza di sé che tiene insieme in una cornice narrativa coerente le azione passate, di cui ci riconosciamo autori, e le azioni future verso le quali ci impegniamo. La neuroscienza allora cambia tutto e niente, a patto di restituirla alla sua funzione descrittiva, preservando così una nozione di responsabilità radicata nell'ipseità. |
Lene Bomann-Larsen #Voluntary Rehabilitation? On Neurotechnological Behavioural Treatment, Valid Consent and (In)appropriate Offers Neuroethics (2013) 6:65–77 Criminal offenders may be offered to participate in voluntary rehabilitation programs aiming at correcting undesirable behaviour, as a condition of early release. Behavioural treatment may include direct intervention into the central nervous system (CNS). This article discusses under which circumstances voluntary rehabilitation by CNS intervention is justified. It is argued that although the context of voluntary rehabilitation is a coercive circumstance, consent may still be effective, in the sense that it can meet formal criteria for informed consent. |
Mertins, Vanessa; Schote, Andrea B.; Meyer, Jobst |
Bruce N Cuthbert, Thomas R Insel #Thomas Insel, Transforming Diagnosis, www.nimh.nih.gov/ on April 29, 2013 |
Eyal Aharoni, Gina M. Vincent, Carla L. Harenski, Vince D. Calhoun, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Michael S. Gazzaniga, Kent A. Kiehl |
Jan-Christoph Bublitz |
Justin M. Carré, Luke W. Hyde, Craig S. Neumann, Essi Viding, Ahmad R. Hariri |
Isabella Merzagora Il modello offerto dalle neuroscienze ha natura 'descrittiva' non esplicativa[11], e trovare un'anomalia nel cervello di una persona non basta a spiegare il delitto. Questo lo si ricava anche dalla fondamentale sentenza delle Sezioni Unite della Corte di Cassazione 9163/2005. Afferma infatti la Corte: 'è inoltre necessario che tra il disturbo mentale e il fatto reato sussista un nesso eziologico, che consenta di ritenere il secondo casualmente determinato dal primo'. L'affermazione non è inedita per la prassi e la dottrina psichiatrico forensi che sono sempre state univoche nel rapportare l'esistenza dell'incapacità di intendere e di volere non solo ad un criterio cronologico, ma anche ad un criterio di relazione col fatto specifico, di criminogenesi e criminodinamica... |
Elisa Marcheselli L’influenza che le credenze dei vari professionisti, possono avere sull’oggetto osservato è un argomento noto alla psicologia sociale (effetto Hawthorne). È stato ampiamente dimostrando come le convinzioni degli sperimentatori e dei soggetti sperimentali possano influenzare la realtà e dare origine ad una “profezia che si autodetermina” (effetto Rosenthal). Che dire: l’uomo è limitato dalle sue stesse caratteristiche mentali ovvero è abituato ad attribuire significati sulla realtà che lo circonda, ma può ovviare a questo eccesso di ricerca di significati trasformando il limite nella risorsa: conoscendo la possibilità di incorrere in errore per la natura intrinseca della mente umana e contemplare la possibilità di non poter oggettivare in assoluto i dati della realtà. |
Francis X. Shen # Mind, Body, and the Criminal Law Minnesota Law Review, 97, 2013 When the United States Congress passed a new mental health parity law in 2008, then Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced that henceforth, “illness of the brain must be treated just like illness anywhere else in the body.”1 Such sen-timent is becoming more common, as policymakers and the public increasingly recognize the biological basis for, and the gravity of, “mental” and “emotional” disabilities... |
Jean Decety, Laurie R. Skelly, Kent A. Kiehl |
Matthew J. Schreiner, Maria T. Lazaro, Maria Jalbrzikowski, Carrie E. Bearden # Converging levels of analysis on a genomic hotspot for psychosis: Insights from 22q11.2 Deletion Syndrome Neuropharmacology, 2013 May ; 68: 157–173 Schizophrenia is a devastating neurodevelopmental disorder that, despite extensive research, still poses a considerable challenge to attempts to unravel its heterogeneity, and the complex biochemical mechanisms by which it arises. While the majority of cases are of unknown etiology, accumulating evidence suggests that rare genetic mutations, such as 22q11.2 Deletion Syndrome (22qDS), can play a significant role in predisposition to the illness. Up to 25% of individuals with 22qDS eventually develop schizophrenia... |
Adina L. Roskies, N.J. Schweitzer, Michael J. Saks # Neuroimages in court: less biasing than feared Trends in Cognitive Sciences March 2013, Vol. 17, No. 3 For many, neuroscience offers the prospect of allowing us to categorize brain dysfunction in a more fine-grained fashion and potentially to revise current ways of viewing mental dysfunction, perhaps making the law more just. To do this, neuroscience will have to engage more directly with questions of how neuroevidence is relevant to legal criteria for culpability and perhaps ultimately to reshape those criteria. |
Kent A. Kiehl |
Valentina Zuech # Neuroscienze e diritto. Possibilità e limiti di un'esperienza neuro-giuridica Università degli Studi di Padova, 2013 La crisi della psichiatria e la sua incapacità di fornire una definizione unitaria di anomalia psichica hanno aperto un varco per l'introduzione nelle aule di tribunale, mediante la perizia o la consulenza tecnica di parte, del contributo delle neuroscienze nell'individuazione della capacità conoscitiva e volitiva dell'imputato. In particolare, attraverso l'utilizzo di strumenti con i quali è possibile osservare il funzionamento in atto delle sinapsi. Il riferimento al solo sapere neuroscientifico potrebbe condurre verso un rischio duplice: da un lato, deresponsabilizzare l'autore del reato, individuando nella struttura cerebrale il vero colpevole del delitto; dall'altro, sostituire il dialogo tra imputato e perito/consulente tecnico con l'imaging cerebrale, togliendo spazio alla narrazione soggettiva degli stati mentali, sostituita da una “fotografia” funzionale dell'encefalo. |
Comitato Nazionale per la Bioetica |
Robert M. Sapolsky, John A. Gunn, Cynthia Fry Gunn, Allan Siegel, lordan Grafman, Pamela Blake, Peter K. Hatemi, Rose McDermott, Anthony C. Lopez, Paul J. Zak, James Giordano, Roland Benedikter, Robert E. Schmidle | Diane DiEuliis, Hriar Cabayan (eds) |
Bob Roozenbeek, Andrew I. R. Maas, David K. Menon |
Kevin M. Beaver, John Paul Wright, Brian B. Boutwell, J.C. Barnes, Matt DeLisi, Michael G. Vaughn |
Adrian Raine |
Amedeo Santosuosso, Barbara Bottalico |
Marco Mendola |
Adina L. Roskies, N.J. Schweitzer, Michael J. Saks |
Marcel Brass, Margaret T. Lynn, Jelle Demanet, Davide Rigoni # Imaging volition: what the brain can tell us about the will Exp Brain Res 2013 A host of studies indicate that the medial prefrontal cortex plays a crucial role in voluntary action. Accordingly, we postulate that social psychological concepts of volition can be investigated using neuroimaging techniques, and propose that by developing a social cognitive neuroscience of human volition, we may gain a deeper understanding of this fascinating and complex aspect of the human mind. |
Marta Bertolino # Prove neuro-psicologiche di verità penale www.penalecontemporaneo.it/ 8 Gennaio 2013 |
Ilina Singh |
Timm B. Poeppl, Joachim Nitschke, Pekka Santtila, Martin Schecklmann, Berthold Langguth, Mark W. Greenlee, Michael Osterheider, Andreas Mokros # Association between brain structure and phenotypic characteristics in pedophilia Journal of Psychiatric Research 47 (2013) When compared to non-sexual offenders instead of community controls, pedophiles revealed deficiencies in white matter only. The present study sought to test the hypotheses of structurally compromised prefrontal and limbic networks and whether structural brain abnormalities are related to phenotypic characteristics in pedophiles... |
Peggy L. St. Jacques, Daniel L. Schacter |
Daniel L Schacter, Elizabeth F Loftus |
Jeffrey M. Perkel # This Is Your Brain: Mapping the Connectome Science 18 Jan 2013 - Vol. 339, Issue 6117, pp. 350-352 It's been 20 years since Francis Crick and Edward Jones, in the midst of the so-called Decade of the Brain, lamented science's lack of even a basic understanding of human neuroanatomy. 'Clearly what is needed for a modern human brain anatomy is the introduction of some radically new techniques,' the pair wrote in 1993. Clearly, researchers were listening. Today, they are using novel technologies and automation to map neural circuitry with unparalleled resolution and completeness. The NIH has dedicated nearly $40 million to chart the wiring of the human brain, and the Allen Brain Institute has poured in millions more to map the mouse brain. The data will take years to compile, and even longer to understand. But the results may reveal nothing less than the nature of human individuality. As MIT neuroscientist Sebastian Seung writes, 'You are more than your genes. You are your connectome.' |
Nikolas Rose |
Ivannia Delgado Calderón |
Alain Claeys, Jean-Sébastien Vialatte | Office Parlamentaire d'évaluation des choix scientifiques et technologiques # L'impact et les enjeux des nouvelles technologies d'exploration et de thérapie du cerveau www.assemblee-nationale.fr/ 2012 |
Paolo Marchetti |
Gabriele Catania # Newtown, cosa accade se il colpevole è il cervello? | Intervista a Luca Samicheli http://www.linkiesta.it/ 20 dicembre 2012 Se si sposa il riduzionismo cerebrale, il libero arbitrio va a farsi benedire. Ciò forse non crea grandi problemi nelle facoltà di psicologia, dove magari si può accettare la scomparsa del libero arbitrio in nome delle neuroscienze. Nei tribunali, invece, il riduzionismo cerebrale crea un problema pratico: se diciamo che il libero arbitrio non esiste, dobbiamo riscrivere gran parte dei diritti penali occidentali; essi trovano il fondamento della giustificazione della pena, perlomeno di quella retributiva, nel libero arbitrio. |
Cliodhna O’Connor, Geraint Rees, Helene Joffe |
Alissa Quart |
Jane Kaye, Liam Curren, Nick Anderson, Kelly Edwards, Stephanie M. Fullerton, Nadja Kanellopoulou, David Lund, Daniel G. MacArthur, Deborah Mascalzoni, James Shepherd, Patrick Taylor, Sharon F. Terry, Stefan F. Winter # From patients to partners: participant-centric initiatives in biomedical research |
Daniel L. Schacter |
Daniel L. Schacter, Donna Rose Addis, Demis Hassabis, Victoria C. Martin, R. Nathan Spreng, Karl K. Szpunar |
Martina Ly, B.S., Julian C. Motzkin, Carissa L. Philippi, Gregory R. Kirk, Joseph P. Newman, Kent A. Kiehl, Michael Koenigs |
Cornelia I. Bargmann # Beyond the connectome: How neuromodulators shape neural circuits www.its.caltech.edu/ Bioessays 34: 458–465, 2012 Defining the connectome is like sequencing the genome: once the genome was available, it was impossible to imagine life without it. Yet both for the genome and for the connectome, structure does not solve function. What the structure provides is a better overview, a glimpse of the limits of the roblem, a set of plausible hypotheses, and a framework to test those hypotheses with greater precision and power |
Jamil Zaki, Kevin Ochsner # The neuroscience of empathy: progress, pitfalls and promise www.wjh.harvard.edu/ nature neuroscience Vol. 15 | n. 5 | May 2012 Abnormal engagement of empathy-related neural systems also characterizes psychiatric conditions involving social deficits. For example, individuals with autism spectrum disorders exhibit reduced engagement of brain areas associated with mentalizing and experience sharing, which correlates with deficits in clinical measures of social impairments; similar patterns emerge in other disorders such as schizophrenia and psychopathy. Together, these data bolster the argument that neural systems associated with empathic subprocesses support human social abilities. |
Robert Kumsta, Markus Heinrichs |
Michael Koenigs |
S Kapur, AG Phillips, TR Insel |
Elsa Ermer, Lora M. Cope, Prashanth K. Nyalakanti, Vince D. Calhoun, Kent A. Kiehl |
David M. Eagleman, Sarah Isgur Flores |
Thomas Nadelhoffer, Stephanos Bibas, Scott Grafton, Kent A. Kiehl, Andrew Mansfield, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Michael Gazzaniga |
Jean Macchiaroli Eggen, Eric J. Laury |
Julien Delezie, Stéphanie Dumont, Hugues Dardente, Hugues Oudart, Aline Gréchez-Cassiau, Paul Klosen, Michèle Teboul, Franck Delaunay, Paul Pévet, Etienne Challet # The nuclear receptor REV-ERB is required for the daily balance of carbohydrate and lipid metabolism Mutations of clock genes can lead to diabetes and obesity... Altered circadian rhythmicity is a newly identified determinant of metabolic disorders in humans. Most aspects of behavior and metabolism display daily rhythms, including sleep-wake and feeding-nonfeeding cycles. These daily variations are controlled by a circadian timing system made of interconnected clocks and oscillators. |
