Neuroethics Flashcards
A US court case – Brian Dugan
- Facing death penalty for the kidnapping, raping and murder of a 10-year old girl
- Diagnosed as psychopath (38.5/40 in the Hare psychopathy checklist)
- Psychologist Kent Kiehl scans his brain and finds lower activity in the paralimbic system (a brain network for emotion processing) as in many other previously scanned psychopaths
- Dugan’s lawyers invoke the fMRI evidence to argue that Dugan was a “morally disabled man whose sickness was such that he could not feel right from wrong”.
School teacher tumour example
- Suddenly develops an appetite for child pornography and makes overt sexual advances on his step daughter
- Due to neurological symptoms, he is examined and a large tumor in his right orbitofrontal cortex is found
- After doctors remove the tumor, his pedophilic urges disappear
- A year later, his pedophilic tendencies re-appear, and a brain scan demonstrates that his tumor has grown back
What is neuroethics?
- Neuroethics is concerned with ethical, legal and social implications of neuroscience research findings, and with the nature of the research itself
- Farah (2012) Annual Review of Psychology
Why is neuroethics relevant?
- Studying the brain gets us one step closer to the causes of behaviour
- Single genes account for 2-4% of the variance in personality traits, brain imaging studies account for ~ 36% of variance (Farah et al., 2009
Why is neuroimaging important?
- “Journalists, courts, and sometimes even scientists seem to believe that a brain scan can be more telling than a profile of an individual’s behaviour.” (Gary Marcus, NYU).
- Satel & Lilienfeld, 2013: A critical view on how brain imaging data is used and misused in areas such as law and marketing. Critical but entertaining!
What can we find out about personality and the individual mind from brain imaging? -Phelps et al (2000)
- Measures implicit associations and biases that people may have, e.g. associating black people with bad, white people with good.
- White Americans tend to respond faster to black + bad and white + good pairings then for black + good and white + bad pairing -> implicit race bias
- Significant correlation between amygdala activation during viewing black vs. white faces, and the degree of implicit race bias (IAT score).
- However: this result tells about the group, NOT about the individual
-Can we use these findings from brain imaging to make predictions about people’s personalities from their brain scan?
- Farah et al. (2009) tested this statistically.
- Predictive ability of brain measures was minimal and variable across experiments
- From a correlation on the group level it is unjustified to make reverse inferences to personality and mindset of an individual
What did Lockwood, Sebastian et al. (2013) investigate with young boys and antisocial behaviour?
- Adolescent boys (10-16 yr old) with conduct problems: aggression, theft, cruelty to others.
- Antisocial behaviour, lack of empathy, diminished guilt and risk at developing adult psychopathy
- Investigation: brain responses to seeing other’s in pain. Questionnaire on callous traits
What did Lockwood, Sebastian et al. (2013) find with young boys and antisocial behaviour?
- Boys with conduct problems: lower response in the anterior insula (AI) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) to seeing others in pain. In healthy controls, this is the network for responding to other’s pain. -The decrease of activity was correlated with callous trait scores
- “The negative association between callous traits and AI/ACC response could reflect an early neurobiological marker indexing risk for empathic deficits seen in adult psychopathy.”
What would be the consequences of having a diagonostic tool for the prediction of adult psychopathy? – For the individual
- Chance of amelioration of condition and better integration in society
- Condemning individuals to a pathology?
- What about false positive results?
- What about personal responsibility?
What would be the consequences of having a diagonostic tool for the prediction of adult psychopathy? – For society
- Protecting others from becoming victims
- Early intervention may reduce criminality (and costs)
- What are society’s responsibilities for false positives?
What can we find out about individual states of mind from brain imaging?
- Nishimoto et al. (2011), Current Biology
- Mapped reponses of the early visual cortex during movie watching.
- Showed new movies to the participants
- Used the neural responses only to reconstruct images from the movies
- However: Computational reconstruction model is trained a-priori on a variety of movies
- Reconstructions only work well if the model is trained on clips that resemble the viewed clip
What did Owen et al. (2006), find with paitents in vegative states?
- A patient in a vegetative state could follow instructions – to imagine playing tennis vs. walking round her house.
- These tasks activated distinct brain systems in the control group… And in the patient.
- Owen has since gone on to use this task to ask ‘Yes/No’ questions of patients, with some promising results
What are the implications of Owen’s technique for communicating with patients in the vegetative state? – for the individual
- Possibility to communicate
- Possibility to (partly) take control back over one’s life
- Chances of getting rehabilitative care
What are the implications of Owen’s technique for communicating with patients in the vegetative state? – for society/others
- Possibility to communicate with patients that are otherwise unresponsive
- Family members: there is still somebody “there”
