Laureate Psychiatric Clinic and Hospital Conference Center- August 16, 2016
11:00am - 11:45 pm Registration and Lunch
12:00pm - 1:00 pm Program
“The Brain’s Moral Compass: Clues from Neuropsychology”
Daniel Tranel graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 1979, and then earned a PhD in clinical psychology at the University of Iowa in 1982. He completed postdoctoral training at Iowa under Drs. Arthur Benton and Antonio Damasio, and joined the faculty in the Department of Neurology in 1986. Tranel currently holds joint appointments as a Professor in the Department of Neurology and the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. He heads up the Benton Neuropsychology Laboratory, and he is Director of the Neuroscience PhD Program at Iowa. For the past two years, he has also served as the Associate Dean of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies in the Carver College of Medicine. Dr. Tranel studies the neural basis of higher order cognition and behavior, using the lesion method and functional neuroimaging in human participants. His work has been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Strokes, the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, the Office of Naval Research, and the Department of Defense, the James S. McDonnell Foundation, as well as the Kiwanis Foundation and other private foundations. He has published over 300 scholarly research articles, and his clinical and research work has provided new insights into the diagnosis and treatment of traumatic brain injury, Alzheimer’s disease, and mental health disorders.
Learning points:
1. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex is critical for social conduct and moral behavior.
2. Patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex develop impairments in emotion and decision-making, which in turn contribute to abnormal social behavior and moral reasoning. Ventromedial prefrontal damage incurred early in life is especially deleterious for normal social conduct and moral behavior.
3. Neuropsychological evidence points to intriguing parallels between patients with ventromedial prefrontal damage and individuals with antisocial personality disorder (sociopathy), raising questions about a potential common neurobiological substrate – specifically, dysfunction in ventromedial prefrontal brain systems.
To register for this event, email smjenerowitz@saintfrancis.com. Lunch will be provided to registered guests. The William K. Warren Jr. "Frontiers in Neuroscience" Conference Series is free and open to the public.