Amygdala and aggression - criminal
- Created by: bellafereti
- Created on: 17-11-21 20:37
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- Amygdala and aggression
- description of amygdala
- essential in fear conditioning and positive, emotional learning - link to social and criminal behaviour
- integrative centre for emotional response, emotional behaviour and motivations
- activity in amygdala
- increased activity in the RIGHT amygdala will lead to increased impulsive violent behaviour
- damage/ poor development in the amygdala leads to issues with fear conditioning - children will have permanent problems with fear conditioning and will fail to learn the negative concequences of anti-social behaviour - could lead to criminal behaviour as they have no fear of concequences of being caught
- children will also fail to learn that good behaviour is pleasureable and this leads to problems with impulsive control
- Pardini (2013)
- used neuro-imaging scans on groups of 26 year old males
- found that males with LOWER amygdala volumes were 3x more likely to be aggressive and violent than 26 year old men with normal sized amygdala
- Counter-argument
- weakness of researching amygdala is that other brain areas are implicated. the amygdala does not operate alone - suggests the influence of the amygdala on crime is difficult to disentangle
- Counter-argument
- Raine (1997)
- lower activity in left amygdala than controls linked to inhibition of aggression
- higher activity in right amygdala than controls - linked to increased aggressive/ sexual behaviour
- description of amygdala
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