This magnetic resonance imaging study is designed to obtain relevant implications for criminal justice and explores the effective connectivity underlying expertise. Laypersons and experts considered sentences for remorseful and remorseless defendants, respectively, with and without mitigation, in hypothetical murder cases. Two groups revealed no differential activation. However, dynamic causal modeling analysis found distinct patterns of connectivity associated with subjects' expertise and mitigating factors. In sentencing for remorseful defendants, laypersons showed increased strength in all bidirectional connections among activated regions of Brodmann area (BA) 32, BA23, the right posterior insula, and the precuneus. In contrast, legal experts sentenced based on mitigation reasoning, showed increased strength only in the bidirectional connection between the insula and the precuneus. When sentencing for remorseless ones without mitigation, both laypersons and experts increased the connection strength, but with reverse directionality, between regions; legal experts strengthened connectivity from BA10 to other regions, that is, the right anterior insula and BA23, but the directionality was reversed in laypersons. In addition, the strength of connection to BA32 and BA10 was correlated with changes in punishments by mitigating factors. This is a crucial result that establishes the validity of the connectivity estimates, which were uninformed by the independent (behavioral) differences in the severity of punishment.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhab484 | DOI Listing |
Health Expect
February 2025
Osteopathy Sciences Research Unit (URSO), Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Brussels, Belgium.
Objective: Chronic musculoskeletal pain (CMSP) is frequent in chronic diseases, decreasing the quality of life of these patients. In a survey conducted in Belgium in 2019, chronic pain was named by patients as the main factor of complexity in their lives. The objective of our research was to provide elements to understand why and how CMSP contributes to the complexity of these people's lives.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFData Brief
December 2024
Centre of Marine Sciences (CCMAR), Campus de Gambelas, University of Algarve, Faro 8005-139, Portugal.
The dataset gathers available regulations of human activities and protection levels of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) of the European Union (EU). The MPA list and polygons were extracted from the MPA database of the European Environment Agency (EEA) and completed with available zoning systems (all were filtered for their marine area reported under the Marine Strategy Framework Directive). Fully-overlapping MPAs were merged.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArch Public Health
December 2024
Faculty of Medicine, Université Libre de Bruxelles, 808, Route de Lennik, Brussels, CP630, 1070, Belgium.
Background: The objective of this paper was to determine whether the medicolegal assessment of injured and disabled persons is based on the biopsychosocial model of disability proposed by the International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health.
Methods: We searched for the word disability and other keywords, occurring alone or in combination as well as the meaning given to the word "disability" in two Belgian legal databases (JURA and STRADALEX) for the period from 1960 to 2020.
Results: The use of the term disability has increased over time, more so from 2001 to 2010, in areas of public health law, labor relations, and personal injury law.
Int J Ment Health Addict
December 2024
Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada.
This study examined differences in quit attempts, 1-month quit success, and vaping status at follow-up among a cohort of 3709 daily smokers with and without depression, anxiety, and regular alcohol use who participated in both the 2018 and 2020 International Tobacco Control Four Country Smoking and Vaping (ITC 4CV) Surveys. At baseline, a survey with validated screening tools was used to classify respondents as having no, or one or more of the following: 1) depression, 2) anxiety, and 3) regular alcohol use. Multivariable adjusted regression analyses were used to examine whether baseline (2018) self-report conditions were associated with quit attempts; quit success; and vaping status by follow-up (2020).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArch Sex Behav
December 2024
Gynecology Division, Department of Pediatrics, Obstetrics and Gynecology, Geneva University Hospitals, Boulevard de la Cluse 30, 1205, Geneva, Switzerland.
An increasing number of women are undergoing female genital cosmetic surgery (FGCS). Labiaplasty, the most commonly performed FGCS, consists of a surgical procedure to decrease the inner labia size so that no or less tissue protrudes beyond the outer labia. Anatomically, it is similar to female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) Type 2a.
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