1. Adrian Raine, Monte Buchsbaum, and Lori LaCasse 1997
Brain Abnormalities in Murderers Indicated by Positron Emission Tomography.
Adrian Raine, Monte Buchsbaum, and Lori LaCasse
1997

2. Adrian Raine

3. Typical Criminals?

5. Physiological Psychology
The central question:
Can we link physiological
process or structure
directly to human behaviour?

6. Physiological Psychology
Research suggests that brain dysfunction may PREDISPOSE a person to being violent
The FRONTAL brain region may be associated with violent behaviour
Some violent offenders plead NGRI (not guilty by reason of insanity) to murder charges

7. Physiological Psychology
Discussion points
What are the advantages to the physiological explanation of behaviour?
What are the disadvantages?
Why is this approach described as determinist?
How else can violent behaviour be explained?

8. Physiological Psychology - Raine
The Raine hypothesis
That the seriously violent individuals have localised brain damage in
the prefrontal cortex; the amygdala;
the thalamus; the hippocampus;

9. Physiological Psychology - Raine

10. frontal lobe
It is important for voluntary and planned motor behaviours - such things as voluntary movement of eyes, trunk, limbs and the many muscles used for speech
The motor speech area (Broca's area) is usually in the frontal lobe of the left hemisphere regardless of which hemisphere is dominant for handedness (i.e. the left hemisphere for right handers).

11. Phineas Gage

12. Frontal Lobes

15. Raine suggests three reasons why prefrontal deficits may cause antisocial personality:
First, the region appears to be critical for self-restraint and deliberate foresight. "One thing we know about antisocials is that they do not think ahead," said Raine.
Second, it’s crucial for learning conditioned responses — essential, for example, to a child’s linking the thought of a misdeed with anxiety over punishment. "Unconscious mental-emotional associations such as these lie at the core of what we call conscience," Raine said.
Third, if prefrontal deficits underlie the Antisocial Personality Disorder (APD) group’s low levels of autonomic arousal, these people may unconsciously be trying to compensate through stimulation-seeking. "For some kids," said Raine, "one way of getting an arousal-jag is by robbing stores or beating people up."

16. parietal lobe (pa rye' it ul)
It is important for aspects of somesthetic sensation (i.e. touch, kinesthesia, pain), taste, and other sophisticated perceptive abilities.
An example of the latter would be the receptive speech area (Wernicke's area) which is in the inferior part of the parietal lobe on the left side regardless of which hemisphere is dominant for handedness.
The parietal lobe of the right hemisphere appears to be especially important for perceiving spatial relationships.

17. Parietal Lobe

20. corpus callosum (cull low' sum)
It is an enormous bundle of axons which interconnects the left and right cerebral hemispheres. Therefore, it is a commissure.
It disseminates information from the cerebral cortex on one side of the brain to the same region on the other side .

22. Corpus Callosum

24. thalamus (thal' uh mus)
A large mass of grey matter deeply situated in the forebrain. There is one on either side of the midline.
It relays to the cerebral cortex information received from diverse brain regions. Sort of a requisite 'last pit stop' for information going to cortex.
Axons from every sensory system (except olfaction) synapse here as the last relay site before the information reaches the cerebral cortex.
There are other thalamic nuclei that receive input from cerebellar-, basal ganglia- and limbic-related brain regions.

25. Thalamus

27. temporal lobe (temp' or ul)
Various parts of it are important for the sense of hearing, for certain aspects of memory, and for emotional/affective behaviour.

31. Physiological Psychology - Raine
The participants:
41 murderers (39 males 2 females)
Charged with murder/manslaughter in California/USA
All pled NGRI
All were referred for physiological examination

32. Physiological Psychology - Raine
The ‘histories’
head injury/brain damage(23)
drug abuse (3)
affective disorder (2)
epilepsy (2)
hyperactivity & learning impairment (3)
personality disorder (2)

33. Physiological Psychology - Raine
CONTROL GROUP
41 normal individuals (non murderers)
matched for sex and age
including 6 ‘murdering’ schizophrenics who were matched with 6 ‘ non murdering’ schizophrenics

34. Physiological Psychology - Raine
The method
A ‘natural’ experiment
The procedure
PET Scans to examine the brain

35. Physiological Psychology - Raine
What is a PET SCAN?
Positron Emission Tomography
This method assesses the amount of metabolic activity in various parts of the brain
A scanning machine detects positrons emitted through the head with high amounts being associated with a higher level of metabolic activity.