Ciro Santoriello |
Barbara Bottalico # La libertà personale e le neuroscienze cognitive |
George Symington |
Olivier Oullier (coord) # Le cerveau et la loi: analyse de l’émergence du neurodroit http://archives.strategie.gouv.fr/ N°2012-07, septembre 2012 La loi de bioéthique de 2011 fait de la France le premier pays à admettre, par un texte législatif, le recours à l’imagerie cérébrale dans le cadre de l’expertise judiciaire. Dans ce contexte, le Centre d’analyse stratégique publie un document de travail sur les enjeux du “neurodroit”, néologisme qui désigne le champ de recherche s’intéressant aux applications juridiques des neurosciences. Deux grands domaines d’intérêt sont identifiés : d’une part l’utilisation de l’imagerie cérébrale comme preuve dans un procès, d’autre part la compréhension des conduites et des mécanismes délibératifs des acteurs du procès grâce aux sciences comportementales. La possibilité à terme d’une meilleure administration de la justice – par une compréhension accrue des comportements délictueux – ne doit pas masquer les limites encore importantes de l’utilisation de la neuroimagerie fonctionnelle dans les prétoires. |
Yarimar Ruiz Orozco |
Georgia Martha Gkotsi, Lazare Benaroyo # Neuroscience and the Treatment of Mentally Ill Criminal Offenders: Some Ethical Issues Journal of Ethics in Mental Health, 6, 2012 As punishment and treatment are combined in most justice systems, the challenge for the future is to use neuroscience to the real benefit of mentally ill off enders, as a therapeutic tool, which would replace punishment. To do that, efficient, safe and tested neuroscientific interventions should be employed with the purpose of treating a well-defined, existing psychiatric disorder and not as a means of experimentation or further punishment, under the pretext of treatment and rehabilitation |
Giuseppe Amoroso # Giudizio di imputabilità e neuroscienze Diritto e scienza 2012/6 Una giurisdizione più matura già oggi può avvalersi delle neuroscienze, non sostituendole alla valutazione comportamentale e clinica di un soggetto, nell’ambito dell’accertamento sulla sua capacità di intendere e di volere, ma integrandola, accrescendone il grado di affidabilità come prova scientifica nel processo penale. Il nocciolo della questione, infatti, concerne esattamente la ricerca di parametri oggettivi... |
Laura Capraro |
Maurizio Stupiggia # From Hopeless Solitude to the Sense of Being-With: Functions and Dysfunctions of Mirror Neurons in Post Traumatic Syndromes International Body Psychotherapy Journal, 2012 In the last few years we have discovered that some mirror neurons may respond to sounds that correspond to certain actions– these have been termed ‘‘audio-visual’’ mirror neurons. This suggests that hybrid therapies that employ both visual and auditory stimulation would maximize clinical efficacy. Furthermore, virtual reality may create such an environment. Recent neuroimaging studies indicate that music, like language, involves an intimate coupling between the perception and production of hierarchically organized sequential information, which links meaning to emotion via the mirror neuron. We believe that music could be a potent component in mirror neuron-based therapies, as recent findings in the domain of stroke rehabilitation have shown |
Adam Lamparello # Neuroscience, Brain Damage, and the Criminal Defendant: Who Does It Help and Where in the Criminal Proceeding Is It Most Relevant? Violent offenders with frontal lobe disorder, namely those with damage to the prefrontal cortex which consists of the lateral and medial areas along with the orbitofrontal cortex, are less blameworthy than other offenders and warrant different treatment in our criminal justice system. The critical question facing criminal law jurisprudence is no longer whether we should treat these offenders differently, but how, and at what stages, such differential treatment should be applied. |
Tal Yarkoni, Russell A. Poldrack, Thomas E. Nichols, David C. Van Essen, Tor D. Wager # Large-scale automated synthesis of human functional neuroimaging data Nat Methods. 8(8): 665–670, 2012 Here we describe and validate an automated brain mapping framework that uses text mining, meta-analysis and machine learning techniques to generate a large database of mappings between neural and cognitive states. We demonstrate the capacity of our approach to automatically conduct large-scale, high-quality neuroimaging metaanalyses, address long- tanding inferential problems in the neuroimaging literature, and support accurate ‘decoding’ of broad cognitive states from brain activity in both entire studies and individual human subjects. Collectively, our results validate a powerful and generative framework for synthesizing human neuroimaging data on an unprecedented scale. |
Giulia Volpatti |
Liane Young, Michael Koenigs, Michael Kruepke, Joseph P. Newman # Psychopathy Increases Perceived Moral Permissibility of Accidents http://moralitylab.bc.edu/ Journal of Abnormal Psychology 2012 Psychopaths are notorious for their antisocial and immoral behavior, yet experimental studies have typically failed to identify deficits in their capacities for explicit moral judgment. We tested 20 criminal psychopaths and 25 criminal nonpsychopaths on a moral judgment task featuring hypothetical scenarios that systematically varied an actor’s intention and the action’s outcome... |
James M. Bjork, Gang Chen, and Daniel W. Hommer |
Maribel Narváez Mora |
Rose McDermott, Chris Dawes, Elizabeth Prom-Wormley, Lindon Eaves, Peter K. Hatemi |
Manuela Fumagalli, Alberto Priori |
Gianluca Carta # Le droghe, la mente e il cervello. La comunicazione delle tossicodipendenze fra linguaggi scientifici e psicosociali Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati, 2010-2012 Le tecniche di neuroimaging (FRMI, MRI, PET, SPECT, ecc.) che permettono di evidenziare e rappresentare non solo le strutture ma anche il funzionamento e le attività delle aree e delle connessioni cerebrali variamente coinvolte nei processi disfunzionali che portano alla dipendenza... Il cambio di paradigma nel concetto di tossicodipendenza – da meccanismo di inclusione/esclusione sociale a malattia misurabile con gli strumenti della neuroscienza – si riflette in maniera profonda nel mutamento del processo comunicativo attorno al tema in questione |
Leanne Houston, Amy Vierboom |
Dominique J. Church |
Marta Bertolino |
Andrea L. Glenn, Yaling Yang # The Potential Role of the Striatum in Antisocial. Behavior and Psychopathy Biol Psychiatry 2012;72:817– 822 Across many subtypes of antisocial individuals, several features appear to be consistent: impulsivity, novelty seeking, reward seeking, and poor decision making. Many studies examining the neural correlates of antisocial behavior have focused on the prefrontal cortex because of its demonstrated importance for inhibition, behavioral control, and decision making... |
Eyal Aharoni, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Kent A. Kiehl # Can Psychopathic Offenders Discern Moral Wrongs? A New Look at the Moral/Conventional Distinction J Abnorm Psychol. 2012 May ; 121(2) A prominent view of psychopathic moral reasoning suggests that psychopathic individuals cannotproperly distinguish between moral wrongs and other types of wrongs. The present study evaluated this view by examining the extent to which 109 incarcerated offenders with varying degrees of psychopathy could distinguish between moral and conventional transgressions relative to each other and to non-incarcerated healthy controls... The authors conclude that, contrary to earlier claims, insufficient data exist to infer that psychopathic individuals cannot know what is morally wrong. |
Paul J. Frick Conduct disorder (CD) is defined as a repetitive and persistent pattern of behavior that violates the rights of others or in which major age-appropriate societal norms or rules are violated. The symptoms of the disorder fall into four main categories: (a) aggression to people and animals, (b) destruction of property, (c) deceitfulness or theft, and (d) serious violations of rules (e.g., truancy, running away from home). CD is an important psychiatric disorder for a number a reasons. Specifically, it often involves aggression; it is highly related to criminal behavior. |
Catherine Tuvblada, Yu Gao, Pan Wanga, Adrian Rainec, Theodore Botwick, Laura A. Baker The present study examined the genetic and environmental etiology of decision-making, in a sample of twins at ages 11–13, 14–15, and 16–18 years. The variance across five 20-trial blocks could be explained by a latent “decision- aking’’ factor within each of the three times of IGT administration. This latent factor was modestly influenced by genetic factors, explaining 35%, 20% and 46% of the variance within each of the three times of IGT administration. The remaining variance was explained by the non-shared environment (65%, 80% and 54%, respectively). |
Nikolaos Koutsouleris, Stefan Borgwardt, Eva M. Meisenzahl, Ronald Bottlender, Hans-Jürgen Möller, Anita Riecher-Rössler Our findings suggest that the early prediction of psychosis may be reliably enhanced using neuroanatomical pattern recognition operating at the single-subject level. These MRI-based biomarkers may have the potential to identify individuals at the highest risk of developing psychosis, and thus may promote informed clinical strategies aiming at preventing the full manifestation of the disease. |
Amanda C. Pustilnik # Pain as Fact and Heuristic: How Pain Neuroimaging Illuminates Moral Dimensions of Law Cornell Law Review, Vol. 97, No. 4, 2012 Introducing the theory of “embodied morality,” the Article describes how moral conceptions of rights and duties are informed by human physicality and constrained by the limits of empathic identification. Pain neuroimaging helps reveal this dual factual and heuristic nature of pain in the law, and thus itself points to the translational work required for neuroimaging to influence, much less transform, legal practice and doctrine. |
Olivier Oullier. |
Baer Arts, Claudia J.P. Simons, Jim van Os |
Steve Sussman (Ed.) |
Yadin Dudai # The Restless Engram: Consolidations Never End Annual Review of Neuroscience 2012 Memory consolidation is the hypothetical process in which an item in memory is transformed into a long-term form. It is commonly addressed at two complementary levels of description and analysis: the cellular/synaptic level (synaptic consolidation) and the brain systems level (systems consolidation). This article focuses on selected recent advances in consolidation research, including the reconsolidation of long-term memory items, the brain mechanisms of transformation of the content and of cue-dependency of memory items over time, as well as the role of rest and sleep in consolidating and shaping memories. |
Maria Teresa Collica |
Alessandro Corda 0. Ambientamento. Visioni futuribili e contaminazioni. – 1. L’intuizione ‘antica’ delle neuroscienze. – 2. Neuroscienze e diritto penale: contesto, limiti e potenzialità. – 3. L’apporto delle neuroscienze cognitive e della genetica comportamentale al giudizio di imputabilità. - 3.1 La sentenza di Trieste. - 3.2. La sentenza di Como. - 3.3. Uno sguardo d’insieme. – 4. L’ingresso della prova scientiica nel processo penale. Alla ricerca di criteri-guida nella Post-Daubert Era. - 4.1. Prova scientiica “nuova” e regime di ammissibilità. - 4.2. Quali criteri per l’ammissione della prova neuroscientiica? – 5. L’utilizzo ‘di parte’ del sapere neuroscientiico. Il problema della responsabilità penale del consulente tecnico. – 6. Un caveat conclusivo. |
Stefano Fuselli # Le emozioni nell’esperienza giuridica: l’impatto delle neuroscienze Neuroscienze e diritto, Roma 25 gennaio 2012 La carica emotiva della retorica ha una vera e propria funzione ‘informativa’ per l’uditorio, in quanto apporta elementi indispensabili per il formarsi in esso di quel tipo di conoscenza che sorregge razionalmente la decisione. Essa ‘informa’ anzitutto nel senso che attualizza e rende apprezzabile una differenza (entelecheia chorizein, dice Aristotele), in virtù di cui alcunché si staglia, positivamente o negativamente, da ‘tutto il resto’. Ma essa ‘informa’ anche perché organizza attorno ad un centro di attenzione la convergenza delle attività e delle facoltà di tipo noetico e oressico altrettanto necessarie per la deliberazione e la decisione. Infine ‘informa’ proprio in quanto rende comune all’uditorio quella ‘marcatura emotiva’ grazie alla quale qualsiasi dato o elemento entra nei processi di apprensione, memorizzazione ed elaborazione di cui si nutre l’intelligenza pratica e dà forma ad un orizzonte valutativo comune, rendendolo esplicito, discutibile e controllabile. |
