Aggressività psicopatica: una questione di volontà o di determinismo?

Psychopathic aggressive behavior is extremely antisocial and its destructiveness can be appalling. Throughout the past and still at present, psychopathy has been the topic of descriptive, psychodynamic, genetic and biological investigations. This article addresses the question of whether psychopaths are free in their decisional capacity or whether their criminal acts are subjected to determinism. A brief review of the history of psychopathy, psychopathic aggressivity, and pertinent psychoanalytic views are presented, along with philosophical theories of free will and determinism. Recent findings of brain neuroimaging of psychopaths are discussed. Special regard is given to Libet’s theory of free will. The criminal responsibility of psychopaths is considered in view of free will and determinism.I comportamenti psicopatici aggressivi possiedono un forte impatto sociale e la loro distruttività può avere conseguenze sconvolgenti. In tutto il corso della storia ed ancora oggi, la psicopatia è sempre stata oggetto di indagini di natura descrittiva, psicodinamica, genetica e biologica. Questo articolo affronta la questione della libertà decisionale degli psicopatici ovvero se questi non possono ritenersi pienamente responsabili dei comportamenti delittuosi tenuti. L’Autore, dopo aver presentato una breve review del concetto di psicopatia, dell'aggressività ad essa correlata e delle relative teorie psicoanalitiche, procede ad una disamina delle teorie filosofiche sulla libera volontà e sul determinismo. Analizza, poi, i recenti risultati delle neuroimaging cerebrali negli psicopatici. Riserva, inoltre, una considerazione speciale alla teoria di Libet sulla libera volontà. Esamina, infine, la responsabilità personale dello psicopatico rispetto ad una condotta delittuosa, alla luce dei concetti di libera volontà e determinismo

Destructive Hostility: The Jeffrey Dahmer Case: A Psychiatric and Forensic Study of a Serial Killer

We were involved as forensic experts in the case of the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. We discuss the scene and victim autopsy findings, with a brief consideration of the basic emotion of hostility. These findings support the thesis that at the basis of this serial killer\u27s behavior were primary unconscious feelings of hate that he had channeled into a sadistic programmed destruction of 17 young men. The interview of the serial killer, the photographic scene documentation, and the autopsy findings stress the ambivalent homosexuality of the killer, his sexual sadism, his obsessive fetishism, and his possible cannibalism and necrophilia

Severe Personality-Disordered Defendants and the Insanity Plea in the United States: a Proposal for Change

