James Blair
Keynote 6
Forms of neuro-cognitive dysfunction that increase the risk for violence
Dr. James Blair received a doctoral degree in Psychology from University College London in 1993 under the supervision of Professor John Morton. Following graduation he was awarded a Wellcome Trust Mental Health Research Fellowship that he held at the Medical Research Council Cognitive Development Unit for three years. Subsequently, he moved to the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London. There, with Uta Frith, he helped form and co-lead the Developmental Disorders group, and was ultimately appointed Senior Lecturer.
He Joined the NIMH Intramural Research Program in 2002 and became Chief of the Section on Affective Cognitive Neuroscience. In 2016, he left NIMH to become the first Head of the Center of Neurobehavioral Research (CNR) at the Boys Town National Research Hospital in Omaha. Boys Town is one of the largest residential care communities for troubled youth in the country. The mission of the the CNR is to translate basic science findings into new assessment tools and use information from these to help develop new and augmented interventions.
Forms of neuro-cognitive dysfunction that increase the risk for violence
In this paper, I will review work on neuro-cognitive systems that, when dysfunctional, increase the risk for violence. These are: empathy, the acute threat response, reinforcement-based decision-making, and response inhibition and the Default Mode Network. I will propose how measurement of these systems might help in risk assessment and hopefully provide preliminary data on the relationship between the functional integrity of these systems and behavioral response within a residential treatment program.
© Oud Consultancy - Amsterdam - The Netherlands - 
