The Psychology Of a Criminal
The latest research on criminals says that criminals thinking
are too different than the normal people thinking, According to neuroscience.
The latest neuroscience research is presenting intriguing
evidence that the brains of certain kinds of criminals are different from those
of the rest of the population.
While these findings could improve our understanding of
criminal behavior, they also raise moral quandaries about whether and how
society should use this knowledge to combat crime.
The
criminal mind
In one recent study, scientists examined 21 people with
antisocial personality disorder – a condition that characterizes many convicted
criminals. Those with the disorder "typically have no regard for right and
wrong. They may often violate the law and the rights of others," according
to the Mayo Clinic.
Brain scans of the antisocial people, compared with a
control group of individuals without any mental disorders, showed on average an
18-percent reduction in the volume of the brain's middle frontal gyrus, and a 9
percent reduction in the volume of the orbital frontal gyrus – two sections in
the brain's frontal lobe.
Another brain study, published in the September 2009
Archives of General Psychiatry, compared 27 psychopaths — people with severe
antisocial personality disorder — to 32 non-psychopaths. In the psychopaths,
the researchers observed deformations in another part of the brain called the
amygdala, with the psychopaths showing a thinning of the outer layer of that
region called the cortex and, on average, an 18-percent volume reduction in
this part of brain.
"The amygdala is the seat of emotion. Psychopaths lack
emotion. They lack empathy, remorse, guilt," said research team member
Adrian Raine, chair of the Department of Criminology at the University of
Pennsylvania, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., last month.
In addition to brain differences, people who end up being
convicted for crimes often show behavioral differences compared with the rest
of the population. One long-term study that Raine participated in followed
1,795 children born in two towns from ages 3 to 23. The study measured many
aspects of these individuals' growth and development, and found that 137 became
criminal offenders.
One test on the participants at age 3 measured their
response to fear – called fear conditioning – by associating a stimulus, such
as a tone, with a punishment like an electric shock, and then measuring people's
involuntary physical responses through the skin upon hearing the tone.
In this case, the researchers found a distinct lack of fear
conditioning in the 3-year-olds who would later become criminals. These
findings were published in the January 2010 issue of the American Journal of
Psychiatry.
Neurological
base of crime
Overall, these studies and many more like them paint a
picture of significant biological differences between people who commit serious
crimes and people who do not. While not all people with antisocial personality
disorder — or even all psychopaths — end up breaking the law, and not all
criminals meet the criteria for these disorders, there is a marked correlation.
"There is a neuroscience basis in part to the cause of
crime," Raine said.
What's more, as the study of 3-year-olds and other research
have shown, many of these brain differences can be measured early on in life,
long before a person might develop into actual psychopathic tendencies or
commit a crime.
Criminologist Nathalie Fontaine of Indiana University
studies the tendency toward being callous and unemotional (CU) in children
between 7 and 12 years old. Children with these traits have been shown to have
a higher risk of becoming psychopaths as adults.
"We're not suggesting that some children are
psychopaths, but CU traits can be used to identify a subgroup of children who
are at risk," Fontaine said.
Yet her research showed that these traits aren't fixed, and
can change in children as they grow. So if psychologists identify children with
these risk factors early on, it may not be too late.
"We can still help them," Fontaine said. "We
can implement intervention to support and help children and their families, and
we should."
Neuroscientists' understanding of the plasticity, or
flexibility, of the brain called neurogenesis supports the idea that many of
these brain differences are not fixed.
"Brain research is showing us that neurogenesis can
occur even into adulthood," said psychologist Patricia Brennan of Emory
University in Atlanta. "Biology isn’t destiny. There are many, many places
you can intervene along that developmental pathway to change what's happening
in these children."
Furthermore, criminal behavior is certainly not a fixed
behavior.
Psychologist Dustin Pardini of the University of Pittsburgh
Medical Center found that about four out of five kids who are delinquents as
children do not continue to offend in adulthood.
Pardini has been researching the potential brain differences
between people with a past criminal record who have stopped committing crimes,
and those who continue criminal behavior. While both groups showed brain
differences compared with non-criminals in the study, Pardini and his
colleagues uncovered few brain differences between chronic offenders and
so-called remitting offenders.
"Both groups showed similar results," Pardini
said. "None of these brain regions distinguish chronic and remitting
offenders."
Ethical
quandaries
Yet even the idea of intervening to help children at risk of
becoming criminals is ethically fraught.
"Do we put children in compulsory treatment when we've
uncovered the risk factors?" asked Raine. "Well, who decides that?
Will the state mandate compulsory residential treatment?"
What if surgical treatment methods are advanced, and there
is an option to operate on children or adults with these brain risk factors?
Many experts are extremely hesitant to advocate such an invasive and risky
brain intervention — especially in children and in individuals who have not yet
committed any crime.
Yet psychologists say such solutions are not the only way to
intervene.
"You don’t have to do direct brain surgery to change
the way the brain functions," Brennan said. "You can do social
interventions to change that."
Fontaine's studies, for example, suggest that kids who
display callous and unemotional traits don't respond as well to traditional
parenting and punishment methods such as time-outs. Instead of punishing bad
behavior, programs that emphasize rewarding good behavior with positive
reinforcement seem to work better.
Raine and his colleagues are also testing whether children
who take supplemental pills of omega-3 fatty acids — also known as fish oil —
can show improvement. Because this nutrient is thought to be used in cell
growth, neuroscientists suspect it can help brain cells grow larger, increase
the size of axons (the part of neurons that conducts electrical impulses), and
regulate brain cell function.
"We are brain scanning children before and after
treatment with omega-3," Raine said. "We are studying kids to see if
it can reduce aggressive behavior and improve impaired brain areas. It's a
biological treatment, but it's a relatively benign treatment that most people
would accept."
'Slippery
slope to Armageddon'
The field of neurocriminology also raises other
philosophical quandaries, such as the question of whether revealing the role of
brain abnormalities in crime reduces a person's responsibility for his or her
own actions.
"Psychopaths know right and wrong cognitively, but
don't have a feeling for what's right and wrong," Raine said. "Did
they ask to have an amygdala that wasn't as well functioning as other
individuals'? Should we be punishing psychopaths as harshly as we do?"
Because the brain of a psychopath is compromised, Raine
said, one could argue that they don't have full responsibility for their
actions. That — in effect — it's not their fault.
In fact, that reasoning has been argued in a court of law.
Raine recounted a case he consulted on, of a man named Herbert Weinstein who
had killed his wife. Brain scans subsequently revealed a large cyst in the
frontal cortex of Weinstein's brain, showing that his cognitive abilities were
significantly compromised.
The scans were used to strike a plea bargain in which
Weinstein's sentence was reduced to only 11 years in prison.
"Imaging was used to reduce his culpability, to reduce
his responsibility," Raine said. "Yet is that not a slippery slope to
Armageddon where there's no responsibility in society?"
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