Raine + application evaluation

• Method?


  • quasi experiment - naturally occurring (metabolic brain activity)
  • matched design - matched fro age, sex and schizophrenia
• data?


  • qualitative and quantitative data from PET scans
• ethics?


  • murderers were NGRI so may not have been mentally competent to give valid consent (pleading not guilty for reasons of insanity)
  • consent gained to brain scans
  • protection of participants - didn’t allow schizophrenic patients to take their medication for 2 weeks, to prevent harm
• sample?


  • too small to generalise to the rest of the world (82)
  • gender proportionate to actual prisons (both genders 95%)
• validity?


  • high population validity
  • large target population of murderers pleading NGRI
  • low ecological validity as tasks weren’t artificial to real life
• reliability?


  • high internal reliability - high controls, standardised procedure, replicable
• ethnocentrism?


  • murderers from America only - cannot judge whether murderers from other cultures also have brain abnormalities
• Nature vs nurture?


  • nature: focuses on murderers biology like brain abnormalities
  • nurture: ignores situational factors like upbringing
• freewill/determinism?


  • deterministic: behaviour isn’t attributed to biological drives - this would suggest that brain activity alters behaviour and we don‘t have control over the fact we are a murderer
• reductionism vs hollism?


  • reductionistic: explain complex behaviour as a product of biological drives
• usefulness?


  • can be useful if certain areas of the brain are linked to violence it can lead to treatments being developed - e.g drug therapy for altering activity in the pre-frontal cortex and amygdala
• psychology as a science?

  • scientific evidence - testable hypothesis, experiment, replicable, slightly subjective (PET scans need to be analysed, could be open to human errors)
• demand characteristics?


  • none: murderers don’t have control over the researchers measuring the murderers brain activity, therefore the internal validity is high, as the low activities displayed weren’t purposefully displayed by the murderers
• subjective/objective?


  • objective: PET scans produce objective data, considered a scientific measurement of the brain
  • subjective: scans/images need to be analysed by a doctor, may be interpretation bias