What brain mechanisms influence decision-making about the severity that we impose on a punishment? This has been the central axis of the research carried out by a team of scientists from Harvard University (USA) and which has been published in the journal Nature Neuroscience .
For the study, the researchers had the participation of 30 volunteers (20 men and 10 women) with an average age of 23 years , who took brain images during a decision-making process for a punishment. The participants listened to a series of arguments and data that described an alleged crime where there was death, mutilation, physical assault and damage to property that they later had to value from 0 to 10 according to the severity of the punishment. Furthermore, in half of the stories the event was identified as clearly intentional and the rest as involuntary, offering two different versions of each scenario: the first with an objective description and the second with graphic evidence.
The analysis of the results showed that the deliberate manipulation of language to expose an event in a more gruesome way or expose clear images of an event , led to the imposition of a more severe punishment if the participant in question believed that the incident was clearly intentional.
The researchers found that the brain amidgala, one of the neuronal areas involved in processing emotions, was activated when volunteers viewed images with great cruelty . However, this effect was only appreciated in brain scans when the volunteer knew that there was intentionality in the act, showing for the first time with a clear neural base thanks to what could be observed in the amygdala, that the decision to impose a more severe punishment or less harsh has to do with our perception of intentionality.
