By Tiffany A. Greenwood, Gregory A. Light, Neal R. Swerdlow, Monica E. Calkins, Michael F. Green, Raquel E. Gur, Ruben C. Gur, Laura C. Lazzeroni, Keith H. Nuechterlein, Ann Olincy, Allen D. Radant, Larry J. Seidman, Larry J. Siever, Jeremy M. Silverman, William S. Stone, Catherine A. Sugar, Debby W. Tsuang, Ming T. Tsuang, Bruce I. Turetsky, Robert Freedman, and David L. Braff | The American Journal of Psychiatry | August 10, 2015

Abstract:

Method:

A total of 296 nuclear families consisting of a schizophrenia proband, at least one unaffected sibling, and both parents underwent a comprehensive endophenotype and clinical characterization. The Family Interview for Genetic Studies was administered to all participants and used to obtain convergent psychiatric symptom information for additional first-degree relatives. Among the families, 97 were multiply affected, and 96 were singletons.

Results:

Both PPI and P50 gating displayed substantially increased heritability in the 97 multiply affected families (47% and 36%, respectively) compared with estimates derived from the entire sample of 296 families (29% and 20%, respectively). However, no evidence for heritability was observed for either measure in the 96 singleton families. Schizophrenia probands derived from the multiply affected families also displayed a significantly increased severity of clinical symptoms compared with those from singleton families.

Conclusions:

By Virginia Gewin | Nature | October 15, 2015

In October 2006, Bradley Waldroup attacked his estranged wife with a machete and shot her friend to death. In the subsequent trial, his defence attorney argued that Waldroup had the ‘warrior’ gene — a genetic variant that has been linked to aggression. As a result, the defence argued, he was less able to control his behaviour than are people who do not have the variant.

Although he had been charged with first-degree murder of the friend and attempted first-degree murder of his wife, Waldroup was convicted in 2011 of voluntary manslaughter and attempted second-degree murder, and received a 32-year sentence. Had he been found guilty of the more-serious charges, he would have faced the death penalty. Waldroup’s conviction was due, at least in part, to the testimony of forensic psychiatrist William Bernet of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. News stories at the time quoted jurors as saying that the genetic evidence persuaded them that Waldroup could not fully control his actions. Bernet’s research had linked the genetic variant and a history of abuse during childhood—both of which Waldroup had—to an increased likelihood of violent behaviour.

The outcome outraged many in the US legal and scientific communities, who considered the genetic link much too distant to be used to establish guilt. “The leap from population studies of the ‘warrior gene’ to a single man and a single gene variant was absurd,” says Judith Edersheim, a lawyer-turned-psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. And the trial is not the only example of what she describes as “neuroscience run amok in the courtroom”. Continue reading »

CLBB’s Dr. Judith Edersheim and Judge Gertner were featured speakers at this year’s HUBweek, as part of the Perspectives in Healing: Women in Medicine series. Dr. Edersheim will headline the event titled, “Where the Brain and the Law Intersect”, on Sunday, October 4th, from 6-7 pm. Continue reading »

Click to enlarge poster.

The neuroscience of adolescent brain development has had increasing impact on American jurisprudence. The U.S. Supreme Court relied on this neuroscience in Roper v. Simmons (2005) in barring execution for capital crimes committed as a juvenile and in Miller v. Alabama (2012) in holding that mandatory life without possibility of parole for juveniles is also unconstitutional.

On Monday, September 28, 2015, CLBB and the Petrie-Flom Center assembled a panel of developmental scientists, clinicians, and legal scholars for a panel discussion examining the implications of developmental neuroscience for law in specific domains including death penalty mitigation for young adults over age 18 such as the Tsarnaev case, a developmentally informed view of Miranda and Competence to Stand Trial for juveniles, trial of youth as adults, and conditions of confinement in juvenile and adult incarceration.

The panel discussed the promises and perils for constitutional jurisprudence, legal and public policy reform, and trial practice of relying upon a complex body of science as it emerges. Scroll down to view complete video from the event.

This event is part of the Project on Law and Applied Neuroscience, a collaboration between the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. 

Continue reading »

By Laura Germine, Richard Russell, P. Matthew Bronstad, Gabriëlla A.M. Blokland, Jordan W. Smoller, Holum Kwok, Samuel E. Anthony, Ken Nakayama, Gillian Rhodes, and Jeremy B. Wilmer | Current Biology | October 1, 2015

Summary:

Although certain characteristics of human faces are broadly considered more attractive (e.g., symmetry, averageness), people also routinely disagree with each other on the relative attractiveness of faces. That is, to some significant degree, beauty is in the “eye of the beholder.” Here, we investigate the origins of these individual differences in face preferences using a twin design, allowing us to estimate the relative contributions of genetic and environmental variation to individual face attractiveness judgments or face preferences. We first show that individual face preferences (IP) can be reliably measured and are readily dissociable from other types of attractiveness judgments (e.g., judgments of scenes, objects). Next, we show that individual face preferences result primarily from environments that are unique to each individual. This is in striking contrast to individual differences in face identity recognition, which result primarily from variations in genes [1]. We thus complete an etiological double dissociation between two core domains of social perception (judgments of identity versus attractiveness) within the same visual stimulus (the face). At the same time, we provide an example, rare in behavioral genetics, of a reliably and objectively measured behavioral characteristic where variations are shaped mostly by the environment. The large impact of experience on individual face preferences provides a novel window into the evolution and architecture of the social brain, while lending new empirical support to the long-standing claim that environments shape individual notions of what is attractive.

Read the full article here.