Edith Greene, Brian S. Cahill # Effects of Neuroimaging Evidence on Mock Juror Decision Making Behav. Sci. Law 30: 280–296 (2012) During the penalty phase of capital trials, defendantsmay introducemitigating evidence that argues for a punishment “less than death.” In the past few years, a novel form of mitigating evidence—brain scans made possible by technological advances in neuroscience— has been proffered by defendants to support claims that brain abnormalities reduce their culpability. |
The Royal Society |
Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche # Quando la genetica sfida la giustizia www.stampa.cnr.it/ Roma, 13 dicembre 2011 In che misura il comportamento criminale dipende dai geni? Quali strumenti offrono le neuroscienze per la valutazione della colpevolezza? Le scoperte sulla struttura del cervello modificheranno il modo di intendere la responsabilità e come influenzeranno la società ed eventualmente le decisioni dei tribunali? |
Julian C. Motzkin, Joseph P. Newman,Kent A. Kiehl, Michael Koenigs # Reduced Prefrontal Connectivity in Psychopathy The Journal of Neuroscience, November 30, 2011 Linking psychopathy to a specific brain abnormality could have significant clinical, legal, and scientific implications. Theories on the neurobiological basis of the disorder typically propose dysfunction in a circuit involving ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). However,to datethere is limited brain imaging datato directlytest whether psychopathy may indeed be associated with any structural or functional abnormality within this brain area. |
Oliver R. Goodenough, Micaela Tucker |
Francis X. Shen, Owen D. Jones # Brain Scans as Evidence: Truths, Proofs, Lies, and Lessons Mercer Law Review, vol. 62, 2011 Neurolaw is not just a fanciful fiction of the future. For better or worse, it is already entering contemporary jurisprudence. As United States v. Semrau illustrates in the brain-based lie detection context, attempts to use brain scans in legal contexts will often precede the full appropriateness of doing so. |
Owen D. Jones, Francis X. Shen Neuroscientific evidence is increasingly reaching United States courtrooms in a number of legal contexts. And the emerging field of Law and Neuroscience is being built on a foundation that joins: a) rapidly developing technologies and techniques of neuroscience; b) quickly expanding legal scholarship on the implications of neuroscience; and c) neuroscientific research designed specifically to explore legally relevant topics. Despite the sharply increasing interest in neuroscientific evidence, it remains unclear how the legal system – at the courtroom, regulatory, and policy levels – will resolve the many challenges that new neuroscience applications raise. |
Rolando Rengifo |
David P. McCabe, Alan D. Castel, Matthew G. Rhodes |
Sagari Sarkar, Ben S. Clark, Quinton Deeley # Differences between psychopathy and other personality disorders: evidence from neuroimaging Advances in psychiatric treatment, vol. 17, 191–200, 2011 ICD-1O and DSM-IV-TR diagnostic guidelines do not list psychopathy as a distinct psychiatric entity. However, there are significant overlaps between psychopathy and DSM-IV-TR Cluster B personality disorders. Neuroimaging studies implicate deficits in structure and function of frontal and limbic regions in this group of personality disorders, while highlighting both distinctions and overlaps between syndromes. Here, these data are reviewed and implications for diagnosis and clinical practice are discussed. |
Per B. Sederberg, Samuel J. Gershman, Sean M. Polyn, Kenneth A. Norman # Human memory reconsolidation can be explained using the Temporal Context Model Psychon Bull Rev. 2011 June ; 18(3): 455–468. One of the most provocative and exciting ideas to emerge from the animal learning and memory literature in recent years is the idea of reconsolidation. According to this idea, retrieving a memory makes its molecular substrate malleable; when the memory is in this malleable state, it can be changed or even erased... |
Eyal Aharoni, Olga Antonenko, Kent A. Kiehl |
Andrea L. Glenn, Adrian Raine, William S. Laufer # Is it Wrong to Criminalize and Punish Psychopaths? Emotion Review, Vol. 3, No. 3 (July 2011) 302–304 Increasing evidence from psychology and neuroscience suggests that emotion plays an important and sometimes critical role in moral judgment and moral behavior. At the same time, there is increasing psychological and neuroscientific evidence that brain regions critical in emotional and moral capacity are impaired in psychopaths. We ask how the criminal law should accommodate these two streams of research, in light of a new normative and legal account of the criminal responsibility of psychopaths. |
J.R.H. Law |
Bernardo Feijoo Sánchez # Derecho Penal y Neurociencias. ¿Una relación tormentosa? InDret. Revista para el analisidel derecho, abril del 2011 Las neurociencias, en gran medida gracias a las enormes posibilidades que ofrecen los nuevos métodos de experimentación y neuroimagen -tomografía por emisión de positrones (PET), resonancia magnética funcional o nuclear (RM o fMRI), magnetoencefalografía, etc.-, han sufrido un avance espectacular en los últimos años y nos han abierto la ilusionante posibilidad de conocer mejor lo que denominamos “naturaleza humana”. De tal manera que algún autor no ha tenido reparos en hablar de una “revolución neurocientífica”... |
Adam Teitcher |
Kent A. Kiehl, Morris B. Hoffman |
Jean Decety, Kalina J. Michalska, Katherine D. Kinzler Cerebral Cortex may 2011 |
Katja Karg, Margit Burmeister, Kerby Shedden, Srijan Sen #The Serotonin Transporter Promoter Variant (5-HTTLPR), Stress, and Depression Meta-Analysis Revisited: Evidence of Genetic Moderation Arch Gen Psychiatry, 2011 May ; 68(5): 444–454 We included 54 studies and found strong evidence that 5-HTTLPR moderates the relationship between stress and depression, with the 5-HTTLPR s allele associated with an increased risk of developing depression under stress (p<0.0001). When restricting our analysis to the studies included in the previous meta-analyses, we found no evidence of association (Munafo studies p=0.16; Risch studies p=0.11). This suggests that the difference in results between previous meta-analyses and ours was not due to the difference in meta-analytic technique but instead to the expanded set of studies included in this analysis. |
Morse, S. J. # Stephen J. Morse, The Status of NeuroLaw: A Plea for Current Modesty and Future Cautious Optimism, J. Psychiatry & L. 595 (2011) |
Ombretta Di Giovine |
Enrica Nordio |
Kenneth K. Kidd #Population Genetics of SNPs for Forensic Purposes www.ncjrs.gov/ November 2011 |
Matthew L. Baum |
Deborah W. Denno #Courts’ Increasing Consideration of Behavioral Genetics Evidence in Criminal Cases: Results of a Longitudinal Study Michigan State Law Review Vol. 2011:967 |
Charlotte Walsh |
Kent A. Kiehl, Morris B. Hoffman # The Criminal Psychopath: History, Neuroscience, Treatment, and Economics Jurimetrics, Summer 2011 Psychopaths consume an astonishingly disproportionate amount of criminal justice resources. Individuals with psychopathic personality, or psychopaths, have a disproportionate impact on the criminal justice system. Psychopaths are twenty to twenty-five times more likely than non- sychopaths to be in prison, four to eight times more likely to violently recidivate compared to non- sychopaths, and are resistant to most forms of treatment. Given psychopathy’s enormous impact on society in general and on the criminal justice system in particular, there are significant benefits to increasing awareness of the condition. This review also highlights a recent, compelling and costeffective treatment program that has shown a significant reduction in violent recidivism in youth on a putative trajectory to psychopathic personality. |
Andrea L. Glenn |
Adam Lamparello # Using Cognitive Neuroscience to Predict Future Dangerousness Columbia Human Rights Law Review, 42:481 2011 It is, of course, not easy to predict future behavior. The fact that such a determination is difficult, however, does not mean that it cannot be made. Indeed, prediction of future criminal conduct is an essential element in many of the decisions rendered throughout our criminal justice system. . . . And any sentencing authority must predict a convicted person’s probable future conduct when it engages in the process of determining what punishment to impose. . . . The task that a [capital sentencing] jury must perform in answering the statutory question in issue is thus basically no different from the task performed countless times each day throughout the American system of criminal justice. |
Donatella Pianezzi |
Emilia Musumeci #Cesare Lombroso e le neuroscienze: un parricidio mancato? Università degli Studi di Catania 2011 |
Stanislas Dehaene, Jean-Pierre Changeux, Lionel Naccache #The Global Neuronal Workspace Model of Conscious Access: From Neuronal Architectures to Clinical Applications www.cs.helsinki.fi/ 2011 While a considerable body of experimental data has been accumulated on the differences between conscious and non- conscious processing, a theory is needed to bridge the neuro-psychological gap and establish a causal relationship between objective neurophysiological data and subjective reports. In the present review, we first briefly outline the detailed postulates and predictions of our working hypothesis, referred to as the global neuronal workspace (GNW) model. |
Ugo Fornari, Ambrogio Pennati L'utilizzo dell'analisi genetica sul piano clinico non fornisce, allo stato attuale, informazioni rilevanti. In particolare, la valutazione della pericolosità sociale psichiatrica è una valutazione clinica con indubbie conseguenze sul piano prognostico. L'analisi genetica, per le sue attuali caratteristiche strutturali e per le informazioni che oggi può fornire, non è in grado di prendere nella necessaria considerazione gli aspetti dinamico-evolutivi e trasformativi insiti nella nozione stessa di pericolosità sociale psichiatrica. |
Luca Casartelli #How Cognitive Neuroscience interacts with Psychiatric Forensic Examination: Conceptual Clarification and Methodological Assessment Studia Bioethica - vol. 4 (2011) n. 1 , pp. 34-39 Considering the implications of psychiatric forensic evaluation, we defend a prudential attitude, although prudence must not become blindness towards new neuroscientific possibilities. To appropriately use neuroscientific evidences we need a neurocognitive model capable to explain and categorize empirical data better. Further empirical, methodological and conceptual studies may provide more consistent agreement and open new ways to consider the relation between neuroscience and law. |
Abigail A. Marsh, Elizabeth C. Finger, Katherine A. Fowler, Ilana T.N. Jurkowitz, Julia C. Schechter, Henry H. Yu, Daniel S. Pine, R.J.R. Blair |
Cristina M. Alberini #The role of reconsolidation and the dynamic process of long‑term memory formation and storage www.frontiersin.org/ Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience March 2011 It is becoming increasingly clear that the processes of memory formation and storage are exquisitely dynamic. Elucidating the nature and temporal evolution of the biological changes that accompany encoding, storage, and retrieval is key to understand memory formation. For explicit or medial temporal lobe-dependent memories that form after a discrete event and are stored for a long time, the physical changes underlying the encoding and processing of the information (memory trace or engram) remain in a fragile state for some time. However, over time, the new memory becomes increasingly resistant to disruption until it is consolidated... |
Charles F. Manski |
Jaak Panksepp, Douglas Watt #Why Does Depression Hurt? Ancestral PrimaryProcess Separation-Distress (PANIC/GRIEF) and Diminished Brain Reward (SEEKING) Processes in the Genesis of Depressive Affect Psychiatry, 74(1) Spring 2011 A critical question about genesis of depression is: Which negative affect-generating networks of mammalian brains are most important for understanding depressive “pain” and what new therapeutics might such knowledge engender? Affective neuroscience has outlined seven primary process (i.e., genetically provided) emotional systems. All are subcortically situated... |
