Neural Explanation of Crime Flashcards
What does the neural explanation suggest?
- There may be neural differences in the brains of offenders
Antisocial personality disorder and the prefrontal cortex
- Research by Raine has found there is reduced functioning in the pre-frontal cortex of people who have an anti-social personality disorder
- 11% reduction in volume of grey matter in the prefrontal cortex of people with APD
What did Raine say the four main predictors for becoming an offender were?
- low resting heart rate
- birth complications
- mother smoking or drinking during pregnancy
- lack of activity in frontal lobe
What has Raine discovered about people with a reduced amygdala volume?
- 4x more likely to commit a violent act in the next 3 years
What did Keysers find about mirror neurons?
- offenders with APD can experience empathy but do so more sporadically
- only when they were asked to empathise was their empathy activated
- this is controlled by mirror neurons in the brain
- in a ‘normal’ brain the empathy switch is always turned on
Brain evidence as a strength
P: one strength is research support
E: Kandel and Freed reviewed evidence of frontal lobe damage and APD
E: people with this damage showed impulsive behaviour and inability to learn from mistakes
L: brain damage may be a causal factor in offending behaviour
Intervening variables as a limitation
P: intervening variables
E: other factors may contribute to APD and ultimately offending. Farrington studied men who scored high on a psychopathy test
E: the men who experienced risk factors during childhood such as neglect showed reduced activity in the frontal lobe
L: the relationship between neural differences and APD may be complex
Determinism as a debate
P: biologically determinist
E: suggests offenders are not responsible for their behaviour
E: they can have their sentences reduced
C: one limitation is that this challenges our understanding of the legal system, which is based on free will
