Neurophilosophical perspectives of neuroimaging in forensic psychiatry—giving way to a paradigm shift?

Forensic psychiatry is concerned with the relationshipbetween psychiatric abnormalities and legal violationsand crimes. Due to the lack of available biological criteria,evaluation and therapy in forensic psychiatry have so farbeen restricted to psychosocial and mental criteria ofoffenders’ personalities. Recent advances in neurosciencesallow a closer approach to the neural correlates of person-ality, moral judgments and decision-making. We proposeto discuss the introduction of biological criteria in the fieldof forensic psychiatry and to establish rules as to whatextent such biological criteria will be a better and morereliable choice in judging mentally ill criminals by using allavailable information that can be obtained by biologicalmeans.Psychosocial and subjective criteria in forensic evaluationwill be more and more accomplished by biopsychosocialand objective criteria. The responsibility of having com-mitted a criminal act will no longer be exclusively definedby judging free and voluntary decision-making, but ratherby brain–behavior relationships. What is often referred toas psychosocially determined mental processes thus couldbe complemented by estimating the degree of biopsycho-socially determined neural processes. We conclude thatsuch a process could contribute to a paradigm shift inforensic psychiatry, which will have profound implicationsfor offenders, forensic psychologists and psychiatrists, thelaw and society in general. Copyright # 2008 John Wiley &Sons, Ltd.Behavioral Sciences and the LawBehav. Sci. Law 26: 113–130 (2008)Published online in Wiley InterScience(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/bsl.798