My Personal Blog
Putting Jurisprudence in the Scanner
When you have 2 journal articles to review, a presentation to prep and a regular weekend’s worth of work to consider, not expecting anything great to happen- then here comes sarcastic_f tweeting along about some paper (thanks) that holds up the whole day, and I kinda love it. I wanna curl up with this paper and ask it questions about situational correction, we could eat snacks while it plays with my hair. No you should get out more.
Anyways, asking if emotion and cognition are “integrated sensibly in difficult judgments” is a pretty big question (define sensibly… or even “reasonably” when it comes to juries). To learn what really goes on in the brain when faced with deciding punishment, researchers scanned the brains of subjects acting as jurors dealing with sentencing mitigation in a murder trial. This is my jam. How could I resist not taking a little time out?
These researchers found that:
…sentencing activated precuneus and anterior cingulate cortex, suggesting that mitigation is based on negative affective responses to murder, sympathy for mitigating circumstances and cognitive control to choose numerical punishments.
Sounds about right. Of interest to me, are the activity levels of the DMPFC (dorsomedial prefrontal cortex- mentalizing and moral conflict) and the correlation of activity in the insula, an area known to represent “interoception of visceral states”.. and the ACC of course- mentioned a lot in empathy & pain studies.
Above: Regions in which activity correlated with parametric regressors of increasing sympathy (green) and reduced punishment (red). [via]
Understanding the neuroscientific basis of legal mitigation adds to a basic understanding of moral neuroscience. Neural evidence could also advance theory and practice of law, as so little is known about whether the mental activity of juries and judges conforms to normative legal principles.
Even when we are instructed to decide based on the facts, a little (or lot) of emotion creeps in. So basically, when are law schools going to support neuroscientific research, because…
