Austin on Understanding the Neurobiology of Emotion @SturmCOL @WFULawReview

Debra S. Austin, University of Denver College of Law, is publishing Windmills of Your Mind: Understanding the Neurobiology of Emotion in the Wake Forest Law Review. Here is the abstract.

Intelligence has been parsed into categories including general intelligence (IQ), which is cognitive capacity, and emotional intelligence (EQ), describing social competency. Perhaps the most important new form of intelligence that lawyers can cultivate is neuro-intelligence (NQ), which is an understanding of the most important tool a lawyer must deploy – the brain. NQ can help us understand how emotions that arise in the brain are often experienced in the windmills of the mind as “words that jangle in your head”. Boomers will enjoy the Noel Harrison version of Windmills of your Mind, which won the 1968 Academy Award for Best Original Song, while Millennials should check out the Sting version from the 1999 remake of The Thomas Crowne Affair. This article describes the importance of developing mental strength, and challenges lawyers to enhance their understanding of the role emotion plays in their relationships with colleagues, clients, employees, and constituents. Brain Literacy defines key components of the emotional and thinking brains. The process of memory formation is illustrated in Learning and Memory. Stress and Cognition outlines the harmful impacts of stress on brain health and mental performance. Recent research results are reviewed in Law Students and Lawyers are at Risk for Impaired Well-being. The brain’s automated response to emotional stimuli is detailed in Emotion. Emotion Regulation explores methods for responding to emotion, and the difference between survival and attachment emotions. Emotion and Decision-Making depicts the process that helps us determine what outfit to wear, what rewards we are strong enough to defer to meet our long-term goals, and how public policy is shaped by emotion. Finally, Interventions to Strengthen the Mind links mental strength to happiness, explains three obstacles to developing mental strength that are commonly experienced by law students and lawyers, and provides ten practices that can promote mental strength. This article proposes that law students, legal educators, and lawyers will benefit from developing their NQ, as well as their understanding of the impact of emotion and stress on performance, and the how building mental strength can empower their professional and personal lives. With greater NQ, individuals can improve well-being and performance, and organizations can leverage healthy human beings to enhance capacity and innovation.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Unconscious States: Is There Anybody There? Dr. Andrew Hanrahan, Speaker, St. Mary's University, March 22, 2018 @CBET_StMarys @thomgiddens

From Trevor G. Stammers, Reader in Bioethics, Director, Centre for Bioethics and Emerging Technologies, St. Mary's University

On Thursday, March 22, 5:45 p.m.-7:30 p.m., Senior Common Room, St. Mary's University, Twickenham TW1 4SX

Unconscious States: Is there anybody there?

Dr Andrew Hanrahan, Consultant in Neurorehabilitation, Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability, Putney
 Disorders of consciousness arise from sudden profound brain injury, and instantaneously deprive that person of all awareness of self and social connectedness. While these persons are typically totally unaware of the catastrophe that has befallen them, it is left to the families now stunned into a period of intense loss, to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives.
When this situation persists and hope of recovery gradually wanes, realisation dawns and an array of coping mechanisms are displayed. These range from anger to ambiguous loss and back again. Resolution of these feelings, crystallisation of patients' previously expressed wishes, a re-statement of the clinical possibility or futility of treatments, lead inevitably to questions of withdrawal of these treatments, previously reserved to the Courts, but now possibly resolved without a legal ruling.This then affects staff, external agencies and it matters tremendously to society in which we all live, and die. This talk will hope to inform, yet stimulate thought and discussion.

The event is free.  Further details contact trevor.stammers@stmarys.ac.uk

Dr Trevor G Stammers BSc, MA, FRCGP, DRCOG, FHEA, Dip Psych.
Reader in Bioethics,
Director, Centre for Bioethics and Emerging Technologies,
Editor, The New Bioethics  www.tandfonline.com/loi/ynbi20
Room E201, St Mary’s University, Waldegrave Road, Twickenham, TW1 4SX Tel 0208 240 4310

Vaughn on Susanna Blumenthal, Law and the Modern Mind

Lea B. Vaughn, University of Washington School of Law, is publishing Book Review - (Of Susanna L. Blumenthal, Law and the Modern Mind: Consciousness and Responsibility in American Legal Culture (2016)) in volume 67 of the Journal of Legal Education (Autumn 2017). Here is the abstract.

