@article{oai:repo.qst.go.jp:00047225,
 author = {Yamada, Makiko and F., Camerer Colin and Fujie, Saori and Kato, Motoichiro and Matsuda, Tetsuya and Takano, Harumasa and Ito, Hiroshi and Suhara, Tetsuya and Takahashi, Hidehiko and 山田 真希子 and 藤江 沙織 and 加藤 元一郎 and 松田 哲也 and 高野 晴成 and 伊藤 浩 and 須原 哲也 and 高橋 英彦},
 issue = {759},
 journal = {Nature Communications  (Online Only URL:http://www.nature.com/ncomms/index.html)},
 month = {Mar},
 note = {In sentencing guilty defendants, jurors and judges weigh 'mitigating circumstances', which create sympathy for a defendant. Here we use functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure neural activity in ordinary citizens who are potential jurors, as they decide on mitigation of punishment for murder. We found that sympathy activated regions associated with mentalising and moral conflict (dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, precuneus and temporo-parietal junction). Sentencing also activated precuneus and anterior cingulate cortex, suggesting that mitigation is based on negative affective responses to murder, sympathy for mitigating circumstances and cognitive control to choose numerical punishments. Individual differences on the inclination to mitigate, the sentence reduction per unit of judged sympathy, correlated with activity in the right middle insula, an area known to represent interoception of visceral states. These results could help the legal system understand how potential jurors actually decide, and contribute to growing knowledge about whether emotion and cognition are integrated sensibly in difficult judgments.},
 title = {Neural circuits in the brain that are activated when mitigating criminal sentences},
 volume = {3},
 year = {2012}
}