Raine et al

Question 1

Aim of Raine Study

Answer 1

• This study aimed to investigate whether the brain areas of the prefrontal cortex, angular gyrus, amygdala, hippocampus, thalamus, and corpus callosum were related to violent behaviour

Question 2

Participants

Answer 2

• Raine’s sample were 41 murders who had pleaded the insanity defence and 41 age, sex and ethnicity-matched controls
• The participants also hadn’t taken drugs two weeks before the experiment and this was confirmed by doing a urine test, this was done to make sure no drugs were affecting the brain activity of the participants during the experiment

Question 3

Procedure

Answer 3

• All the participants were injected with a radioactive tracer which will light up the brain areas were being used in a computer scan
• The participants had to do a series of tasks on the computer such as identifying targets on the screen and the purpose of this was to activate the brain areas the researchers were interested in
• Immediately after the tasks a PET scan was taken at took 10 10mm images of the brain

Question 4

Findings

Answer 4

• The findings of this experiment showed the murderers had less brain activity in their lateral prefrontal, medial prefrontal, corpus callosum and parietal cortex
• However they had a higher level of activation in the right thalamus, right amygdala and right hippocampus

Question 5

Conclusion

Answer 5

• From the study, it was seen that the murder group had different brain activity compared to the control group suggesting that there is no single brain area that is linked to violent behaviour and that various brain areas interact together to lead to violent behaviour

Question 6

Strength of Raine et al

Answer 6

• A strength of this study is that the study had high levels of control in the procedure
• The study had the same standardised procedures which were the 32-minute CPT task, the participants were all drug tested and the PET brain scan was consistent across the participants
• This shows that the study had high levels of internal validity as it minimized other variables that could have affected brain activity during the task and affected the results of the study

Question 7

Weakness of Raine et al

Answer 7

• A weakness of this study is that the study used a small subset of violent criminals
• The sample used in the study was 41 murderers who pleaded innocent using the insanity defence
• Therefore, based on this limited sample the study does not provide a generalisable explanation of criminal and violent behaviour in general
• The finding from the study such as higher brain activity in the right thalamus may be only applicated to highly violent criminals such as murders and not other aggressive behaviours such as shouting or emotional aggression to other people.