[ad_1]
According to a new study published Monday in the Journal of Neuroscience, the ability to use brain stimulation to help prevent future violence has just passed a proof-of-concept stage.
In a double-blind randomized controlled trial, a group of volunteers who received a load in their dorsolateral prefrontal cortex – the part of the brain directly behind the forehead and responsible for planning, reasoning, and inhibition – were less likely to say that they would consider adopting aggressive behavior compared to a similar group who received a fictitious treatment.
The experience examined the aggressive intent as well as the way people were reasoning about the violence and found that the feeling of moral injustice regarding the acts of aggression hypothetical was increased in the group receiving transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). This form of brain stimulation delivers targeted impulses to the brain through electrodes placed on a person's scalp.
"Zapping delinquents with an electric current to repair their brains looks like pulp fiction, but it can not be as crazy as it sounds," said Adrian Raine, a neurocriminologist at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the investigators of the study. "This study goes in the direction of documenting a causal association by showing that strengthening of the prefrontal cortex slows down the impulse to act aggressively."
In the experiment, 39 volunteers received direct stimulation of the prefrontal cortex for 20 minutes. One placebo group received a weak current for 30 seconds. The next day, both groups read two stories, one portraying an act of physical aggression and the other an act of sexual assault. Both groups of volunteers were then asked to rate their likelihood of performing similar acts on a scale of 1 to 10, with one being the least likely and the 10 most likely
.
To assess their sense of morality, subjects had to evaluate on a scale of zero (not at all) to 10 (very) how it would be morally wrong to act in the same way as the protagonist in both stories. ]
For a third task measuring aggression, subjects were shown a computer-generated image of a doll and told them that she represented a close partner or friend. They were then told that they could free themselves from any negative energy towards this person by inserting zero to 51 pins into the doll. The higher the number used, the higher this level of aggression.
The researchers found a 54% reduction in aggressive intentions in the group receiving stimulation and a 31% jump in their feeling of moral wrongness about acts of aggression. There was no significant difference between the two groups in the voodoo doll type test measuring behavioral aggression.
Principal Investigator Olivia Choy, a criminologist who teaches at the Department of Psychology at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, said: "Although this is certainly a first step in the study of STCC and antisocial and aggressive behavior, this could inform future approaches. reduce aggressive intention and behavior through a non-invasive and relatively benign intervention that targets a biological risk factor for crime. If these results can be replicated and expanded, it may be that the use of tDCA on offenders is not entirely out of the question. "
Scientists of the study warn that this is still very early in the game and more studies
Roy Hamilton, the third scientist involved in the study. study and director of the laboratory for cognition and neural stimulation at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, says that the experiment shows
"The study also suggests that violent thinking and action are not fully predestined by cerebral cabling, as they may be influenced by external inputs, "he said. The external input was electrical stimulation but generally the external circumstances that can influence the brain's machinery to control violence include the whole spectrum of lived experiences. "[19659002]
Study participants included adults aged 18 and over, alsodistributed between men and women, and ethnically diverse. Before participating, all received a series of tests and quizzes measuring the personality, crime and social adversity of childhood.
Tom Hummer, an assistant professor of research in psychiatry at the University of Indiana Medical School, says the study should be understood more as an experimental manipulation than it is. 39, an early treatment study, especially because the doll part of the experiment shows no difference. this laboratory measurement of aggressive behavior.
"The biggest limitation is the lack of behavioral effect," he said. "It is difficult to measure the actual aggression in the laboratory, but even in their measurement, they do not find any difference between the groups in real aggression. It is therefore difficult to say if the subjects simply say that they would act differently or if the behavior of the real world would change. "
Delaney Smith welcomes the new study and what it might suggest. Smith is a forensic psychiatrist in Columbus, Ohio, who helps treatment-resistant depressed patients with FDA-approved transcranial magnetic stimulation, which is weaker and less targeted than direct transcranial direct stimulation.
"At the present time, we are limited in the treatment of aggression and do not have very good interventions – just talk about therapy, unapproved drugs ", did she say. "So, all we can add to the therapeutic arsenal to counter future acts of violence, the better."
Source link