Roope Tikkanen, Laura Auvinen-Lintunen, Francesca Ducci, Rickard L. Sjöberg, David Goldman, Jari Tiihonen, Ilkka Ojansuu, Matti Virkkunen #Psychopathy, PCL-R, and MAOA genotype as predictors of violent reconvictions Psychiatry Res. 2011 February 28 The Revised Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R) has shown a moderate association with violence. The efficacy of PCL-R in varying monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) genotypes is, however, unexamined. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of PCL-R and psychopathy on the risk for violent reconvictions among 167 MAOA genotyped alcoholic offenders. |
Jason Roach, Ken Pease |
Mercer Law |
Giorgio Ganis, J. Peter Rosenfeld, John Meixner, Rogier A. Kievit, Haline E. Schendan |
Charlotte Walsh |
Andrea L. Glenn, Spassena Koleva, Ravi Iyer, Jesse Graham, Peter H. Ditto # Moral identity in psychopathy Judgment and Decision Making, Vol. 5, No. 7, December 2010, pp. 497–505 The concept of psychopathy stands in sharp contrast to Socrates’ famous dictum “to know the good is to do the good.” Individuals with psychopathic traits know the difference between right and wrong — at least in straightforward cases such as knowing whether an act is illegal. Nevertheless, they often engage in frequent and flagrant bad behavior (Hare, 2003). This discrepancy between the judgments people make about what they should do and their actual behavior is not unique to psychopathic individuals. |
Steven K. Erickson |
Thomas R. Insel # Rethinking schizophrenia Nature, 11 november 2010 How will we view schizophrenia in 2030? Schizophrenia today is a chronic, frequently disabling mental disorder that affects about one per cent of the world’s population. After a century of studying schizophrenia, the cause of the disorder remains unknown. Treatments, especially pharmacological treatments, have been in wide use for nearly half a century, yet there is little evidence that these treatments have substantially improved outcomes for most people with schizophrenia. These current unsatisfactory outcomes may change as we approach schizophrenia as a neurodevelopmental disorder with psychosis as a late, potentially preventable stage of the illness. This ‘rethinking’ of schizophrenia as a neurodevelopmental disorder, which is profoundly different from the way we have seen this illness for the past century, yields new hope for prevention and cure over the next two decades |
Niklas Nordquist, Lars Oreland # Serotonin, genetic variability, behaviour, and psychiatric disorders - a review Upsala Journal of Medical Sciences. 2010; 115: 2–10 There is a clear discrepancy in prevalence for neuropsychiatric disorders between the sexes, where, for example, females more often tend to develop major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder, whereas, in males, antisocial personality disorder, childhood attention-defecit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and alcohol and drug dependence are more frequent. |
Kent A. Kiehl, Joshua W. Buckholtz |
John Matthew Fabian Violence and murder have their roots in biological, psychological, and sociological factors. This article will focus on one specific element of the biological aspects of violence and murder; specifically; neurological and neuropsychological aspects. The author will provide a literature review contrasting structural brain abnormalities and dysfunction (neuropathology) and brain–behavior (neuropsychological) relational attributes to violence, aggression, and homicidal behavior in particular. |
Thomas J. Crowley, Manish S. Dalwani, Susan K. Mikulich-Gilbertson, Yiping P. Du, Carl W. Lejuez, Kristen M. Raymond, Marie T. Banich # Risky Decisions and Their Consequences: Neural Processing by Boys with Antisocial Substance Disorder www.plosone.org/ PLoS ONE, 1 September 2010 | Volume 5 | Issue 9 Adolescent boys with 'Antisocial Substance Disorder' (ASD) had extensive neural hypoactivity during risky decision-making, coupled with decreased activity during reward and increased activity during loss. These neural patterns may underlie the dangerous, excessive, sustained risk- taking of such boys. The findings suggest that the dysphoria, reward insensitivity, and suppressed neural activity observed among older addicted persons also characterize youths early in the development of substance use disorders. |
Thomas Nadelhoffer, Stephanos Bibas, Scott Grafton, Kent A. Kiehl, Andrew Mansfield, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Michael Gazzaniga |
Laura Baker, Catherine Tuvblad, Adrian Raine |
Martin A. Kohli, Daria Salyakina, Andrea Pfennig, Susanne Lucae, Sonja Horstmann, Andreas Menke, Stefan Kloiber, MD, Johannes Hennings, Bekh B. Bradley, Kerry J. Ressler, Manfred Uhr, Bertram Müller-Myhsok, Florian Holsboer, Elisabeth B. Binder |
Thomas R. Insel www.psychiatry.unimelb.edu.au/ Scientific American, April 2010 |
Virginia Hughes |
Anthony R. Cashmore # The Lucretian swerve: The biological basis of human behavior and the criminal justice system www.pnas.org/ PNAS | March 9, 2010 If free will is an illusion, then it becomes more difficult to hold people responsible for their actions. I have argued that one of the reasons that individuals have been so reluctant to question the reality of free will is the belief that it would be difficult for society to function under a system in which this concept was abandoned. |
Francesca Forzano, Pascal Borry, Anne Cambon-Thomsen, Shirley V Hodgson, Aad Tibben, Petrus de Vries, Carla van El, Martina Cornel # Italian appeal court: a genetic predisposition to commit murder? European Journal of Human Genetics (2010) 18, 519–521 A few months ago, the controversial debate on connection between genetic variants and antisocial behaviour gained renewed prominence after the sentence of an Italian judge who decided to further reduce the prison sentence of a person convicted of murder by 1 year – from 9 to 8 years – because he was found to be a carrier of a few genetic variants thought to be associated with a predisposition to aggressiveness. We discuss the social implication of this view, the lack of evidence of the clinical utility of this test, and in particular the risks of offering susceptibility testing in the context of legal proceedings. |
The Law and Neuroscience Project | Floyd E. Bloom, Howard L. Fields, Michael S. Gazzaniga, Scott T. Grafton, Kent Kiehl, Helen Mayberg, Read Montague, Louis J. Ptáček, Marcus Raichle, Adina Roskies, Anthony Wagner |
Kate Bloch |
Giulia Capra # Le Neuroscienze e la genetica molecolare nella valutazione della capacità di intendere e di volere. Commento alla sentenza della Corte d’Assise d’Appello di Trieste n. 5/2009 del 18/09/2009 www.psicologiagiuridica.com/ 2010 Particolarmente significative sono risultate le indagini genetiche effettuate dai periti alla “ricerca di polimorfismi genetici significativi per modulare le reazioni a variabili ambientali fra i quali in particolare per quello che interessa nel caso di specie l’esposizione ad eventi stressanti ed a reagire agli stessi con comportamenti di tipo impulsivo” . […] Tale indagine, del tutto innovativa rispetto al livello di approfondimento corrente degli accertamenti giudiziari avrebbe consentito di accertare che l’imputato “risulta possedere, per ciascuno dei polimorfismi esaminati, almeno uno se non tutti e due gli alleli che, in base a numerosi studi internazionali riportati sinora in letteratura, sono stati riscontrati conferire un significativo aumento del rischio di sviluppo di comportamento aggressivo, impulsivo (socialmente inaccettabile)... |
Adina L. Roskies |
Frederick Schauer #Can Bad ScienceBe Good Evidence? Neuroscience, Lie Detection, and Beyond http://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/ Cornell Law Review, vol. 95, 2010 Law must listen to what neuroscientists say about neuroscience, but it must also be attentive to the adjectives and adverbs. When neuroscientists say that there is no “compelling” evidence of fMRI’s lie-detecting reliability, that there is “very little basis” for confidence in the results produced so far, or that claims about fMRI results have been made “prematurely,” they are imposing an evaluative standard on the experimental results. |
Martin Gottschalk, Lee Ellis |
Carla L. Harenski, Keith A. Harenski, Matthew S. Shane, Kent A. Kiehl # Aberrant Neural Processing of Moral Violations in Criminal Psychopaths Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 2010, Vol. 119, No. 4, 863– 874 The authors used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to record hemodynamic activity in 72 incarcerated male adults, stratified into psychopathic (n 16) and nonpsychopathic (n 16) groups based on scores from the Hare Psychopathy Checklist—Revised (R. D. Hare, 2003), while they made decisions regarding the severity of moral violations of pictures that did or did not depict moral situations. Consistent with hypotheses, an analysis of brain activity during the evaluation of pictures depicting moral violations in psychopaths versus nonpsychopaths showed atypical activity in several regions involved in moral decision-making... |
Andrea Colorio # Diritto e cervello: verso le nuove frontiere del neurodiritto www.i-lex.it Scienze Giuridiche, Scienze Cognitive e Intelligenza artificiale Ottobre 2010, numero 10 La recente pubblicazione del pregevole volume collettaneo Von der Neuroethik zum Neurorecht, curato da Schleim, Spranger e Henrik, rafforza la sensazione che questo settore scientifico stia iniziando a riscontrare interesse in larghe fasce del mondo di civil law, per certi versi affiancandosi al già consolidato biodiritto, ma soprattutto conferma lo strettissimo collegamento con la tematica della neuroetica, a propria volta al centro di un dibattito scientifico di primissimo piano. |
Sofia Moratti, Raffaella Ida Rumiati |
Gabriella Marando |
Oliver R. Goodenough, Micaela Tucker |
Philip Hunter While the idea of a ‘criminal gene’ is nonsense, there is growing evidence that some psychopathic behaviour might indeed be grounded in genes. “…it is useful to think of psychopathy as mainly the product of genes and sociopathy as more subject to environmental influences” |
Sarina M. Rodrigues, Laura R. Saslow, Natalia Garcia, Oliver P. John, and Dacher Keltner |
Odette Eronia |
Songfa Zhong, Salomon Israel, Hong Xue, Richard P. Ebstein, Soo Hong Chew #Monoamine Oxidase A Gene (MAOA) Associated with Attitude Towards Longshot Risks PLoS ONE December 2009 | Volume 4 | Issue 12 | Decision making often entails longshot risks involving a small chance of receiving a substantial outcome. People tend to be risk preferring (averse) when facing longshot risks involving significant gains (losses). This differentiation towards longshot risks underpins the markets for lottery as well as for insurance. Both lottery and insurance have emerged since ancient times and continue to play a useful role in the modern economy. In this study, we observe subjects’ incentivized choices in a controlled laboratory setting, and investigate their association with a widely studied, promoter- egion repeat functional polymorphism in monoamine oxidase A gene (MAOA). We find that subjects with the high activity (4-repeat) allele are characterized by a preference for the longshot lottery and also less insurance purchasing than subjects with the low activity (3-repeat) allele. This is the first result to link attitude towards longshot risks to a specific gene. It complements recent findings on the neurobiological basis of economic risk taking. |
Joshua D. Greene |
Yu Gao, Andrea L. Glenn, Robert A. Schug, Yaling Yang, Adrian Raine #The neurobiology of psychopathy: A neurodevelopmental perspective Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 2009, 54(12), 813-823. Although it is clearly difficult to conduct longitudinal studies on psychopathy, examining the development of neurobiological measures for psychopathic personality from an early age is crucial to furthering our knowledge on etiology and testing a neurodevelopmental hypothesis of psychopathy. Continued efforts to identify and assess psychopathiclike children and adolescents using prospective longitudinal designs could have potentially important implications for the prevention and management of adult psychopathy. If psychopathic traits and serious offending are, in part, neurodevelopmentally determined, successful prevention and intervention efforts would be most effective if they begin in early childhood, infancy, or even prenatally... |
