Criminal Intent and Responsibility: Exploring Conscious and Unconscious Motivation

23 October 2010 9am - 23 October 2010 4pm

Venue: Royal Society of Medicine, 1 Wimpole Street, London, W1G 0AE

This conference will explore the subtle interface between conscious and unconscious motivation with respect to criminal intent and behaviour. While many neuroscientists stress the role of neurochemicals in the brain as a key driver of behaviour, our legal system is based on the ethical notion of personal responsibility, albeit to different degrees. This sets up an interesting tension between differing accounts of behaviour and motivation and poses the intriguing question: to what extent are we really responsible for our actions? This question will be examined by our panel of distinguished speakers from four different angles: social psychology, clinical hypnosis, neuroscience and law. The resulting discussion will give us a clearer and probably more complex understanding of the relationship between inner psychological and outer social factors. This will have significant implications in all four of the fields we will be covering.

£75 for SMN members and RSM members

£85 for non-members

View pdf leaflet including booking form


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

Conference Programme

9:00 Registration

9:30 Introductions – Jacky Owens, Claudia Nielsen

9:45 Prof. Sean Spence: A Neuroscientific Perspective on Criminal Responsibility

11:00 Coffee

11:45 Lord Justice Toulson: Responsibility under the Criminal Law

1:00 Lunch

2:00 Prof. David Canter: Bridging the Gap between the Psychological Sciences and the Law: In the Kingdom of the Blind is the One-Eyed Man King?

3:15 Prof. Graham Wagstaff: Hypnotic Automatism Reconsidered: Are any of us responsible for our actions?

4:30 Tea

5:00 Plenary dialogue

6:00 Conclusions

 

 

Speakers:

Professor David Canter is most widely known as the pioneer of ‘Offender Profiling’ in the UK. This grew out of his work in Architectural and Environmental Psychology and his studies of behaviour in emergencies and industrial safety. Since his initial work with the police in 1985 he has assisted over 150 criminal investigations and contributed expert evidence in many cases, being called by both the defence and the prosecution, as well as contributing to government enquiries. Being convinced that any contributions made to investigations and the legal process must have an empirical, scientific basis led him to create the discipline of Investigative Psychology. He has mapped out this new field over the last quarter of a century, opening up thinking on the psychology of criminal actions and the ways in which this can inform investigations and the courts. The emergence of this new field is reviewed in his award-winning popular book  CriminalShadows, and more recently Mapping Murder. It is covered in detail in the widely acclaimed, current textbook Investigative Psychology: Offender Profiling and the Analysis of Criminal Behaviour which he wrote with his colleague Dr Youngs.

Professor Sean Spence is Professor of General Adult Psychiatry at the University of Sheffield, where he holds a MRC Career Establishment Grant. He was previously De Witt – Wallace visiting research fellow at Cornell University, New York (1999) and MRC Clinical Training Fellow on the MRC Cyclotron Unit, Hammersmith Hospital (1995 – 1998). He has been awarded the Royal College of Psychiatrists Research Prize and Medal (1997) and Royal Society of Medicine Section of Psychiatry Essay Prize (1997). He studied Medicine at Guy’s Hospital, London, where he acquired an intercalated BSc in Psychology and won the Gillespie Prize in Psychological Medicine (1986). His principal research interest is in the regulation of voluntary behaviour (volition) in healthy subjects and those affected by neuropsychiatric disease. He is the author of The Actor’s Brain: Exploring the Cognitive Neuroscience of Free Will (Oxford University Press, 2009). In 2007, a Channel 4 television series entitled ‘Lie Lab’ was devoted to his work on the neuroimaging of deception. His clinical work is with the homeless.

Lord Justice Toulson, is currently a judge of the Court of Appeal. He studied law at Jesus College, Cambridge and was called to the bar in 1969. He practised as a barrister from 1969-1996. He was appointed QC in 1986 and a High Court Judge in 1996. He was presiding judge on the Western Circuit from 1997-2002 and Chairman of the Law Commission of England and Wales from 2002-06. During this time the Commission carried out a major review of the law of murder. He was appointed to the Court of Appeal in 2007 and is the co-author of a legal textbook on confidentiality.

Professor Graham Wagstaff is Professor of Cognitive Social Psychology at Liverpool University. He teachesmainly in the areas of social and forensic psychology, and has specialist research interests in the areas of hypnosis, forensic interviewing, eyewitness testimony and the psychology of justice. He sits on the editorial boards of five scientific journals, has authored two scholarly books, one on hypnosis, the other on the psychology and philosophy of justice, and has authored or co-authored numerous scientific and other academic publications. He has delivered invited addresses to groups including The International and European Societies of Hypnosis, and the British Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2008 he received an award from the American Psychological Society, Division 30, for scientific contributions to the study of hypnosis. In addition to his academic work, he advises the police and other legal experts on various aspects of hypnosis, forensic interviewing, and eyewitness testimony, and has acted as an expert witness in the courts in a variety of legal cases involving these matters. He has also appeared on national and international radio and television on numerous occasions with regard to his research.