Raine Flashcards
What year was it
1997
What is the background
- Hormones affect your behaviour as low levels of cortisol as a child leads to aggressive behaviour whereas high levels of hypothalamus leads to antisocial behaviour. this is seen by Glenn and Raine 2014.
- Genetics play apart in criminal behaviour whcih can be seen in a set of twins raised apart in different lives with equal chances of being criminals later in life due to their parental genetics.
what was the aim
To see whether seriously violent criminals have localised brain dysfunction in parts of the brain such as the prefontal-cortex, angular gyrus, amygdala, hippocampus, thalamus and the corpus callosum
What is the method
- A quasi-experiment as the ID was whether they were a murderer or not
- The DV was the activity in specified brain areas.
- The sample was 41 murderers, 39 men 2 women, with a mean age of 34. They had all pleaded not guilty for reasons of insanity.
What was the procedure
The participants were given continious performance tasksto work on for 32 minutes based around target recognition. Raine et al. monitered the specif areas’ brain acitivty during these rasks. Participants were able to practice the CPT for 10 minutes before the tracer injection. They also started the tast 30 seconds before the glucose tracer was injected so that the novelty of the task would not be labelled by the FDG.
What were the results
Murderers had reduced activity in the prefontal cortext, left angular gyrus and corpus callosum. These areas had linked to violent actions. This was the same for the left hemisphere’s amygdala, thalamus and hippocampus. They showed higher activity in the cerebellum and in the amygdala, thalamus and hippocampus in the right hemisphere. There was no differences between the NGRI’s and the control group in other areas not previously linked to violent behaviour such as the caudate, putamen, globus palidus and midbrain.
