Neural explanations

• Prefrontal cortex

  -        Raine (2004) found those with antisocial personality disorder had reduced activity in the pre-frontal cortex.

  o   Involved in emotional regulation & moral reasoning.

  o   Leaves people with little guilt and conscience.
• The Limbic System

  -        A set of subcortical structures (including the thalamus and amygdala) that are linked to emotion. Raine (1997) found those murderers who pleaded NGRI had abnormalities in their limbic system, especially the amygdala, when compared to a control group.
• A reduced ability to feel empathy

  -        Those with antisocial personality disorder can experience empathy but they do so more sporadically than the rest of us. Only when directly asked to empathise did those with APD do so. This suggests they may have a neural ‘switch’, in which mirror neurons activated.

  -        Mirror neurons are the mirrored activity our neurons do when watching another person e.g. when seeing someone in pain, we may also feel pain.
• -        A further limitation is methodological problems with adoption studies.

  o   Adoption studies are complicated by the fact that many children experience late adoption. So these children spent time with their biological parents before adoption.

  o   In addition, lots of adoptees maintain contact with their biological parents.

  o   Both of these points make it difficult to assess the environmental (nurture as well as nature) impact the biological parents might have had
• -        Another limitation is that these explanations are biologically reductionist.

  o   Criminality is complex; explanations that reduce offending behaviour to a genetic or neural level ignore higher level explanation. Crime runs in families but so do poverty, deprivation and illness.

  o   This makes it difficult to disentangle the effects of genes and neural influences from other factors.

  o   This indicates that genetic and neural explanations in isolation are too simplistic.