People ’s Sense Of Control Over Their Actions Is Reduced At A Fundamental Level When They’re Angry Or Afraid

The findings lend some scientific legitimacy to the “I just lost it” defence By Matthew Warren During major bouts of anger or fear, people can end up taking extreme and sometimes violent actions. But they often say that, in the moment, they didn’t feel responsible for those actions – they “lost control” or “saw red”. In the UK, under certain circumstances, a person accused of murder can even claim that this “loss of control” led to them killing their victim. If successful, this defence can reduce charges to manslaughter. Now the first study of its kind suggests that there is some truth to these claims. Participants put into a fearful or angry state really do seem to have a reduced sense of agency, according to a paper published recently in Experimental Brain Research, raising questions about the accountability of people going through extreme emotions. Julia Christensen and colleagues at University College London assessed participants’ sense of agency while they were in different emotional states. To do this, they used a measure of a perceptual distortion known as “intentional binding”. Intentional binding refers to the fact that we perceive our deliberate physical actions as occurring closer in time to their sensory consequences than was really the case.  In the standard task demonstrating this effect, participants press a button while watching a clock hand which is constantly rotating. They have to say what time was indicated by the clock...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Emotion Forensic Source Type: blogs