People who live in society are bound together by laws based on duties and rights. Even though primarily born out of acceptance and respect for one another, these laws, part of an ethical system of communal life, are also utilitarian in their essence. Though accepting the above postulates, people are at times the subject of feelings, drives, and actions contrary to respectful interaction with others. Society has, therefore, created criminal laws, codified through the centuries, with the purpose of controlling the deviant and impulsive behavior of some of its members in order to maintain, in as much as possible, societal homeostasis. Ethical principles, such as beneficence and non-maleficence, especially in a democratic society, are basic to legal systems whose purpose is to dispense justice in its various courts of law, where victims and miscreants, represented by their respective advocates, contend over guilt and exculpation. The majority of criminal cases involve mentally competent persons, who maliciously do not conform to the requirements of the law and, furthermore, often do not conform to basic moral values. A small percentage of those who break the law suffer from a severe mental disorder, which, if present at the time of a crime, may annul or greatly diminish their mental capacity to appreciate the nature, quality and consequences of their criminal behavior or their capacity to conform to the requirements of the law. These persons are allowed by the law to enter an exculpatory plea and to attempt to prove at trial that they were legally insane at the time of an alleged offense. There is, in addition, a substantial cohort of persons who suffer from a severe personality disorder for whom entering a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity in United States courts at present is typically a futile exercise, even though their behavior at the time of their alleged crime was bizarre, confused and irrational. The futility of their plea stems from the practical reality that their disorder is not recognized as a mental illness.They cannot take advantage of the insanity plea because of the prevailing legal view that they cannot meet its threshold criterion. Even if they were in a court that would allow them to surmount that hurdle, they would still be subjected to exceptionally strict scrutiny.It is the argument of this thesis that, in regard to individuals suffering from a severe personality disorder, in the United States the criminal law operates if not from unfounded prejudice certainly from a foundation that disregards current scientific knowledge. The premise underlying this argument is that persons with a severe personality disorder (many of whom are capable of only marginal functioning in daily life), under severe stress, may at times undergo a personality disintegration that is tantamount to a frank psychotic episode, which should make them eligible for an insanity plea. However, United States courts, including the United States Supreme Court, have held explicitly that criminal defendants have no due process right to 2 how the insanity defense is framed or worded, what sorts of conditions it may cover or exclude, or even whether they may have the benefit of an insanity defense at all—or any number of other exculpatory concepts. (See, e.g. Montana v. Egelhoff, 518 U.S. 37 (1996); Clark v. Arizona, 126 S. Ct. 2709 (2006)). Elementary fairness suggests they ought to be allowed to assert their non-accountability in the context of an insanity defense or any other defense. Of course, it is well known that offenders at times attempt to malinger mental disorders, or to greatly exaggerate any existing mental pathology. That is a risk that is run with any offender. However, it is better to free ten guilty people than to convict one innocent one. It serves as the justification for requiring, that is, an extraordinarily high standard of proof (beyond a reasonable doubt) in criminal prosecutions. The argument of this thesis is that the preclusion to plead insanity or the non-credibility of those rare personalitydisordered offenders who are allowed to enter the plea, is based on socio-political factors rather than psychological and psychiatric ones

Do Ectomycorrhizal Mutualists Influence Douglas-firResistance to Defoliation by the Western Spruce Budworm ?

USDA Forest Service Research and DevelopmentNorthern Arizona UniversityProceedings : IUFRO Kanazawa 2003 "Forest Insect Population Dynamics and Host Influences"., Scedule:14－19 September 2003, Vemue: Kanazawa Citymonde Hotel, Kanazawa, Japan, Joint metting of IUFRO working groups : 7.01.02 Tree resistance to Insects | 7.03.06 Integrated management of forset defoloating insects | 7.03.07 Population dynamics of forest insects, Sponsored by: IUFRO-J | Ishikawa Prefecture | Kanazawa City | 21st-COE Program of Kanazawa University, Editors: Kamata, Naoto | Liebhold, Nadrew M. | Quiring, Dan T. | Clancy, Karen M

The eye contact effect: mechanisms and development

The ‘eye contact effect’ is the phenomenon that perceived eye contact with another human face modulates certain aspects of the concurrent and/or immediately following cognitive processing. In addition, functional imaging studies in adults have revealed that eye contact can modulate activity in structures in the social brain network, and developmental studies show evidence for preferential orienting towards, and processing of, faces with direct gaze from early in life. We review different theories of the eye contact effect and advance a ‘fast-track modulator’ model. Specifically, we hypothesize that perceived eye contact is initially detected by a subcortical route, which then modulates the activation of the social brain as it processes the accompanying detailed sensory information

Safety and immunogenicity of Rift Valley fever MP-12 and arMP-12ΔNSm21/384 vaccine candidates in goats (Capra aegagrus hircus) from Tanzania