38. Physiological Psychology - Raine
THE PET SCAN process
Patients are injected with fluorodeoxyglucose tracer (radioactive glucose)
For about 30 minutes before the PET SCAN the participants are engaged in a ‘continuous activity’
This activity aimed to activate the FRONTAL LOBES, and the RIGHT TEMPORAL and PARIETAL LOBES

41. A typical PET scan

43. Physiological Psychology - Raine
THE RESULTS
DIFFERENCES in the brains of the murderers
CORTICAL REGIONS
LOWER ACTIVITY

44. Physiological Psychology - Raine
THE RESULTS
DIFFERENCES in the brains of the murderers
SUBCORTICAL REGIONS
LOWER ACTIVITY

45. Physiological Psychology - Raine
THE RESULTS
SUMMARY OF DIFFERENCES in the brains of the murderers
Reduced activity in prefrontal cortex, parietal region & corpus callosum
Left hemisphere less activity than right
Abnormal asymmetries in amygdala & thalamus

46. Physiological Psychology - Raine
THE RESULTS
Both groups performed similarly on performance task
NOT CONTROLLED
6 murderers were left handed
14 murderers were non white
23 murderers had history of head injury

47. Physiological Psychology - Raine
DISCUSSION POINTS
Pre Frontal deficit - associated with impulsivity
Hippocampus & amygdala - associated with aggressive behaviour & with conditioned emotional responses
Amygdala - reduced activity associated with fearlessness
Corpus Callosum - dysfunction associated with predisposition to violence

48. Physiological Psychology - Raine
CONCLUSION
Unlikely that violence is due to a single brain mechanism
Evidence that - murderers pleading NGRI may have different brain functions to ‘normal’ people
Evidence that - murderers have different brain functions to psychiatric patients

49. Physiological Psychology - Raine
Validity & reliability of the research?
Large sample
Significant results (non trivial)
Two tailed tests
Areas of brain selected based on previous research
Could IQ differences be a factor?

50. Physiological Psychology - Raine
WHAT these findings DO NOT demonstrate
That violent behaviour is ‘caused’ by biology
That murderers are NOT RESPONSIBLE for their actions
That brain dysfunction causes violent behaviour

51. Physiological Psychology - Raine
WHAT these findings DO demonstrate
That there MAY BE a link between brain activity and a predisposition towards violence which should be investigated further

52. Physiological Psychology - Raine
Ethics - how might you criticise this study?
Generalisation - can the findings of this study be generalised to all murderers?
Why or why not?

53. Ethics
Raine’s findings raise important ethical questions about culpability and free will. "To what extent," he asked, "should we take disordered brain functioning into account as part of the reason for certain types of crime?
Assuming these people are not responsible for their own brain damage, should we hold them fully responsible for their criminal acts?"

54. Physiological Psychology - Raine
Questions
Suggest one thing that cannot be concluded from this study
The conclusions suggest that murderers who plead NGRI are different to 2 groups - which 2 groups?

55. Physiological Psychology - Raine
Questions
Describe the strengths & weaknesses of the NATURAL experimental method?
What do you think might be the main difficulty in drawing conclusions from PET observed ‘brain activity’?

56. Physiological Psychology - Raine
Application - how is this study useful?

57. Interventions
Raine suggested a number of interventions that could be applied.
Cognitive and behavioural therapy and drug therapy have potential.
Biofeedback – training children or adults to control their own arousal levels – could be a useful tool.
And children could be channelled into safe activities that might satisfy their natural stimulation-seeking and aggressive proclivities.

58. THE END