Brain damage tied to moral judgments

[Al-khiyal]

Damage to an area of the brain behind the forehead, inches behind the eyes, transforms the way people make moral judgments in life-or-death situations, scientists reported Thursday.

In a new study, people with this rare injury expressed increased willingness to kill or harm another person if doing so would save others' lives.

The findings are the most direct evidence to date that humans' native revulsion for hurting others relies on a part of neural anatomy, one that most likely evolved before the brain regions responsible for analysis and planning.

The researchers emphasized that the study was small and that the moral decisions were hypothetical; the results cannot predict how people with or without brain injuries will act in real life-or-death situations.

Yet the findings in the journal Nature confirm the central role of the damaged region — the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is thought to generate social emotions, like compassion.

Previous studies showed that this region was active during moral decision- making and that damage to it and neighboring areas from severe dementia affected moral judgments.

The new study seals the case by demonstrating that a very specific kind of emotion-based judgment is altered when the region is damaged. In extreme circumstances, people with the injury will even endorse suffocating an infant if that would save more lives.

"I think it's very convincing now that there are at least two systems working when we make moral judgments," said Joshua Greene, a psychologist at Harvard who was not involved in the study. "There's an emotional system that depends on this specific part of the brain and another system that performs more utilitarian cost-benefit analyses which in these people is clearly intact."

The new study focused on six patients who had suffered very specific damage to the ventromedial area from an aneurysm or a tumor.

The cortex is the thick outer wrapping of the brain, where the distinctly human, mostly conscious functions of thinking and language reside. The term ventral means underneath and medial means near the middle. The area in adults is about the size of a large plum.

People with this injury can be lucid, easygoing, talkative and intelligent, but socially awkward, seemingly numb to the ebb and flow of subtle social cues and emotions. They also have some of the same moral instincts that others do.

The researchers, from the University of Iowa and other institutions, had them respond to several moral challenges. In one, they had to decide whether to divert a runaway boxcar that was about to kill a group of five workmen. To save the workers they would have to flip a switch, sending the car hurtling into another man, who would be killed.

They strongly favored flipping the switch, just as a group of people without injuries did. A third group, with brain damage that did not affect the ventromedial cortex, made the same decision.

All three groups also strongly rejected doing harm to others in situations that were not a matter of trading one certain death for another. They would not send a daughter to work in the pornography industry to fend off crushing poverty or kill an infant they felt they could not care for.

But a large difference in the participants' decisions emerged when there was no switch to flip — when they had to choose between taking direct action to kill or harm someone (pushing him in front of the runaway boxcar, for example) and serving a greater good.

Those with ventromedial injuries were about twice as likely as the other participants to say they would push someone in front of the train (if that was the only option) or poison someone with AIDS who was bent on infecting others or suffocate a baby whose crying would reveal to enemy soldiers where the subject and family and friends were hiding.

"The difference was very clear, for all of the ventral medial patients," said Dr. Michael Koenigs, a neuroscientist at the National Institutes of Health who led the study while at the University of Iowa.

The other authors were Dr. Daniel Tranel of Iowa, Dr. Marc Hauser of Harvard and other neuroscientists.

The ventromedial area is a primitive part of the cortex that appears to have evolved to help humans and other mammals navigate social interactions. The area has connections to deeper, unconscious regions like the brain stem, which transmit physical sensations of attraction or discomfort, and the amygdala, a gumdrop of neural tissue that registers threats, social and otherwise. The ventral medial area integrates these signals with others from the cortex, including emotional memories, to help generate familiar social reactions.

"This area when it's working will give rise to social emotions that we can feel, like embarrassment, guilt and compassion, that are critical to guiding our social behavior," said Dr. Antonio Damasio, a co-author and a neuroscientist at the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California.

These sensations in effect put a finger on the brain's conscious, cost-benefit scale weighing moral dilemmas, Damasio argues, creating a tension that even trained snipers can feel when having to pull the trigger on an enemy.