A.L Glenn, Adrian Raine, R.A. Schug, #The Neural Correlates of Moral Decision-Making in Psychopathy http://repository.upenn.edu/ ' Molecular Psychiatry, (2009) Vol. 14, 5-6 Findings demonstrate that amygdala functioning is disrupted during moral decision-making in psychopathy, and is evident in all features of psychopathy, suggesting that amygdala dysfunction may be a core deficit in psychopathy. The amygdala is thought to respond to cues indicating distress in others, thus guiding individuals away from antisocial behavior. Reduced amygdala functioning in more psychopathic individuals suggests reduced responsivity to the thought of causing harm to others when contemplating personal moral dilemmas. |
Andrea L. Glenn, Ravi Iyer, Jesse Graham, Spassena Koleva, J. Haidt #Are all types of morality compromised in psychopathy? Journal of Personality Disorders, 2009, 23, 384-398 Psychopathy is a clinical construct defined as a constellation of personality and behavioral features, including callousness; manipulativeness; a lack of guilt, remorse, and empathy; impulsiveness; sensation-seeking; and frequent antisocial and immoral behavior. Previous descriptions of the relationship between psychopathy and morality have used general terms such as “morally insanity” and “without conscience”, or have focused on a few aspects of morality such as the willingness to harm and cheat others or the ability to distinguish between moral and conventional transgressions... |
Rose McDermott, Dustin Tingley, Jonathan Cowden, Giovanni Frazzetto, Dominic D. P. Johnsone |
Owen D. Jones, Joshua W. Buckholtz, Jeffrey D. Schall, Rene Marois |
Yadin Dudai |
Amanda Pustilnik |
Amedeo Santosuosso |
Yves Hémery |
Ilina Singh, Nikolas Rose # Biomarkers in psychiatry Nature | Vol 460 | 9 July 2009 Psychiatry has long been a second-class citizen in science and medicine. Despite much effort, the causes of many psychiatric disorders remain unclear, and it has been difficult even to categorize such disorders precisely. In the past decade, however, there has been a large shift towards incorporating biomarkers into psychiatry, and there is hope that such biological indicators will improve psychiatric diagnoses by underpinning them with physiological evidence. But biomarkers promise far more than a basis for better diagnoses. |
Pietro Pietrini # Intervista su sentenza di Trieste Effettuata da Marco Mozzoni il 16/11/2009 per BRAINFACTOR Cervello e Neuroscienze http://brainfactor.it Per la perizia abbiamo utilizzato una serie di strumenti, a partire dalla raccolta dei dati anamnestici e l’esame clinico, il colloquio psichiatrico, la somministrazione di test cognitivi e di personalità, l’esame di risonanza magnetica strutturale e funzionale del cervello e, infine, gli esami genetici per verificare la presenza di varianti polimorfiche che in letteratura sono state riscontrate essere significativamente associate con un aumentato rischio di comportamento impulsivo, aggressivo e antisociale. Le conclusioni alle quali il Prof. Sartori ed io siamo giunti nella nostra relazione peritale sono basate sull’insieme dei risultati ottenuti nei vari esami sopradescritti, compresi in primo luogo le valutazioni “classiche” e certamente non solo nè principalmente sui dati dello studio genetico. |
Sabrina Peron |
William P. Banks and Eve A. Isham |
Oliver R. Goodenough |
Stephen M. Fleming, Rogier B. Mars, Thomas E. Gladwin, Patrick Haggard # When the Brain Changes Its Mind: Flexibility of Action Selection in Instructed and Free Choices Cerebral Cortex October 2009;19 Many human actions are determined by a combination of current external cues and internal representations within the brain, such as memories, goals, and motivations. ‘‘Free choices’’ can be defined as actions occurring when current external cues guiding behavior are largely absent. In particular, the choice of which of a number of possible alternative actions to make in a given situation is an important aspect of free choice because most situations afford a number of possible responses. |
Emiliano Feresin An Italian court has cut the sentence given to a convicted murderer by a year because he has genes linked to violent behaviour. Some fear that such cases could lead to the acceptance of genetic determinism — the idea that genes determine the behaviour of an organism — in criminal cases. '90% of all murders are committed by people with a Y chromosome — males. Should we always give males a shorter sentence?' says Steve Jones, a geneticist at University College London. 'I have low MAOA activity but I don't go around attacking people.' |
J. Arturo Silva #Forensic Psychiatry, Neuroscience, and the Law J Am Acad Psychiatry Law 37:489 –502, 2009 The rise of modern neuroscience is transforming psychiatry and other behavioral sciences. Neuroscientific progress also has had major impact in forensic neuropsychiatric practice, resulting in the increased use of neuroscientific technologies in cases of a psychiatric-legal nature. This article is focused on the impact of neuroscientific progress in forensic psychiatry in relation to criminal law. Also addressed are some emerging questions involving the practice of forensic neuropsychiatry. These questions will be reframed by providing alternative perspectives consistent with the objectives of forensic neuropsychiatric practice. The last part of the article is a discussion of potential developments that may facilitate the integration of neuroscientific knowledge in forensic neuropsychiatric practice. |
Noel Shafi |
Natalie Weder, Bao Zhu Yang, Heather Douglas-Palumberi, Johari Massey, John H. Krystal, Joel Gelernter, Joan Kaufman |
Tali Sharot, Tamara Shiner, Annemarie C. Brown, Judy Fan, Raymond J. Dolan # Dopamine Enhances Expectation of Pleasure in Humans Current Biology (2009) Yet, little is known about the biological basis of subjective estimations of future hedonic reactions. Here, we show that administration of a drug that enhances dopaminergic function (dihydroxy-L-phenylalanine; L-DOPA) during the imaginative construction of positive future life events subsequently enhances estimates of the hedonic pleasure to be derived from these same events. |
Björn Hofvander, Daniel Ossowski, Sebastian Lundström, Henrik Anckarsäter International journal of law and psychiatry, 2009 May 8 During recent years, intense interest has been focused on interactions between specific genotypes and environmental factors as a possible key to disentangle the inconsistent findings from univariate association studies. The first paper to identify such effects was published in 2002 by Caspi and co-workers, who could show that maltreated boys with the high-activity polymorphism in the MAO-A gene were less likely to develop antisocial behaviours than maltreated boys with the low-activity polymorphism, while the polymorphism did not have any effect on the variation of antisocial behaviours in the population at large |
Stephen W. Porges |
S. W. Porges |
Jay D. Aronson |
Peter Cohen |
Kevin M. Beaver, Matt DeLisi, Michael G. Vaughn, J.C. Barnes |
Christopher J. Ferguson, Kevin M. Beaver |
Nicole A. Vincent # Neuroimaging and Responsibility Assessments http://ethicsandtechnology.eu/ 2009 Could neuroimaging evidence help us to assess the degree of a person’s responsibility for a crime which we know that they committed? This essay defends an affirmative answer to this question. A range of standard objections to this high-tech approach to assessing people’s responsibility is considered and then set aside, but I also bring to light and then reject a novel objection—an objection which is only encountered when functional (rather than structural) neuroimaging is used to assess people’s responsibility. |
Michael S. Gazzaniga |
Adrian Raine |
The Rupture and Repair of Cooperation in Borderline Personality Disorder #Brooks King-Casas, Carla Sharp, Laura Lomax-Bream, Terry Lohrenz, Peter Fonagy, P. Read Montague Science, vol. 321, 8 August 2008 Behaviorally, individuals with BPD showed a profound incapacity to maintain cooperation, and were impaired in their ability to repair broken cooperation on the basis of a quantitative measure of coaxing. Neurally, activity in the anterior insula, a region known to respond to norm violations across affective, interoceptive, economic, and social dimensions, strongly differentiated healthy participants from individuals with BPD... |
Larry J. Siever |
Andrea L. Glenn, Adrian Raine #The neurobiology of psychopathy Psychiatric Clinics of North America, 2008, 31, 463-475. It is becoming increasingly clear that understanding the neurobiology of psychopathy goes far beyond identifying brain regions that may be involved. Genetics, neurotransmitters, and hormones all impact the functioning of brain structures and the connectivity between them. In future research it will be important to identify how these systems work together to produce the unique compilation of traits and behaviors characteristic of psychopathy. |
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Adina Roskies, Teneille Brown, Emily Murphy #Brain Images As Legal Evidence Episteme, 2008 This paper explores whether brain images may be admitted as evidence in criminaltrials underFederalRule ofEvidence 403,whichweighs probative value against the danger of being prejudicial, confusing, or misleading to fact finders. The papersummarizes and evaluatesrecent empirical research relevant to these issues. We argue that currently the probative value of neuroimages for criminal responsibility is minimal, and there is some evidence of their potential to be prejudicial or misleading. We also propose experiments that will directly assess howjurors are influenced by brain imagesto aid future decisions of admissibility. |
David P. McCabe, Alan D. Castel |
John Seabrook # Suffering Souls. The search for the roots of psychopathy. www.newyorker.com/ The New Yorker, Noovember 10, 2008 There is also little consensus among researchers about what causes psychopathy. Considerable evidence, including several large-scale studies of twins, points toward a genetic component. Yet psychopaths are more likely to come from neglectful families than from loving, nurturing ones. Psychopathy could be dimensional, like high blood pressure, or it might be categorical, like leukemia. Researchers argue over whether tests used to measure it should focus on behavior or attempt to incorporate personality traits—like deceitfulness, glibness, and lack of remorse—as well. The only point on which everyone agrees is that psychopathy is extremely difficult to treat. Psychopathy also raises fundamental issues about justice... |
Carlo Brusco |
Luca Sammicheli, Giuseppe Sartori # Neuroscienze e imputabilità www.personaedanno.it/ 23 ott 2008 L'imputabilità rappresenta di fatto il cardine, il punto di appoggio, di un sistema penale basato su una certa visione dell’uomo: essa definisce quelle funzioni psichiche che delimitano il confine di senso dell’ordinamento penale. Le capacità di intendere e di volere esprimono con una formula sintetica quella “normalità psichica” sulla quale si poggia, quale esperienza comunemente condivisa, e al di là delle discussioni filosofiche, il cosiddetto libero arbitrio. O meglio, per dirla con le parole degli psicologi, un libero arbitrio sufficientemente buono... |
Nikos K. Logothetis |
The British Psychological Society # Guidelines on Memory and the Law. Recommendations from the Scientific Study of Human Memory www.forcescience.org/ June 2008 Remembering is a constructive process. Memories are mental constructions that bring together different types of knowledge in an act of remembering. As a consequence, memory is prone to error and is easily influenced by the recall environment, including police interviews and cross-examination in court... People can remember events that they have not in reality experienced. This does not necessarily entail deliberate deception. For example, an event that was imagined, was a blend of a number of different events, or that makes personal sense for some other eason, can come to be genuinely experienced as a memory, (these are often referred to as ‘confabulations’). |
