Neural circuits in the brain that are activated when mitigating criminal sentences

By M. Yamada, Colin F. Camerer, S. Fujie, Motoichiro Kato, T. Matsuda, H. Takano, Hiroshi Ito, T. Suhara, Hidehiko Takahashi. 2012

44 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In sentencing guilty defendants, jurors and judges weigh 'mitigating circumstances', which create sympathy for a defendant. Here we use functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure neural activity in ordinary citizens who are potential jurors, as they decide on mitigation of punishment for murder. We found that sympathy activated regions associated with mentalising and moral conflict (dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, precuneus and temporo-parietal junction). Sentencing also activated precuneus and anterior cingulate cortex, suggesting that mitigation is based on negative affective responses to murder, sympathy for mitigating circumstances and cognitive control to choose numerical punishments. Individual differences on the inclination to mitigate, the sentence reduction per unit of judged sympathy, correlated with activity in the right middle insula, an area known to represent interoception of visceral states. These results could help the legal system understand how potential jurors actually decide, and contribute to growing knowledge about whether emotion and cognition are integrated sensibly in difficult judgments. Jurors can be influenced by mitigating circumstances when deciding on sentences for committed crimes. Yamadaet al. show that feelings of sympathy created by mitigating circumstances activate moral conflict regions of the brain that predict individual differences in the severity of the sentence.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

Theory of Mind: A Neural Prediction Problem (2013, positive): “, she believed the poison was sugar; he only wanted to end the patient’s misery from an incurable disease) compared to the “predicted” intention (to kill the person; Buckholtz et al., 2008; Koster-Hale et al., 2013; Yamada et al., 2012; Young and Saxe, 2009b).”
Decoding moral judgments from neural representations of intentions (2013, background): “In prior research, increased RTPJ activation is related to greater consideration of mitigating intentions and more lenient punishment (22, 23); individual differences in the forgiveness of accidental harms are correlated with the magnitude of activity in the RTPJ at the time of the judgment (24); an”