Violent Injuires: Studies from the social neuroscience perspective

Speaker : Dr. Chenyi Chen (Assistant Professor, Graudate Institute of Injury Prevention and Control, Taipei Medical University) 

Date : 2018.04.27 (Fri) 15:00-17:00

Location : 12 Floor, Conference room, Da-an Branch, Taipei Medical University  

Abstract: The leading risk of death throughout the prime of life is not disease. It is violence. If you survive into old age you will most likely die from disease, but according to CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) statistics for deaths in the United States for the year 2014, life ends at the hand of another human so frequently. From early childhood through middle-age, homicide is the third to 5th most common cause of death in all age brackets between 1-44 years. Briefly overview, in 1990, much of the work on human aggression, violence, and psychopathy was based on cognitive models with a significant stress on the suggestions of atypical attention (e.g., Gorenstein & Newman, 1980). This was beginning to change by the mid-1990s with a greater emphasis on neurobiology and emotional dysfunction (e.g. Blair, 1995; Patrick, 1994). The role of systems linked to top-down attention and response control (dorsal and rostral medial frontal cortex, lateral frontal cortex and anterior insula/inferior frontal cortex) are importantly involved in aggression/violence, particularly aggression in response to provocation (Blair and Lee, 2013). In this presentation, I will examine the issue of violence with cognitive neuroscience approach from the studies of pain empathy in healthy subjects to aberrant empathetic responses in violent psychopaths.