Guang Guo, Michael E. Roettger # The Integration of Genetic Propensities into Social-Control Models of Delinquency and Violence among Male Youths American Sociological Review, 2008, VOL. 73 (August:543–568) This study, drawing on approximately 1,100 males from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, demonstrates the importance of genetics, and genetic–environmental interactions, for understanding adolescent delinquency and violence. Our analyses show that three genetic polymorphisms—specifically, the 30-bp promoter- region variable number tandem repeat (VNTR) in MAOA, the 40-bp VNTR in DAT1, and the Taq1 polymorphism in DRD2—are significant predictors of serious and violent delinquency when added to a social-control model of delinquency. |
Gina M. Vincent, Candice L. Odgers, Amanda V. McCormick, Raymond R. Corrado # The PCL: YV and recidivism in male and female juveniles: A follow-up into young adulthood International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 31 (2008) 287–296 Adolescents, and most recently, adolescent females, have emerged as an important population in violence risk assessment and have sparked a debate regarding the downward and gendered extension of the Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version (PCL:YV). This article evaluates the differential prediction of the three and four-factor models of the PCL:YV for male (n= 201) and female (n= 55) juvenile offenders using a prospective four and one-half year follow-up (M= 3 years) study. |
Francis X. Shen This Article has argued that the legal system is readily equipped to provide citizens with adequate protection against government‐compelled or coerced mind reading with neuroimaging. The law has seen, and protected citizens from, previous analogs, and the technology itself is unlikely to be as dangerous as some prognosticators believe. We should certainly be concerned about the government tracking our minds, but we should be most concerned about government carrying out that tracking by observing and inferring mental states from our behavior, not our brains. |
Christopher J. Patrick # Psychophysiological correlates of aggression and violence: an integrative review www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B (2008) 363, 2543–255 What are the distinctive functional roles of brain regions that have been implicated in electro-cortical and neuroimaging studies of aggression and how do these regions interact to achieve regulatory control over emotional states? Basic cognitive and affective neuroscience research is needed to elucidate this issue. What specific impairments in the functioning of these brain systems predispose individuals towards aggressive behaviour? |
Sheri Alpert # Neuroethics and Nanoethics: Do We Risk Ethical Myopia? Neuroethics (2008) 1:55–68 In recent years, two distinct trajectories of bioethical inquiry have emerged: neuroethics and nanoethics. The former deals with issues in neuroscience, whereas the latter deals with issues in nanoscience and nanotechnology. In both cases, the ethical inquiries have coalesced in response to rapidly increasing scientific and engineering developments in each field. |
Anne K Churchland, Roozbeh Kiani, Michael N Shadlen # Decision-making with multiple alternatives Nature Neuroscience, n. 6, vol. 11, June 2008 Organisms face decisions of varying complexity. In simple decisions, perceptual observations allow an animal to choose between action and inaction, or between two alternative actions. These are simple instances of complex cognitive processes, which may require additional information from the environment or from memory. The ability to delay a response to consider incoming information is a hallmark of higher brain function. |
Eric García # Neurociencia, conducta e imputabilidad QUARK n. 39-40 diciembre 2007 Una breve reflexión sobre el vínculo que existe entre el cerebro y la conducta –y a través del comportamiento humano, la relación con las normas jurídicas, pues éstas regulan la conducta externa del individuo– se plantea en este texto, donde se mencionan términos como la imputabilidad y la edad penal, pues los avances científicos de las neurociencias son susceptibles de brindar sustento a dichos conceptos. El texto forma parte del homenaje que la revista Quark dedica a Ramón y Cajal, tras la celebración del primer siglo del Nobel otorgado a este destacado científico. universal. |
J. Arturo Silva |
Klaus A. Miczek, Rosa M. M. de Almeida, Edward A. Kravitz, Emilie F. Rissman, Sietse F. de Boer, Adrian Raine # Neurobiology of Escalated Aggression and Violence The Journal of Neuroscience, October 31, 2007•27(44): Research on aggression and violence is pursued by social and biological scientists with profoundly divergent approaches. At present, the schism between these approaches promises to be overcome by advancing our knowledge of the molecular events through which social experiences sculpt future aggressive acts. Insights into the gene– environment interactions are critical for the way in which the criminal justice and the public health systems deal with aggression and violence. Neurobiological research of aggressive behavior is emerging from several shameful episodes during the past century ranging from the eugenics movement to lobotomies to stigmatizing individuals with phrenologically defined biomarkers. |
Kolja Schiltz, Joachim Witzel, Georg Northoff, Kathrin Zierhut, Udo Gubka, Hermann Fellmann, Jörn Kaufmann, Claus Tempelmann, Christine Wiebking, Bernhard Bogerts |
Thomas R. Insel # Shining Light on Depression Science, vol. 317, 10 August 2007 Just as research during the Decade of the Brain (1990–2000) forged the bridge between the mind and the brain, research in the current decade is helping us to understand mental illnesses as brain disorders. As a result, the distinction between disorders of neurology (e.g., Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases) and disorders of psychiatry (e.g., schizophrenia and depression) may turn out to be increasingly subtle. That is, the former may result from focal lesions in the brain, whereas the latter arise from abnormal activity in specific brain circuits in the absence of a detectable lesion. As we become more adept at detecting lesions that lead to abnormal function, it is even possible that the distinction between neurological and psychiatric disorders will vanish, leading to a combined discipline of clinical neuroscience. |
Giuseppe Di Chiara |
William Bernet, Cindy L. Vnencak-Jones,Nita Farahany, Stephen A. Montgomery |
Melissa S. Caulum There is very little empirical research regarding first- time emergingadult offenders. Regardless, states should consider their behavioral and brain development when determining policy and sentencing. The brain is more malleable than scientists once believed: Research confirms growth well beyond the age of eighteen, and has allowed for a deeper understanding of the end of adolescence and the transition to adulthood. Studies have shown that, during this developmental stage, the brain responds to learning- and training- nduced and environmentally stimulated structural changes. |
J. Arturo Silva |
Stephen J. Morse, Morris B. Hoffman |
Marcel Brass, Patrick Haggard # To Do or Not to Do: The Neural Signature of Self-Control The Journal of Neuroscience, August 22, 2007•27(34) Our results suggest that the human brain network for intentional action includes a control structure for self-initiated inhibition or withholding of intended actions. The mental control of action has an enduring scientific interest, linked to the philosophical concept of “free will.” Our results identify a candidate brain area that reflects the crucial decision to do or not to do. |
Jeffrey Rosen # The Brain on the Stand The New York Times, March 11, 2007 Neuroscience, it seems, points two ways: it can absolve individuals of responsibility for acts they’ve committed, but it can also place individuals in jeopardy for acts they haven’t committed — but might someday. “This opens up a Pandora’s box in civilized society that I’m willing to fight against,” says Helen S. Mayberg, a professor of psychiatry, behavioral sciences and neurology at Emory University School of Medicine, who has testified against the admission of neuroscience evidence in criminal trials. “If you believe at the time of trial that the picture informs us about what they were like at the time of the crime, then the picture moves forward. You need to be prepared for: ‘This spot is a sign of future dangerousness,’ when someone is up for parole. They have a scan, the spot is there, so they don’t get out. It’s carved in your brain.” |
Stacey A. Tovino |
Edward Gondolf # Cautions About Applying Neuroscience to Batterer Intervetion Court Review , Winter 2007 Researchers have recently pointed out the high prevalence of 'intermittent explosive disorder' (IED) underlying many of the violent outbursts in our society. They estimate that at least a third of domestic violence perpetrators, or those we frequently refer to as 'batterers,' are likely to suffer from this disorder. This claim, along with a number of related findings, appears to have implications for domestic violence courts and judges' decisions to mandate offenders to batterer programs. The issue is that if this disorder is related to brain activity that warrants medical treatment, then in many cases, domestic violence offenders may be unresponsive to more conventional counseling and education efforts that typify batterer intervention. The assertions about IED come from a rapidly advancing line of research in neuroscience--that is, brain activity and its association with behavior. The emerging concern is that the implications stemming from this research are subject to misuse and overuse and therefore warrant some clarification and caution |
Quirino Cordeiro, Jacqueline Siqueira-Roberto, Homero Vallada |
Luciano Floridi #A look into the future impact of ICT on our lives www.thephilosophyofinformation.net/ 2007 |
Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, Joshua W. Buckholtz, Bhaskar Kolachana, Ahmad R. Hariri, Lukas Pezawas, Giuseppe Blasi, Ashley Wabnitz, Robyn Honea, Beth Verchinski, Joseph H. Callicott, Michael Egan, Venkata Mattay, Daniel R. Weinberger |
J Kim-Cohen, A Caspi, A Taylor, B Williams, R Newcombe, IW Craig, TE Moffitt |
Adam J. Kolber |
Marta Bertolino |
Michael Rutter |
Kenneth S. Kendler, Ralph J. Greenspan |
Brent Garland, Paul W Glimcher |
Yadin Dudai |
Deborah W. Denno |
Kent A. Kiehl |
Bärbel Hüsing, Lutz Jäncke, Brigitte Tag |
Brent Garland, Mark S. Frankel |
Nigel Eastman, Colin Campbell Neurosciences, April 2006 |
Stephen J. Morse #Brain Overclaim Syndrome and Criminal Responsibility: A Diagnostic Note Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, vol. 3, 2006 Brains do not commit crimes; people commit crimes. This conclusion should be self-evident, but, infected and inflamed by stunning advances in our understanding of the brain, advocates all too often make moral and legal claims that the new neuroscience does not entail and cannot sustain. Particular brain findings are thought to lead inevitably to moral or legal conclusions. Brains are blamed for offenses; agency and responsibility disappear from the legal landscape... |
James H. Fallon #Neuroanatomical Background to Understanding the Brain of the Young Psychopath Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, vol. 3:341, 2006 This paper is intended to provide a basic neuroanatomical framework upon which to interpret the range of normal and psychopathic phenotypes that may be encountered during a criminal trial where culpability, especially of an adolescent or young adult defendant, may be at issue. In considering this question from a scientific perspective, there are nevertheless several caveats that must be made about the material that will follow... |
Thomas Fuchs |
Carlo Alberto Redi, Valentina Sellaroli, Amedeo Santosuosso # Giudici & Geni Le Scienze, febbraio 2006 La reciproca mancanza di conoscenza è il terreno fertile di ogni pregiudizio, sia pro sia contro la scienza. Lo scientismo è il tipico pregiudizio a favore della scienza, mentre il tipico pregiudizio contro la scienza è il rifiuto ideologico, e quindi acritico, di essa. Entrambi questi pregiudizi sono parimenti dannosi e dovrebbero essere superati o, quanto meno, arginati. |
Tania Singer #The neuronal basis and ontogeny of empathy and mind reading: Review of literature and implications for future research http://people.hss.caltech.edu/ Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 30 (2006) 855–863 ... Finally, it is suggested that the abilities to understand other people’s thoughts and to share their affects display different ontogenetic trajectories reflecting the different developmental paths of their underlying neural structures. In particular, empathy develops much earlier than mentalizing abilities, because the former relys on limbic structures which develop early in ontogeny, whereas the latter rely on lateral temporal lobe and pre-frontal structures which are among the last to fully mature. |
