Neuroscience and Crime

A Special Issue of Neurocase

Hans J. Markowitsch, Hans Markowitsch

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000149913
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Neurosurgery

Until recently jurisprudence largely ignored neuroscientific findings. The advent of sophisticated methodologies in the neurosciences - in particular brain imaging techniques - reduced this unawareness, and findings, pointing to clear and unequivocal relations between brain structure and brain function on the one side and personality dimensions on the other, led to a growing interest of jurisprudence in brain research. The Special Issue is intended to provide an overview over the most recent findings and technological refinements in the field of crime related neuroscientific investigations. It covers genetics, functional brain imaging, mind reading, lie detection, and many other topics.

Neuropsychological and neural correlates of autobiographical deficits in a mother who killed her children

E. Kalbe,¹ M. Brand,² A. Thiel,³ J. Kessler,¹ and H. J. Markowitsch^2
1Department of Neurology, University Clinic Cologne, Cologne, Germany ²Department of Physiological Psychology, University of Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany ³Department of Neurology & Neurosurgery, SMBD Jewish General Hospital, McGill University Montreal, Montreal, Canada

We report a case of a delusional patient who had killed two of her children in an attempted ‘extended suicide’. She was convinced of a genetic defect that caused autobiographical memory and emotional deficits and made life ‘senseless’. Neuropsychological tests revealed dysfunctions in remembering emotional details of personal episodes and theory of mind. Water positron emission tomography (¹⁵O) with a paradigm used in a former study by Fink et al. (1996) with healthy controls elicited abnormal activations during autobiographical memory retrieval characterised by a lack of prefrontal and limbic activity. We conclude that these imaging findings reflect neural correlates of the self-reported and objectified autobiographical dysfunctions. Furthermore, they indicate that beliefs or prejudices may have a major impact on the brain’s processing of the personal past.

Keywords: Neuroscience; Crime; Autobiographical memory; Theory of mind; Positron emission tomography.

INTRODUCTION

Autobiographical-episodic memory is the highest memory system that consists of personal events with a clear relation to time, space and context; in Tulving’s words, the conjunction of subjective time, autonoetic consciousness and the experiencing self represents episodic memories, which are typically emotionally toned (Tulving, 2002, 2005). Representing our personal past, autobiographical-episodic memory allows subjective time travel and is fundamental for building the feeling of one’s own identity (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000). Accordingly, disorders of autobiographical memory usually lead to disastrous consequences of the individuals’ lives as they lose their personal past and consequently their personality (e.g., Markowitsch, 2003a, 2003b). Emotional deficits also commonly occur in those patients, as one function of autobiographical memory is to guide emotional behaviour on the bases of previous personal experiences having an emotional connotation (Kopelman, 2000; Serra, Fadda, Buccione, Caltagirone, & Carlesimo, 2007).

Retrograde amnesia for the personal past, covering either the whole life-span or distinct parts of the biography, can be caused by brain damage, predominantly if limbic and/or prefrontal structures are affected. In addition, psychic stress and traumas can also result in severe autobiographical memory disorders, a condition referred to as dissociative, psychogenic, or functional amnesia (Brandt & van Gorp, 2006). In these conditions, autobiographical-episodic memory is most commonly affected. In addition, in some cases deficits in retrieving semantic information from their past or impairments in general semantic knowledge accompany the amnesia for personal episodes. Amain characteristic of dissociative amnesia is that deficits occur in the absence of structural brain damage. Nevertheless, single-case reports point out that there may be functional brain changes, such as metabolic reductions in temporofrontal regions, as neural correlates of the memory disorders (Fujiwara et al., in press; Markowitsch, 1996a, 1996b, 1999a, 1999b; Markowitsch, Kessler, Van der Ven, Weber-Luxenburger, & Heiss, 1998; Reinhold, Kühnel, Brand, & Markowitsch, 2006; Sellal, Manning, Seegmuller, Scheiber, & Schoenfelder, 2002).

This study was funded in part by the EC-FP6-project DiMI, LSHB-CT-2005-512146.

Address correspondence to E. Kalbe, Department of Neurology, University Hospital, Kerpener Str. 62, 50937 Cologne, Germany (E-mail: [email protected]).

© 2008 Psychology Press, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business http://www.psypress.com/neurocase DOI: 10.1080/13554790801992735

Patients with other psychiatric syndromes can also suffer from deficits in autobiographical memory or at least from specific changes in autobiographical remembering. For example, patients with depression retrieve less specific details of autobiographical memories (e.g., time and context information being less accurate) and show overgeneralisation of remote autobiographical memory (review and meta-analysis in Van Vreeswijk & De Wilde, 2004). Instead of narrating temporally and contextually distinctive episodes, patients with depression tend to report categorical descriptions of summarised repeated occasions (Barnhofer, de Jong-Meyer, Kleinpass, & Nikesch, 2002; Williams et al., 2007). Patients with delusions (Kaney, Bowen-Jones, & Bentall, 1999) and schizophrenia also show less specific autobiographical memory. In the latter group, these alterations co-vary with deficits in emotional perspective-taking and theory of mind functions (Corcoran & Frith, 2003). The pattern of over-generalised memories in psychiatric diseases may be explained by dysfunctional integration of factual components of specific events from the personal past related to emotional experiences and self-related information. Potentially, abnormal functioning of the orbitofr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Neuroscience and crime
• Implications of fMRI and genetics for the law and the routine practice of forensic psychiatry
• Neuropsychological and neural correlates of autobiographical deficits in a mother who killed her children
• Kindled non-convulsive behavioral seizures, analogous to primates. A 24th case of ‘limbic psychotic trigger reaction’: Bizarre parental infanticide - might nonvoluntariness during LPTR become objectified by primate model?
• Cross-examining dissociative identity disorder: Neuroimaging and etiology on trial
• Developing a Neuropsychiatrie Functional Brain Imaging Test
• fMRI investigation of the cognitive structure of the Concealed Information Test
• Looking for truth and finding lies:The prospects for a nascent neuroimaging of deception
• Detecting concealed information using brain-imaging technology Mart Bles and John-Dylan Haynes
• Sex, aggression and impulse control: An integrative account
• Title Page
• Copyright Page