In a masterful book titled Law and the Modern Mind, Susanna Blumenthal simultaneously describes the battles among scientists, doctors, and jurists in the period following the Revolutionary War and up through the Gilded Age, and takes on traditional scholarship in legal history as to who this person or “mind” is. Her study not only provides an alternative account of the formation of American character, but also provides a series of detailed portraits of the various turning points in the formation of that character, and the legal determination of capable, accountable personhood. This review essay initially discusses Blumenthal’s approach to legal history and the challenge she presents to traditional scholarship. The second section provides an overview of Blumenthal’s methodology, which draws on a breathtaking base of source materials; she weaves hundreds of cases, treatises, and biographical notes into her observations. Finally, this review considers what is one of the most powerful and important contributions of her book—an in-depth analysis of the intersection of law and medicine in the period under study. The review points out ways in which Blumenthal’s insights can be brought to bear on modern conversations involving law, genetics, and neuroscience.

Download the book review from SSRN at the link.

Jewel on Neurorhetoric, Race, and the Law @ljewel

Lucy A. Jewel, University of Tennessee College of Law, is publishing Neurorhetoric, Race, and the Law: Toxic Neural Pathways and Healing Alternatives in volume 76 of the Maryland Law Review (2017). Here is the abstract.

Neurorhetoric is the study of how rhetoric shapes the human brain. At the forefront of science and communication studies, neurorhetoric challenges many preconceptions about how humans respond to persuasive stimuli. Neurorhetoric can be applied to a multiplicity of relevant legal issues, including the topic of this Maryland Law Review Symposium Issue: race and advocacy. After detailing the neuroscientific and cognitive theories that underlie neurorhetoric, this Essay theorizes ways in which neurorhetoric intersects with the law, advocacy, and race. This Essay explores how toxic racial stereotypes and categories become embedded in the human brain and what can be done about it.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Star Wars As a Window Into the Psychopathic Mind

J. Wesley Judd discusses the use of Star Wars to study psychological disorders in an article for Pacific Standard. Lando Calrissian as a gambling addict? Well, that's certainly one possibility. Darth Vader as a sufferer from PTSD, or someone with borderline personality disorder? There I have to disagree. The guy just wants to rule the world--or the universe. Or else he's a Gray Eminence. ;) Nothing difficult to understand there--move along, move along--most of us run into his type all the time. IMHO, he doesn't have a personality disorder. He's ambitious and he knows what people with personality disorders want to hear. Now, the Emperor--there's someone with a personality disorder. More about the use of Star Wars for such purposes in a paper by Ryan C. W. Hall and Susan Hatters Friedman, Psychopathology in a Galaxy Far, Far Away: the use of Star Wars' Dark Side in Teaching, 10 Academic Psychiatry 1 (May 2015) (subscription may be required).

"Old Hickory" and a New Diagnosis

Donald Matthew Mender, Yale University School of Medicine, has published Boundary Violations of the U.S. Constitution: The Case of Old Hickory in The Neurobiology of Social Disruption: Intersectional Perspectives on Psychiatry, Pathology, and Society (Potomac Institute Press, 2015). Here is the abstract.

Object relations, the developmental neurobiology of attachment, and critical theory are enlisted in order to illuminate ways that the poorly bounded psychodynamics of dysfunctional American political leaders resonate with mass constituencies to promote public policies violating checks and balances specified by the U. S. Constitution. A case study of Andrew Jackson is used as an illustration.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

The Establishment Clause, Religious Symbols, Endorsement, and Coercion

Claudia E. Haupt, Columbia University Law School, is publishing Active Symbols in 55 Boston College Law Review (2014). Here is the abstract.

Visual representations of religious symbols continue to puzzle judges. Lacking empirical data on how images communicate, courts routinely dismiss visual religious symbols as “passive.” This Article challenges the notion that symbols are passive, introducing insights from cognitive neuroscience research to Establishment Clause theory and doctrine. It argues that visual symbolic messages can be at least as active as textual messages. Therefore, religious messages should be assessed in a medium-neutral manner in terms of their communicative impact, that is, irrespective of their textual or visual form.
Providing a new conceptual framework for assessing religious symbolic messages, this Article reconceptualizes coercion and endorsement — the dominant competing approaches to symbolic messages in Establishment Clause theory — as matters of degree on a spectrum of communicative impact. This focus on communicative impact reconciles the approaches to symbolic speech in the Free Speech and Establishment Clause contexts and allows Establishment Clause theory to more accurately account for underlying normative concerns.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

The Reason For Reasoning

Does Homo jurisconsultus represent an evolutionary milestone? Check out Mark D. White's semi-tongue in cheek post at Psychology Today, discussing a new paper by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber (via The Literary Table). Drs. Mercier and Sperber investigate why humans have developed reasoning ability. What is it for? And here I thought it was just to make the decision among the Kindle, the Nook, and the Kobo that much easier.