Tania Singer, Ben Seymour, John P. O'Doherty, Klaas E. Stephan, Raymond J. Dolan, Chris D. Frith #Empathic neural responses are modulated by the perceived fairness of others www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ Nature, January 2006 The neural processes underlying empathy are a subject of intense interest within the social neurosciences... We show here that empathic responses are modulated by learned preferences, a result consistent with economic models of social preferences. We engaged male and female volunteers in an economic game, in which two confederates played fairly or unfairly, and then measured brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging while these same volunteers observed the confederates receiving pain. Both sexes exhibited empathy-related activation in pain-related brain areas (fronto-insular and anterior cingulate cortices) towards fair players. However, these empathy-related responses were significantly reduced in males when observing an unfair person receiving pain. This effect was accompanied by increased activation in reward-related areas, correlated with an expressed desire for revenge. We conclude that in men (at least) empathic responses are shaped by valuation of other people's social behaviour, such that they empathize with fair opponents while favouring the physical punishment of unfair opponents, a finding that echoes recent evidence for altruistic punishment. |
Sheila Jasanoff |
Elizabeth F. Loftus |
Avshalom Caspi, Joseph McClay, Terrie E. Moffitt, Jonathan Mill, Judy Martin, Ian W. Craig, Alan Taylor, Riechie Poulton #Role of Genotype in the Cycle of Violence in Maltreated Children. Fears of the Future in Children and Young People Journal for Sociology of Education and Socialization 2/2005 |
Avshalom Caspi, Terrie E. Moffitt, Mary Cannon, Joseph McClay, Robin Murray, HonaLee Harrington, Alan Taylor, Louise Arseneault, Ben Williams, Antony Braithwaite, Richie Poulton, Ian W. Craig |
Lisa Schriner Lewis |
Joshua Greene, Jonathan Cohen # For the law, neuroscience changes nothing and everything Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B (2004) 359 Some suggest that our emerging understanding of the physical causes of human (mis)behaviour will have a transformative effect on the law. Others argue that new neuroscience will provide only new details and that existing legal doctrine can accommodate whatever new information neuroscience will provide. We argue that neuroscience will probably have a transformative effect on the law, despite the fact that existing legal doctrine can, in principle, accommodate whatever neuroscience will tell us. New neuroscience will change the law, not by undermining its current assumptions, but by transforming people’s moral intuitions about free will and responsibility. This change in moral outlook will result not from the discovery of crucial new facts or clever new arguments, but from a new appreciation of old arguments. |
Jean Decety, Philip L. Jackson, Jessica A. Sommerville, Thierry Chaminade, Andrew N. Meltzoff |
Michael F. Lorber |
Robert M. Sapolsky |
Dominique J.-F. de Quervain, Urs Fischbacher, Valerie Treyer, Melanie Schellhammer, Ulrich Schnyder, Alfred Buck, Ernst Fehr |
Raymond E. Collins # Onset and Desistance in Criminal Careers: Neurobiology and the Age-Crime Relationship Journal of Offender Rehabilitation, Vol. 39 (3), 2004 Until recently, attempts to understand and explain criminal offending have been grounded in theories from sociological, legal, and psychological perspectives. In the preceding twenty years, or so, however, some research in the field has endeavored to look at offending from a psychobiological viewpoint. This research concerns the potential consequences of the effects of neurobiological influences on brain behavior and, consequently, human behavior. |
Hakwan C. Lau, Robert D. Rogers, Patrick Haggard, Richard E. Passingham # Attention to Intention Science, 20 February 2004 Vol 303 Intention is central to the concept of voluntary action. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we compared conditions in which participants made self-paced actions and attended either to their intention to move or to the actual movement. When they attended to their intention rather than their movement, there was an enhancement of activity in the pre-supplementary motor area (pre-SMA). We also found activations in the right dorsal prefrontal cortexand left intraparietal cortex. Prefrontal activity, but not parietal activity, was more strongly coupled with activity in the pre- MA. We conclude that activity in the pre-SMA reflects the representation of intention. |
Brent Garland |
Erin Ann O'Hara # How neuroscience might advance the law Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B (2004) 359 This essay discusses the strengths and limitations of the new, growing field of law and biology and suggests that advancements in neuroscience can help to bolster that field. It also briefly discusses some ways that neuroscience can help to improve the workings of law more generally. |
Joshua Greene # From neural ‘is’ to moral ‘ought’: what are the moral implications of neuroscientific moral psychology? www.wjh.harvard.edu/ Nature Neuroscience October 2003 Philosophers routinely distinguish between ethics and ‘meta-ethics’. Ethics concerns particular moral issues (such as our obligations to the poor) and theories that attempt to resolve such issues (such as utilitarianism or Aristotelian virtue ethics).Meta-ethics, by contrast, is concerned with more foundational issues, with the status of ethics as a whole.What do we mean when we say something like “Capital punishment is wrong”? Are we stating a putative fact, or merely expressing an opinion? |
James R. Blair |
Jim Hom |
Alfred J. Lewy Chronobiological disorders and syndromes include seasonal affective disorder (SAD), total blindness, advanced and delayed sleep phase syndrome, jet lag, and shift work maladaptation. These disorders are treated by adjusting circadian phase, using appropriately timed bright light exposure and melatonin administration (at doses of 0.5 mg or less). In some cases, it may be necessary to measure internal circadían phase, using the time when endogenous melatonin levels rise. |
C. Cajochen, K. Kräuchi, A. Wirz-Justice # Role of Melatonin in the Regulation of Human Circadian Rhythms and Sleep Journal of Neuroendocrinology, Vol. 15, 2003 The circadian rhythm of pineal melatonin is the best marker of internal time under low ambient light levels. The endogenous melatonin rhythm exhibits a close association with the endogenous circadian component of the sleep propensity rhythm. This has led to the idea that melatonin is an internal sleep ‘facilitator’ in humans, and therefore useful in the treatment of insomnia and the readjustment of circadian rhythms... |
Jonathan D. Moreno |
Adrian Raine |
Nuffield Council on Bioethics # Genetics and human behaviour: the ethical context www.nuffieldbioethics.org/ October 2002 Human behaviour is influenced both by the genes that we inherit and the environment in which we live. With the significant advances in our knowledge of genetics and publication of the draft sequence of the human genome, the focus of research has moved once again towards understanding the biological contribution to behaviour. Some researchers are attempting to locate specific genes, or groups of genes, associated with behavioural traits and to understand the complex relationship between genes and the environment. This is called research in behavioural genetics. In contrast to research into the genetic basis of diseases and disorders, researchers in behavioural genetics investigate aspects of our personalities such as intelligence, sexual orientation, susceptibility to aggression and other antisocial conduct, and tendencies towards extraversion and novelty-seeking. |
Martha J. Farah |
The Economist |
Jaak Panksepp, Brian Knutson, Jeff Burgdorf |
R J R Blair |
Stefano Rodotà # Una scommessa impegnativa sul terreno dei nuovi diritti. Discorso del presidente del Garante per la protezione dei dati personali tenuto l'8 maggio 2001 alla presentazione della Relazione per il 2001 www.interlex.it/ 15 maggio 2002 I cittadini mostrano di preoccuparsi assai del loro 'corpo elettronico', di una esistenza sempre più affidata alla dimensione astratta del trattamento elettronico delle loro informazioni. Le persone sono ormai conosciute da soggetti pubblici e privati quasi esclusivamente attraverso i dati che le riguardano, e che fanno di esse una entità disincarnata. Con enfasi riduzionista, per molti versi pericolosa, si dice che 'noi siamo le nostre informazioni'. La nostra identità viene così affidata al modo in cui queste informazioni vengono trattate, collegate, fatte circolare |
Kent A. Kiehl, Andra M. Smith, Robert D. Hare, Adrianna Mendrek, Bruce B. Forster, Johann Brink, Peter F. Liddle |
M C Brower, B H Price J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry 2001;71:720–726 |
Eric R. Kandel, Larry R. Squire # Neuroscience: Breaking Down Scientific Barriers to the Study of Brain and Mind www.sciencemag.org/ 10 November 2000 |
Karim Nader, Glenn E. Schafe, Joseph E. Le Doux # Fear memories require protein synthesis in the amygdala for reconsolidation after retrieval http://www.healthemotions.org/ Nature 17 august 2000 `New' memories are initially labile and sensitive to disruption before being consolidated into stable long-term memories. Much evidence indicates that this consolidation involves the synthesis of new proteins in neurons6±9. The lateral and basal nuclei of the amygdala (LBA) are believed to be a site of memory storage in fear learning. |
Justine Kruger, David Dunning |
Jan Volavka |
Eric R. Kandel |
Antoine Bechara, Daniel Tranel, Hanna Damasio, Antonio R. Damasio |
H Damasio, T Grabowski, R Frank, AM Galaburda, AR Damasio |
Antoine Bechara, Antonio R. Damasio, Hanna Damasio, Steven W. Anderson |
US Supreme Court 1. La tecnica scientifica utilizzata è testabile ed è stata testata? 2. La tecnica è stata sottoposta a revisioni fatte da revisori specializzati nel campo ed è stata pubblicata? 3. Qual è il grado di errore? 4. Ci sono degli standard/limiti che ne regolano l’applicazione? 5. La comunità scientifica ha accettato la tecnica? Suzanne Orofino |
H. G. Brunner, M. R. Nelen, P. van Zandvoort, N. G. G. M. Abeling, A. H. van Gennip, E. C. Wolters, M. A. Kuiper, H. H. Ropers, B. A. van Oost We have identified a large Dutch kindred with a new form of X-linked nondysmorphic mild mental retardation. All affected males in this family show very characteristic abnormal behavior, in particular aggressive and sometimes violent behavior. Other types of impulsive behavior include arson, attempted rape, and exhibitionism... The results of genetic linkage analyses and of biochemical studies suggest that a mutation affecting the structural gene for monoamine oxidase type A (MAOA) may be responsible for this syndrome. |
Brenda Egolf, Judith Lasker, Stewart Wolf, Louise Potvin # The Roseto Effect: A 50-Year Comparison of Mortality Rates American Journal of Public Health, August 1992, 82, n. 8 After a very thorough search of all sources of data for mortality in two small Pennsylvania communities over the course of 50 years, our examiation of death certificates as confirmed the earlier inference, based on a shorter span of years, that the death rate from myocardial infarction was lower in Roseto than in immediately adjacent Bangor in three decades prior to 1965. The difference between the two communities is statistically significant despite the small number of myocardial infarctions. The sharp rise that followed involved mainly young Rosetan men and elderly women at a time when the predicted decrease in social cohesion became clearly manifest... |
R. W. Sperry Challenges the assumption that the subjective phenomena of conscious experiences do not exert any causal influence on the sequence of events in the physical brain process. A theory of mind is suggested in which consciousness, interpreted to be a direct emergent property of cerebral activity, is conceived to be an integral component of the brain process that functions as an essential constituent of the action and exerts a directive holistic form of control over the flow pattern of cerebral excitation. |