This tension between cost-benefit calculations and instinctive emotion in part reflects the brain's continuing adjustment to the vast social changes that have occurred since the ventromedial area of the cortex first took shape. The area most likely adapted to assist the brain in making snap moral decisions in small kin groups — to spare a valuable group member's life after a fight, for instance.

As human communities became larger and increasingly complex, so did the cortical structures involved in parsing ethical dilemmas. But the more primitive ventral medial area continued to anchor it with emotional insistence an ancient principle: respect for the life of another human being.

"A nice way to think about it," Damasio said, "is that we have this emotional system built in, and over the years culture has worked on it to make it even better."

Brain damage tied to moral judgments

[Bent_Bladi]

So now all killers are ma3zoureen cuz they're "mentally ill"?!

akh ya dunya, akh...

[Cheba_Mami]

I do not want evil persons to get this as an excuse, but scientific research must be done in order to understand and maybe - which is dangerous- predict if a person is likely to become a criminal/serial killer or whatever.

[Al-khiyal]

May 16, 2007 -- Unborn babies judged to be at most risk of social exclusion and turning to criminality are to be targeted in a controversial new scheme to be promoted by Downing Street today.

In an effort to intervene as early as possible in troubled families, first-time mothers identified just 16 weeks after conception will be given intensive weekly support from midwives and health visitors until the unborn child reaches two years old.

Unveiling the findings of a Downing Street review, Tony Blair will make clear the government is prepared to single out babies still in the womb to break cycles of deprivation and behaviour.

He will also acknowledge that the state must do more to help a minority of families and will stress that the support they need cannot come through the promotion of marriage.

In an attempt to draw a clear division between Labour and the Conservatives Mr Blair will say that making marriage the primary focus of family policy will be ineffective and could lead to discrimination against children whose parents have split up or died.

The Nurse Family Partnership programme is the most striking attempt yet to pre-empt problems.

Downing Street will outline today how a £7m pilot scheme has already begun to recruit the first of 1,000 families in 10 areas in England.

Supporters of the policy say the risk of stigmatising unborn infants as potential future victims or troublemakers is outweighed by the advantages of helping poor families build on the aspirations they have for their children.

Under the programme, which has been copied from the United States, young, first-time mothers will be assigned a personal health visitor at between 16 and 20 weeks into their pregnancy. They will continue to have weekly or fortnightly visits until the child is two - far more than the few postnatal visits generally on offer.

The support includes help with giving up smoking or drug use in pregnancy, followed by a focus on bonding with the new baby, understanding behaviour such as crying, and encouraging a mother to develop her skills and resources to be a good parent. The programme is voluntary and the intention is to capitalise on the so-called "magic moment" when parents are receptive to support for themselves and their baby.

In the US, three large trials have seen consistently positive results, including higher IQ levels and language development in children, lower levels of abuse, neglect and child injuries in families, and improvements in the antenatal health and job prospects of mothers.

Proponents of the scheme, pioneered by the American paediatrician Professor David Olds, also point to the long-term cost savings, estimated at almost $25,000 (£12,500) by the time a child is 30.

The decision to target unborn babies is, in effect, an acknowledgement by Mr Blair that the government's focus on tackling social exclusion has left a hardcore - 2-3% - of the most excluded families behind.

The prime minister's introduction to today's family review says the state must help such children out of fairness, and because "some of these families actually cause wider social harms. The community in which they live suffers the consequences".

Kate Billingham, director of the project and deputy chief nursing officer, rejected suggestions the scheme could stigmatise deprived children. "I myself think labelling and stigmatising are used as ways of not giving people the help they want and their children can benefit from."

At a Downing Street breakfast to launch the policy this morning, Mr Blair will meet expectant mothers recruited to the scheme, as well as Professor Olds, its founder. Prof Olds told the Guardian the key to the scheme was its ability to "tap into" the instincts of parents. "We are wired as human beings to protect our children," he said.

