Raine Flashcards
What is the aim of Raine?
To see if the brain activity of murderers/people pleading not guilty of murder through diminished responsibility was different to that of non-murderers
What is the sample of Raine?
41 murderers pleading not guilty by reason of insanity (NGRI)
Control group matched on age, gender and 6 in each had schizophrenia (2 females in each group)
What is the procedure of Raine?
Carried out a visual targeting test
10 minutes later injected a tracer (FDG) then completed the visual targeting task again
PET scan was carried out after 32 minutes when the task was finished (to see how active the brain had been in the prefrontal cortex)
What are the results of Raine?
Amygdala: reduced activity in the LEFT amygdala and more activity in the RIGHT in murderers
Prefrontal Lobe: lower glucose metabolism in murderers
Temporal Lobe: no significant difference
Corpus Callosum: lower activity in murderers
What did Raine conclude?
Brains of murderers were significantly different from the brains of non murderers
What is a strength of Raine’s procedure regarding standardisation?
Used same timings, the same machines etc so it can be repeated to test for reliability of findings about brain differences
What is a weakness of Raine’s sample?
Small sample of 41 NGRI so results about differences in brain activity may not be applied to a wider population
What is a strength of Raine using PET scans?
Empirical as they directly measure the
glucose metabolism of the brain making the results about NGRI brain activity differences more valid
as it can be directly measured
What is an issue with Raine using PET scans in regards to validity?
Low ecological validity as PET scanning process doesn’t reflect what the brain would be doing in a real life setting so results about NGRI brain activity may not be applicable to real world brain functioning when committing crimes in real life
What is a strength of Raine using matched pairs?
Reduces individual differences/participant variables making it a more
valid comparison between the NGRI and normal participants without things like Schizophrenia impacting
the results so we can get a better understanding of the key brain differences
What is an ethical issue of Raine using NGRI murderers?
Informed consent/Withdrawal as the participants are
NGRI murderers so their ‘insanity’ might mean that they can’t fully comprehend and agree to take part in
the study
