For the Defense - Volume 1, Issue 3 - 2016 - 39

correctly identified the face as being from the original set 75 percent of the time when the intervening picture was emotional and 80 percent of the time when the picture was nonemotional. The emotional pictures were associated with increased activity in "hot" brain regions responsible for emotions (e.g., the amygdala) and reduced activity in the "cold" brain regions responsible for goal-oriented and decision-making behaviors (e.g., the prefrontal cortex), suggesting that the basis on which people make decisions is directly influenced by the nature of the material to which they have been exposed. The researchers then looked at the fMRI results separately for trials on which correct and incorrect recognitions had been made. As the researchers expected, the decrease in the "cold" regions was largest for those trials on which errors were made. Other neurological studies have found that during decisions surrounding moral judgments, the emotional rather than the cognitive areas of the brain are more active.13 Not only does the gruesomeness of evidence produce different patterns of brain activity, but it also translates into differences in punitiveness. Douglas, Lyons, and Ogloff had participants read a fictitious trial transcript about a man killing his ex-girlfriend by stabbing, including ambiguous testimony from 10 witnesses.14 All participants saw a series of photographs, but the experimental group saw additional photographs in either color or black and white that included images of the actual homicide scene and the woman's mutilated body. Participants who received the additional photos were more likely to claim to have been affected by the photos and claimed that the photos highlighted the severity of the crime. The participants who were exposed to the additional, graphic photos were more than twice as likely to vote for guilty when compared to the control group. In a similar study, Bright and Goodman-Delahunty found that participants who experienced gruesome photographic evidence reported greater emotional responses and were more likely to convict than those who did not view the photographs.15 This cannot be "fixed" or ameliorated by proper judicial instructions to ignore the emotional content of graphic or gruesome evidence. Research has shown that instructions to ignore certain types of information are ineffective at best16 and, at worst, make the information more salient17 due to an ironic process or rebound effect.18 Results from a recent study demonstrate how judges' admonitions to refrain from basing decisions on emotional and gruesome evidence fail to achieve their goal.19 Participants read a manuscript based on an actual case in which a husband is accused of murdering his wife by drowning her in the bath tub. The researchers took care to use verbatim public records and the Standard instructions to simulate the actual role of a juror as closely as possible. Some mock jurors received the Standard pattern jury instructions and some received these instructions with an added admonition: This includes biases or prejudice resulting from heightened emotionality experienced throughout review of the evidence. ... Sometimes, evidence can manipulate jurors' emotions. If emotional, jurors have less mental energy available to make decisions logically. To keep the defendant's Vol. 1, Issue 3 | For The Defense 39

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of For the Defense - Volume 1, Issue 3 - 2016