Martin E. Seligman, Steven F. Maier # Failure to Escape Traumatic Shock Journal of Experimental Psychology 74 (1): 1967 Overmier and Seligman (1967) have shown that the prior exposure of dogs to inescapable shock in a Pavlovian harness reliably results in interference with subsequent escape/avoidance learning in a shuttle box. Typically, these dogs do not even escape from shock in the shuttle box. They initially show normal reactivity to shock, but after a few trials, they passively 'accept' shock and fail to make escape movements. Moreover, if an escape or avoidance response does occur, it does not reliably predict future escapes or avoidances, as it does in normal dogs. |
dna... genomica |
Marco Nigro |
Giuliana Ubbiali # Il capo della banca dati del Dna: «Nessun nome, privacy da garantire». Saranno conservati soltanto codici e il metodo di analisi sarà più accurato rispetto agli Usa e al resto d’Europa. Da mappare il 90% dei detenuti Corriere della Sera, 22 agosto 2016 |
Decreto del Presidente della Repubblica 7 aprile 2016, n. 87 # Regolamento recante disposizioni di attuazione della legge 30 giugno 2009, n. 85, concernente l'istituzione della banca dati nazionale del DNA e del laboratorio centrale per la banca dati nazionale del DNA, ai sensi dell'articolo 16 della legge n. 85 del 2009. (16G00091) (GU Serie Generale n.122 del 26-5-2016) note: Entrata in vigore del provvedimento: 10/06/2016 |
Ministero della Giustizia # Ministero della Giustizia, Schema di regolamento recante “Disposizioni di attuazione della legge 30 giugno 2009, n. 85, concernente l’istituzione della banca datti nazionale del DNA e del laboratorio centrale per la banca dati nazionale del DNA, ai sensi dell’articolo 16 della legge n. 85 del 2009”. |
Spencer S. Hsu The FBI has notified crime labs across the country that it has discovered errors in data used by forensic scientists in thousands of cases to calculate the chances that DNA found at a crime scene matches a particular person, several people familiar with the issue said... The disclosure comes as some private researchers and lawyers in recent years questioned whether errors in the FBI’s national database of 13 million DNA profiles may have led judges and juries to give undue weight to DNA matches, long considered the “gold standard” in forensic science. |
Schizophrenia Working Group of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium # Biological insights from 108 schizophrenia-associated genetic loci www.nature.com/ 24 july 2014 Schizophrenia is a highly heritable disorder. Genetic risk is conferred by a large number of alleles, including common alleles of small effect that might be detected by genome-wide association studies. Here we report a multi-stage schizophrenia genome-wide association study of up to 36,989 cases and 113,075 controls. We identify 128 independent associations spanning 108 conservatively defined loci that meet genome-wide significance, 83 of which have not been previously reported. |
# Banca dati dna, Orlando: avvio entro il 2015 Roma, 4 feb. (askanews) |
Walter D'Amario # Banca dati del Dna, c'è la sede e lo spot tv. Ma l'istituto funzionerà dal 2015 www.repubblica.it/ 04 febbraio 2014 |
E Vassos, DA Collier and S Fazel |
Giuseppe Gennari # US Supreme Court, Jeremy Bentham e il panopticon genetico www.penalecontemporaneo/ Diritto Penale Contemporaneo, n. 4, 2013 |
Robert Kumsta, Elisabeth Hummel, Frances S. Chen, Markus Heinrichs # Epigenetic regulation of the oxytocin receptor gene: implications for behavioral neuroscience www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ Frontiers in Neurosciences, May 2013 |
David H. Kaye # What the Supreme Court Hasn’t Told You About DNA Databases http://tenthcircuitconference.org/ 2 August 2013 |
David H. Kaye |
Republic of South Africa |
Alfredo Gaito, Bello Valerio, DeNunzio Nicol, Dipasquale Salvina, Gnisci Debora, Liburdi Martina, Longo Ilaria (eds) |
Roberta Catalano # Indagini genetiche, imputabilità e libero arbitrio: questioni giurisprudenziali e nuovi bisogni di tutela della persona Revista do Instituto do Direito Brasileiro - RIDB, Ano 2 (2013), nº 5 |
Supreme Court of the United States |
Fabio Tonacci |
Anna Maria Capitta Se in tema di prelievo di campioni biologici si riscontra, an-che nell’ambito dei contributi dottrinali di casa nostra, una consistente quantità di interventi, meno arato appare il campo che attiene al fenomeno cronologicamente successivo alla raccolta e alla tipizzazione dei profili del DNA, vale a dire quello della conservazione delle informazioni genetiche nella banca dati. |
Annaleda Galluzzo #Diritto alla riservatezza e indagini penali. Nuove dimensioni dell'indagine genetica e informatica Università degli Studi di Padova, 2013 |
Brendan Keating, Aruna T. Bansal, Susan Walsh, Jonathan Millman, Jonathan Newman, Kenneth Kidd, Bruce Budowle, Arthur Eisenberg, Joseph Donfack, Paolo Gasparini, Zoran Budimlija, Anjali K. Henders, Hareesh Chandrupatla, David L. Duffy, Scott D. Gordon, Pirro Hysi, Fan Liu, Sarah E. Medland, Laurence Rubin, Nicholas G. Martin, Timothy D. Spector, Manfred Kayser |
Rebeca Souto Santos # Contributos da Epigenética no âmbito da Medicina Legal Universidade do Porto, 2012 |
Paola Felicioni |
Andrew Thibedeau #National Forensic DNA Databases. Council for Responsible Genetics http://www.councilforresponsiblegenetics.org/ National DNA Databases 2011 |
Mijke Visser, Dmitry Zubakov, Kaye N. Ballantyne, Manfred Kayser # mRNA-based skin identification for forensic applications Int J Legal Med (2011) 125:253–263 |
Giovanni Canzio |
Katina Michael |
Department of Corrections | Raleigh, North Carolina |
Hanna Edlund |
Sameer P. Sarkar, Gwen Adshead # Whose DNA Is It Anyway? European Court, Junk DNA, and the Problem With Prediction J Am Acad Psychiatry Law 38:247–50, 2010 |
![Testes Testes](https://www.gestion.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/psicotecnico.png)
Philip Hunter |
Ilaria Anna Colussi |
Gabriella Marando #L'acquisizione della prova scientifica nel processo penale Università degli Studi di Trieste, 2009-2010 |
Salvatore Meloni |
Andrea Molteni |
Parlamento Italiano #Legge 30 giugno 2009, n. 85|Gazzetta Ufficialen. 160 del 13 luglio 2009 - Supplemento ordinario n. 108 'Adesione della Repubblica italiana al Trattato concluso il 27 maggio 2005 tra il Regno del Belgio, la Repubblica federale di Germania, il Regno di Spagna, la Repubblica francese, il Granducato di Lussemburgo, il Regno dei Paesi Bassi e la Repubblica d'Austria, relativo all'approfondimento della cooperazione transfrontaliera, in particolare allo scopo di contrastare il terrorismo, la criminalità transfrontaliera e la migrazione illegale (Trattato di Prum). Istituzione della banca dati nazionale del DNA e del laboratorio centrale per la banca dati nazionale del DNA. Delega al Governo per l'istituzione dei ruoli tecnici del Corpo di polizia penitenziaria. Modifiche al codice di procedura penale in materia di accertamenti tecnici idonei ad incidere sulla libertà personale' |
Antonella Marandola |
Mark A. Rothstein, Yu Cai, and Gary E. Marchant #The Ghost in Our Genes: Legal and Ethical Implications of Epigenetics Health Matrix Clevel. 2009 ; 19(1): 1–62. |
The Police Foundation |
American Civil Liberties Union ACLU - Vermont |
Comitato Nazionale per la Biosicurezza, le Biotecnologie e le Scienze della Vita Uno dei problemi più rilevanti, per chi lavora nel settore della ricerca scientifica con materiale biologico, consiste nello stabilire entro quali limiti e con quali modalità sia lecito conservare campioni oltre il tempo necessario per raggiungere lo scopo per cui il campione è stato raccolto, e se sia legittimo utilizzare i campioni anche per scopi diversi da quelli inizialmente individuati. |
William TM Dunsmuir, Cuong Tran, Don Weatherburn |
Ciro Sbailò #Trattato di Prüm. Una rivoluzione silenziosa (finora) Forum di Quaderni Costituzionali, 7 agosto 2009 |
Lucia Scaffardi # Le banche dati genetiche per fini giudiziari e i diritti della persona www.forumcostituzionale.it/ 2008 1. Introduzione: i database genetici tra aumento della criminalità e richieste di sicurezza 2. Inghilterra e Scozia, esempi di differenti scelte normative 3. Segue. La legislazione in tema di DNA databases in altri Paesi europei. L’Italia e la mancanza di norme in materia 4. La normativa inter e sovra-nazionale di riferimento. Il Trattato di Prüm: raccolta, accesso e scambio di dati 5. La Corte dei Diritti dell’Uomo e la decisione S. and Marper v. United Kingdom 6. Osservazioni (per nulla) conclusive. |
Paola Balbo |
William T.M. Dunsmuir, Cuong Tran, Don Weatherburn #Assessing the Impact of Mandatory DNA Testing of Prison Inmates in NSW on Clearance, Charge and Conviction Rates for Selected Crime Categories www.bocsar.nsw.gov.au/ NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research 2008 |
Antonino Carlo |
Jeffrey M. Prottas, Alice A. Noble #Use of Forensic DNA Evidence in Prosecutors’ Offices Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics - Summer 2007 |
Paul M. Monteleoni #Dna Databases, Universality, and the Fourth Amendment New York University Law Review, vol. 82, April 2007 |
Consiglio dell'Unione Europea Trattato tra il Regno del Belgio, la Repubblica Federale di Germania, Il Regno di Spagna, la Repubblica Francese, il Granducato di Lussemburgo, il Regno dei Paesi Bassi e la Repubblica d’Austria riguardante l’approfondimento della cooperazione transfrontaliera, in particolare al fine di lottare contro il terrorismo, la criminalità transfrontaliera e la migrazione illegale |
Elizabeth E. Joh # Reclaiming 'Abandoned' DNA: The Fourth Amendment and Genetic Privacy Northwestern University Law Review Vol. 100, No. 2 2006 |
Tania Simoncelli While subjecting persons who have been convicted of a crime to inclusion in a DNA database is inherently problematic, subjecting those who have never been convicted of a crime subverts our notion of a free and autonomous society and is characteristic of an authoritarian regime... |
D.H. Kaye #Science Fiction and Shed Dna www.law.northwestern.edu/ Northwestern University Law Review Colloquy , vol 101 2006 |
Seth Axelrad |
Giovanni Canzio # Prova scientifica, ricerca della “verità” e decisione giudiziaria nel processo penale Relazione dell’11 dicembre 2004 (Sedicesima giornata di studio organizzata dalla Rivista Trimestrale di Diritto e Procedura Civile) |
American Prosecutors Research Institute APRI | Lisa R. Kreeger, Danielle M.Weiss |
Ben Quarmby # The Case for National DNA Identification Cards http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/ Duke Law & Technology Review 2003 |
National Institute of Justice NIJ |
D.H. Kaye #The Constitutionality of DNA Sampling on Arrest An Interim Report to the Legal Issues Working Group of the National Commission on the Future of DNA Evidence October 1, 1999 (revised January 22, 2000) |
Dennis J. Reeder |
Rivista di criminologia criminale # Per una criminologia del corpo http://digilander.libero.it/ Rivista di criminologia criminale, Anno X – n. 2 giugno 2017 La mente ordina, il corpo esegue, le mani ubbidiscono? Nella mia esperienza sono le mani a consentire di entrare in contatto con il pensiero, sono volti senza occhi e senza voce ma che vedono e parlano. La mano non è un oggetto, la mano pensa e il corpo l’accompagna nella sua azione. Anche in stato di quiete la mano non è un utensile senz’anima: in essa permane la volontà di azione... |
Angela Balzano # Normare la vita. Biocontrollo e nuove tecnologie Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna, 2015 La domanda da porre diviene: chi può davvero partecipare ai processi di creazione del biodiritto? Le lobby presenti nel paese considerato, siano esse neoliberisteconservatrici, piuttosto che neoliberiste-progressiste? Oppure è possibile un’inversione di tendenza, un modello più inclusivo, che contempli la consultazione delle soggettività reali? Le associazioni femminili, le categorie di professioniste, le leghe delle ginecologhe, le unioni di pazienti, le biblioteche e le case delle donne, i collettivi femministi, quelli di artiste e intellettuali, i movimenti contro il sessismo, più in generale tutte e tutti coloro che operano per il rispetto delle differenze di genere, possono sperare di prendere parte a tale progetto di regolamentazione giuridica? |
Rosamaria Alibrandi |
Laura Bazzicalupo |
Igor Marchetti, Ernst H. W. Koster |
Edoardo Fugali # Scritto sulla pelle. Le sensazioni localizzate e l’origine del sé corporeo nella fenomenologia husserliana Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia, vol. 4, n. 1, 2013 |
Edoardo Fugali |
Domenica Bruni, Edoardo Fugali |