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Raine et Al (1997) - Coggle Diagram
Raine et Al (1997)
AO1
Aim
To study brain activity in murderers and non-murderers using positron emission tomography to find out whether there were differences in areas thought to be involved in violent behaviour
Procedure
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part 1
Each participant carried out a practice test on the continuous performance task, 10 mins before the fluorodeoxyglucose tracer was injected
part 2
30 secs before the FDG tracer was injected the CPT was started so that brain activity was recorded beforehand
part 3
Participants carried on with the performance task where they had to focus on blurred numbers and target recognition was recorded
part 4
After 32 mins for the FDG uptake to occur the participant was taken for a PET scan of the head and images of slices of the brain were produced
Findings
Murderers had significantly less activity in the lateral, medial and pre-frontal cortical areas of the brain compared to the controls
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AO3
Application
Useful for society as it suggests that pre-dispositions for committing violent criminal acts could be identified using PET scans.
Validity
some variables well controlled - reducing confounding variables.
control group matched to experimental group on different participant variables.
CPT task is artificial lowering ecological validity.
study cannot show cause and effects. NGRIs may have developed their brain deficits after the killing, because of the stress of the event.
Reliability
PET scanning objective technique and results can be interpreted by more than one researcher -> give reliable findings
Generalisability
androcentric as it's mostly male therefore results can't be applied to the wider population especially women as men may have skewed the results in the study.
however, the sample is true to real life as statistically, men are more likely to show aggressive behaviour and it represents the imbalanced ratio of male criminals to female criminals in society.