It was possible that the UK's "superior health care system and social services" compared with the US could result in the relative benefits of the scheme here being smaller than the significant impact seen in American trials, he warned.

While the scheme is generally backed by children and parenting campaigners in the UK, concerns have been raised that the new focus on intensive help for excluded families could drain resources away from already overstretched health visiting services.

A spokeswoman for the Family and Parenting Institute said: "We very much welcome the health-led parenting projects, but they are only for a tiny proportion of the population and we think that a strong universal offer is critical for the majority of families who also need support and parenting help from health visitors.

"The problem is that the number of health visitors is falling - and there are massive variations in numbers throughout the country."

Unborn babies targeted in crackdown on criminality

[Al-khiyal]

May 17, 2007 -- What a wonderful boost to the confidence of a first-time mother! Barely four months pregnant and already the recipient of a fasbo, a foetus asbo, for her unborn child plus a weekly visit from a health visitor until the age of two to ensure that the potential criminal in the womb doesn't begin nicking baby rattles before teething is done.

OK that's a parody - but Tony Blair's latest scheme, as with so many of his grand designs, ignores lessons of the research on which it is based and sets up yet another leper sub-group in society as a result. As Michael White rightly says, "spotting the trouble early just seems sensible" - but is Blair's latest scheme really the way to do it?

The £7m Nursing Partnership Scheme is copied from the US. Young first-time mothers will be assigned a personal health visitor early in pregnancy. The health visitor tries to encourage a woman (why not the dad as well?) to give up smoking, to bond with her baby and to understand the basic principles of parenting that encourage a child's well being.

In the US, three large trials involving 20,000 young mothers, have seen consistently positive results, including higher IQ levels and language development in children, lower levels of abuse and improvements in the job prospects of mothers - all at less cost to the taxpayer in long-term benefits. So what's the problem?

The first is that it provides support for a fraction of families when such a service could benefit all (also erasing the stigma) and particularly those who are poor but not deemed part of the potentially criminal section of the community. They are also, surely, just as entitled to a good beginning for their babies?

In Support from the Start, Lessons from International Early Years Policy, written for the now defunct charity The Maternity Alliance, Jenny North repeatedly pointed out the long-term return from high investment in the months before a child is born.

Poor diet, for example, leads to low birth weight which increases the risk of disabilities, brain damage and hospitalisations, including heart disease and diabetes later in life. Babies born to mothers in social class three are 60% more likely to be of low birth weight than those born to social class one.

Again, the number and quality of interactions between babies and carers in the first year affects how the brain develops - influencing future mental health, emotional well-being and cognitive development.

Women from lower incomes are 19 times more likely to suffer from postnatal depression than those in class one. Poverty, postnatal depression and poor parenting skills exact a high price long before a baby is even out of nappies - but can be ameliorated with the positive and sustained interventions of sensitive health visitors of which there is a desperate shortage in the country as a whole.

Currently, the number of visits from a health visitor depends on where you live not on need. A YouGov poll shows that 76% of parents want access to a health visitor but according to the charity, the Family and Parenting Institute, many health visitors have an impossible work load - Warwickshire PCT has 39 health visitors for over 28,000 under fives. Redbridge PCT has 16 health visitors for 19,000 under fives. Whether for teenage mothers or other pregnant women and their partners, the numbers of health visitors has to be hugely expanded, fast.

According to the YouGov poll, the average time parents said they spend with a health visitor in the first year of their child's life was four hours and six minutes. 80% believed access to health visitors should be a universal right with only 17% agreeing that "only those who are really struggling need help from their health visitor".

Universality rather than targeting is also advocated by many of the researchers whose work Blair has read and allegedly been influenced by in advocating early intervention. They have used longitudinal studies to demonstrate that cause and effect; risk and protective factors are not nearly as exact a science as Blair choses to believe. Or, to put it another way, nearly three years of support from a health visitor hopefully won't do any harm but without also seriously addressing other aspects of the child and family's life, how much long-term good can it really do?

