Many argue that psychopaths suffer from a stable pattern of neurobiological dysfunctions that should be taken into account in sentencing and treatment decisions. These arguments are compelling only if the neuroimaging data are consistent. It is possible that such consistency is created by reviewers who ignore contradictory findings. To evaluate this, we examined how accurately forensic literature reported neuroimaging findings on psychopaths in a theoretically central structure – the amygdala. We found that forensic commentators consistently under-reported null-findings, creating a misleading (...) impression of the data’s consistency. We discuss this misrepresentation from the perspectives of spin and neurohype, and examine their causes and consequences. (shrink)

Remembering is one of the most characteristic and most puzzling of human activities. Personal memory, in particular - the ability mentally to travel back into the past, as leading psychologist Endel Tulving puts it - often has intense emotional or moral significance: it is perhaps the most striking manifestation of the peculiar way human beings are embedded in time, and of our limited but genuine freedom from our present environment and our immediate needs. Memory has been significant in the history (...) of philosophy as much in relation to ethics and to epistemology as in theories of psyche, mind, and self. (shrink)