Hope everyone did well on the midterm and had a nice, relaxing weekend to recuperate. Here's a quick little article to ease you back into normality.The authors of this study wanted to look at the effects of testosterone, so, in a clever bit of experimental control, they used an entirely female sample. Men's normal testosterone levels vary too much to extract any reliable information about their effects, but women have low enough levels to be able to control them entirely by injection. By doing just this and having the women rate faces displaying varying levels of emotion, they found that testosterone reduces our sensitivity to the emotions of fear and anger. This would have direct ramifications on a person's ability to use social learning: if a disapproving look is harder to discern, then it might be harder to learn not to kick your friends. The possibility, then, is that this determines a lifelong disadvantage, where a person continually falls further and further behind of his peers in social and moral development, possibly resulting in criminal behavior.
To tie these findings in to some developmental literature, researchers who study bullying in children and adolescents find that one common factor among many bullies is that they have trouble interpreting emotions. They'll see someone smiling and assume they're being mocked, for instance. Obviously, these two findings raise an obvious hypothesis: bullies are more likely to have high testosterone levels. The testosterone doesn't make them more aggressive, per se, but it does increase their exposure to situations where aggression seems to them to be a reasonable response.
In fact, there's very little to link aggression and testosterone by a direct causal mechanism. So it might then be asked (to bring it back to legal applications) what do these findings mean for defenses based on rage? You might recall that people have tried to get off on charges by claiming they were not responsible for their actions due to temporary chemical imbalances, such as the infamous "twinkie defense." A sudden surge in testosterone might impair a person's ability to reason and function socially, but is not likely to directly trigger aggression. How much control do people have over their own behavior, and how liable should they be over how they react to situations?
One more dilemma that might be added to the four in the textbook could be that between Biological Determinism and Free Will: psychology assumes that there are many chemicals, genes, developmental patterns, etc. that determine how we behave; in the legal system, however, it is assumed that people have the ability to determine and direct their behavior except for very rare circumstances (i.e. <1% of cases result in a successful NGRI verdict). Has the line between these two positions been drawn in the right place?
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