Blair spoke about the need for early intervention in a speech in September last year, launching The Social Exclusion Plan. The groups the plan is supposed to target in particular include looked-after children; teenage mothers; mental health patients and families with complex problems. The latter number 7,500, according to the Respect Task Force, costing between £50,000 to £250,000 a year each.

"The fact we have yet to succeed with these groups is not for want of spending," Mr Blair said. "... It is that we need a radical revision of our methods.

"This is not about blaming anyone for what has happened," he continued. But it most certainly is - and, in some case, it is for factors over which they have little control.

For instance, low intelligence and attainment is a significant predictor of offending. A Stockholm study of 120 males, published in 1993, reported low intelligence measured at the age of three predicted officially recorded offending up to age 30. Frequent offenders had an average IQ of 88 at age 3, whereas non-offenders had an average IQ of 101 - all results held up after controlling for social class.

So, in it's targeting mania, should government start sieving out the not-so-bright toddlers for intensive corrective measures?

David Farrington, professor of Psychological Criminology at Cambridge University, is among those whose work Blair has read. Professor Farrington says one reason for the link between intelligence and offending may be that those with low IQs are less able to foresee the consequences of their offending, living for the present with little thought for the future.

Impulsiveness, hyperactivity, restlessness, clumsiness, short time horizons low self-control, sensation seeking and a poor ability to delay gratification are all related to offending - and also describe a large slice of the primary school population. Is this a call for the diet police? Or, since Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder may have a genetic component, are we beginning to tiptoe into eugenics?

Or, then again, perhaps we should ban all large families? In the long-term Cambridge Study, if a boy had four or more siblings by the age of 10, this doubled his risk of being convicted as a juvenile - perhaps because money is tight and parental attention spread thin. However, if the 10-year-old lived in a house that was not overcrowded, the odds came down considerably.

Of course intervention helps but it's how and why and when it's delivered and by whom to whom. At the same time, studies show, the more marked out the recipients, the less productive the result, After all, the 16-year-old, told she is in for extra help because she may be carrying a serial juvenile delinquent, couldn't be blamed for behaving less than co-operatively.

Farrington has a number of suggestions, including proposing more research on the protective factors that stop a child from offending, in spite of living the kind of life that suggests he is at high risk of breaking the law; more attention to social and cognitive skills in primary schools and examining how the community, not just the parents and family influence a young person's behaviour.

We might know in a very crude way the factors that make offending more likely - but we don't yet know much about the tipping point: why some children do and others, reared in similar settings, don't.

Whatever is offered, Farrington says, it should be offered to all families in specified areas not just targeted at individuals identified as allegedly at risk. Advice Mr Blair has ignored.

It's positive that teenage mothers, and their babies, often for the first time in their lives, will have a health visitor's investment of care and interest for several years - but that would be so much more welcome (not least by the teenagers themselves); more socially just and more likely to be truly preventative, if that was a universal right, not a ham-handed exercise in social engineering to identify potential wrongdoers, pre-birth.

Asbos for the unborn?

[Bent_Bladi]

I do not want evil persons to get this as an excuse, but scientific research must be done in order to understand and maybe - which is dangerous- predict if a person is likely to become a criminal/serial killer or whatever.

this is something that you'll most likely hear in a sociology class... People have always tried to find excuses for deviance - they always tried to find a way why people do such insane things for no apparent reason. Biology/Psychology is only a small part of the reason - but other factors include how the person was brought up, his/her environment --- did he/she live in an area that praised violence and taught "an eye for an eye"? Was the person abused as a child, maybe sexually?

If we label little kids as potential bad guys - then we'll create what we're trying to eliminate. Everyone will treat the kid as a reject - maybe fear him and expect nothing but trouble from him. Of course, with a childhood like that - the poor child is going to end up a criminal. These things become real only if we act upon our beliefs and make them real.