Vaccination of domestic ruminants is considered to be an effective strategy for protecting these animals against Rift Valley fever (RVF), but available vaccines have limitations. Therefore, the aim of this study was to determine the safety and immunogenicity of RVF virus (RVFV) mutagenesis passage 12 (MP-12) and arMP-12ΔNSm21/384 vaccine candidates in goats (Capra aegagrus hircus) in Tanzania. Goats were vaccinated intramuscularly with RVFV MP-12 or arMP-12ΔNSm21/384, and then on Day 87 post-vaccination (PV) all animals were revaccinated using the RVFV MP-12 vaccine candidate. Serum samples were collected from the animals before and after vaccination at various intervals to test for RVFV using a Vero cell culture assay and reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction and for RVFV-neutralising antibody using a plaque reduction neutralisation assay. Serum samples collected before vaccination on Days -14 and 0, and on Days 3, 4 and 5 PV were negative for RVFV and neutralising antibody. All animals remained healthy, and viremia was not detected in any of the animals. Rift Valley fever virus antibody was first detected on Day 5 PV at a 1:10 dilution in five of five animals vaccinated with the MP-12 vaccine and in five of eight animals vaccinated with arMP-12ΔNSm21/384. Titres then increased and were sustained at 1:40 to 1:640 through to Day 87 PV. All animals that were revaccinated on Day 87 PV with MP-12 developed antibody titres ranging from 1:160 to as high as 1:10 240 on Days 14 and 21 PV. Although the antibody titres for goats vaccinated with RVF MP-12 were slightly higher than titres elicited by the arMP-12ΔNSm21/384 vaccine, these findings demonstrated that both vaccines are promising candidates for the prevention of RVF among Tansanian goats

Atypical disengagement from faces and its modulation by the control of eye fixation in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

By using the gap overlap task, we investigated disengagement from faces and objects in children (9–17 years old) with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and its neurophysiological correlates. In typically developing (TD) children, faces elicited larger gap effect, an index of attentional engagement, and larger saccade-related event-related potentials (ERPs), compared to objects. In children with ASD, by contrast, neither gap effect nor ERPs differ between faces and objects. Follow-up experiments demonstrated that instructed fixation on the eyes induces larger gap effect for faces in children with ASD, whereas instructed fixation on the mouth can disrupt larger gap effect in TD children. These results suggest a critical role of eye fixation on attentional engagement to faces in both groups

Avaliação das premissas do Programa de Reestruturação e Ajuste Fiscal e seus impactos para a situação fiscal dos Estados brasileiros

O estudo possui dois objetivos, a saber: discutir as premissas inerentes aos programas de reestruturação e ajuste fiscal (PAF) firmados entre a União e os Estados brasileiros; e propor uma equação formal da relação dívida financeira/receita que garanta para esta a convergência para a meta prevista nos contratos. Para dar conta dos objetivos realizouse revisão da legislação pertinente, a partir da qual foi formalizada matematicamente a equação de convergência. Os resultados indicam que os Estados que possuírem relação dívida financeira/receita líquida real inferior ou igual a 2,50, em 2009, tendem a cumprir a meta de redução de endividamento prevista pelo PAF, em 20 anos. Aponta-se também o desvio das hipóteses do PAF causado pela indexação da dívida ao IGP

Normal perception of Mooney faces in developmental prosopagnosia: evidence from the N170 component and rapid neural adaptation

Individuals with developmental prosopagnosia (DP) have a severe difficulty recognizing the faces of known individuals in the absence of any history of neurological damage. These recognition problems may be linked to selective deficits in the holistic/configural processing of faces. We used two-tone Mooney images to study the processing of faces versus non-face objects in DP when it is based on holistic information (or the facial gestalt) in the absence of obvious local cues about facial features. A rapid adaptation procedure was employed for a group of 16 DPs. Naturalistic photographs of upright faces were preceded by upright or inverted Mooney faces or by Mooney houses. DPs showed face-sensitive N170 components in response to Mooney faces versus houses, and N170 amplitude reductions for inverted as compared to upright Mooney faces. They also showed the typical pattern of N170 adaptation effects, with reduced N170 components when upright naturalistic test faces were preceded by upright Mooney faces, demonstrating that the perception of Mooney and naturalistic faces recruits shared neural populations. Our findings demonstrate that individuals with DP can utilize global information about face configurations for categorical discriminations between faces and non-face objects, and suggest that face processing deficits emerge primarily at more fine-grained higher level stages of face perception