MRI studies reveal that psychopathic violent offenders are unable to learn from punishment due to abnormalities in their brains.
Society expects criminal behavior to be punished in forms of rehabilitation programs to reinforce social norms, but what if punishment from these programs cannot modify their behavior?
Scientists have recently found that the brains of psychopaths have a distinct organization in its neuronetwork. This allows these individuals to only consider the positive consequences of their actions, and fail to take into account the negative outcomes of their decisions.
Typically in a normal subject, punishment signals the necessity to change behavior. However, in Hodgins' and Dr. Blackwood's findings in their MRI study, they find that offenders have difficulty learning from punishment and therefore no initiative to change their behavior from their previous actions.
To provide evidence for this claim, researchers in the United Kingdom examined the structure and functioning of 12 violent offenders with psychopathy and social personality disorder, 20 violent offenders with only social personality disorder, and 18 non-offenders (control subjects). During the MRI scanning, participants completed an image-matching task which was designed to evaluate the individual's behavior change given positive and negative feedback to their responses. In order to validate their claim on psychopathic difference in neuronetworks, previously awarded answers from the beginning of the scan would later be punished. While analyzing the results, the scientists found an abnormal response in violent offenders with psychopathy in comparison with non-offenders and the violent offenders without psychopathy.
In Dr. Jordan Grafman's research on behavioral norms, he explores the value of morals and takes on a neuroscientific approach by evaluating behavioral differences in patients with frontal lobe lesions through CT scans compared to control subjects. In his article "The Neural Basis of Human Moral Cognition," Grafman defines morality as "the consensus of manners and customs within a social group, or to an inclination to behave in some ways but not in others." In Blackwood and Hodgins' study, they refer to a psychopath as one who displays "moral depravity" or "moral insanity," due to their inability to behave in a particular way described by society.
Grafman's findings in his ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex brain lesions and traumatic brain injury study determined the dorsomedial Prefrontal Cortex to be the source of intention, the Posterior Cortex in change of understanding if harm was produced, and finally, the ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex in understanding the outcome of an action. Results also determined the ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex to play a significant role in concept formation. This ability is imperative in behavior modulation due to its ability of understanding societal moral. From this we can concur the affiliation of these regions to the abnormalities in psychopathic violent offenders due to their inability to understand the negative impact of the outcome of an action, harm produced from their individual crimes and the concept formation of punishment signaling for behavioral change.
Since most violent crimes are committed by individuals who display conduct problems from a young age, this new insight to the neural mechanisms behind the actions of violent offenders with psychopathy provides a push for learning-based interventions in children to target brain mechanisms which underlie the abnormal neural development before becoming a permanent network. This approach would hopefully change the behavior in adulthood and therefore reduce overall violent crime.
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Photo References
Figure 1:
GE Healthcare. (n.d.). Retrieved February 28, 2017, from http://www3.gehealthcare.com/en/products/categories/magnetic_resonance_imaging/mr_applications/neuro_imaging
Figure 2:
When looking at a brain scan; what is the difference between a psychopath and a Sociopath or would the scans look the same? (n.d.). Retrieved February 28, 2017, from https://www.quora.com/When-looking-at-a-brain-scan-what-is-the-difference-between-a-psychopath-and-a-Sociopath-or-would-the-scans-look-the-same
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