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Hostage Negotiation

A hostage situation is a law-enforcement worst-case scenario, because it places innocent civilians directly in harm's way. Armed intervention becomes very risky, since the hostages themselves can be harmed either by stray bullets or by the hostage-takers. That makes the negotiation the most important aspect of any hostage crisis. A skilled negotiator must find out what the hostage-taker wants, who he or she' is and what it will take to achieve a peaceful outcome, all while ensuring the safety of the hostages and other bystanders.

Ideally, a hostage situation ends with everyone walking away. In this article, we'll find out what happens on the scene of a hostage negotiation,how a negotiator gets the job done. We will also take a look at the psychology of hostage-takers.

The Hostage Situation

Although hostage situations can vary greatly based on the motivations of the hostage-taker and the exact circumstances surrounding the incident, there are some basic facts that apply to all hostage situations.

The hostage-taker wants to obtain something. This can be as simple as money, personal safety or sale passage to another country, or it can involve complicated political goals.

The target of the hostage-taker is not the hostage; it is some third party (a person, a company or a government) that can provide whatever it is the hostage-taker' wants.

The hostages are bargaining chips. They may have symbolic value (as at the 1972 Munich Olympics, in which the target was the Israeli government and the hostages were Israeli athletes), but the hostages themselves could be anyone.

Hostage situations move through several distinct phases.

Initial Phase—This phase is violent and brief and lasts as long as it takes for the hostage-takers to make their assault and subdue(慑服) the hostages. The end of this phase is often marked by the presentation of the hostage takers' demands.

Negotiation Phase—At this point, law-enforcement officials are on the scene, and the demands have probably been received. This phase can last hours, days or months and could also be referred to as "the standoff(均衡) phase. "Physically, nothing about the situation changes greatly. The hostages and the hostage-takers stay in the same place. However, a lot is happening during this phase in terms of the relationships developing between everyone involved. The negotiator's job boils down to manipulating those relationships in a way that results in a peaceful ending.

Termination Phase—This is the brief, sometimes violent final phase. This phase has one of throe results: The hostage-takers surrender peacefully and are arrested. Police assault the hostage-takers and kill or arrest them. The hostage-takers' demands are granted, and they escape.

The fate of the hostages does not necessarily depend on what happens during the termination phase. Even if the hostage-takers give up, they may have killed the hostages during the negotiations. Often, hostages are killed either accidentally by police or intentionally by their captors during an assault. There have even been cases in which the hostage-takers were granted their demands, but they killed a hostage anyway.

There is also a post-incident stage in which the effects of the incident play themselves out. These effects can include changes in the status of the groups responsible, shifts in the relationships between world governments or in creases in security.

Hostage-takers

One of the first things a negotiator does when he or she arrives on the scene of a hostage crisis is to find out everything about the hostage-taker. The most basic question is: Why did this person take a hostage? There are a few common reasons.

The hostage-taker might be emotionally or mentally disturbed. His or her specific reason fo

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By now, it should come as no surprise when scientists discover yet another case of experience changing the brain. From the sensory information we absorb to the movements we make, our lives leave footprints on the bumps and fissures of our cortex, so much so that experiences can alter "hard-wired" brain structures. Through rehab, stroke patients can coax a region of the motor cortex on the opposite side of the damaged region to pinch-hit, restoring lost mobility; volunteers who are blindfolded for just five days can reprogram their visual cortex to process sound and touch.

Still, scientists have been surprised at how deeply culture—the language we speak, the values we absorb—shapes the brain, and are rethinking findings derived from studies of Westerners. To take one recent example, a region behind the forehead called the medial prefrontal cortex supposedly represents the self: it is active when we ("we" being the Americans in the study) think of our own identity and traits. But with Chinese volunteers, the results were strikingly different. The "me" circuit hummed not only when they thought whether a particular adjective described themselves, but also when they considered whether it described their mother. The Westerners showed no such overlap between self and mom. Depending whether one lives in a culture that views the self as autonomous and unique or as connected to and part of a larger whole, this neural circuit takes on quite different functions.

"Cultural neuroscience," as this new field is called, is about discovering such differences. Some of the findings, as with the "me/mom" circuit, buttress longstanding notions of cultural differences. For instance, it is a cultural cliche that Westerners focus on individual objects while East Asians pay attention to context and background (another manifestation of the individualism-collectivism split). Sure enough, when shown complex, busy scenes, Asian-Americans and non-Asian—Americans recruited different brain regions. The Asians showed more activity in areas that process figure-ground relations—holistic context—while the Americans showed more activity in regions that recognize objects.

Psychologist Nalini Ambady of Tufts found something similar when she and colleagues showed drawings of people in a submissive pose (head down, shoulders hunched) or a dominant one (arms crossed, face forward) to Japanese and Americans. The brain's dopamine-fueled reward circuit became most active at the sight of the stance—dominant for Americans, submissive for Japanese—that each volunteer's culture most values, they reported in 2009. This raises an obvious chicken-and-egg question.

Cultural neuroscience wouldn't be making waves if it found neurobiological bases only for well-known cultural differences. It is also uncovering the unexpected. For instance, a 2006 study found that native Chinese speakers use a different region of the brain to do simple arithmetic (3 + 4) or decide which number is larger than native English speakers do, even though both use Arabic numerals. The Chinese use the circuits that process visual and spatial information and plan movements (the latter may be related to the use of the abacus). But English speakers use language circuits. It is as if the West conceives numbers as just words, but the East imbues them with symbolic, spatial freight. "One would think that neural processes involving basic mathematical computations are universal," says Ambady, but they "seem to be culture-specific. "

Not to be the skunk at this party, but I think it's important to ask whether neuroscience reveals anything more than we already know from, say, anthropology. For instance, it's well known that East Asian cultures prize the collective over the individual, and that Americans do the opposite.

Ambady thinks cultural neuroscience does advance understanding. Take the me/mom finding, which, she argues, "att

A．the assumption that human experience can change human brain structure has already been widely proved

B．human experience can change brain structure

C．stroke patients can restore mobility by themselves

D．people blindfolded for several days can still have visual ability

The worst case that revealed the fatal dark side of the diet pills is that

[A] 82 patients on fen-phen and seven on Redux had developed heart defects.

[B] a woman patient on fen-phen had died of abnormally high blood pressure.

[C] a woman patient on fen-phen had died of a lung disease.

[D] both diet pills cause brain damage.

The worst case that revealed the fatal dark side of the diet pills is

A．82 patients on fen-phen and seven on Redux had developed heart defects.

B．a woman patient on fen-phen had died of abnormally high blood pressure.

C．a woman patient on fen-phen had died of a lung disease.

D．both diet pills cause brain damage.

According to the passage, the worst case that revealed the fatal side effects of the pills is ______ .

A．82 patients on fen-phen have suffered heart trouble

B．a woman patient on fen-phen died of hypertension

C．the diet pills cause brain damage

D．7 patients who had taken Redux developed heart defects

According to the passage, the worst case that revealed the fatal side effects of the pills is ______.

A．82 patients on fen-phen have suffered heart trouble

B．a woman patient on fen-phen died of hypertension

C．the diet pills cause brain damage

D．7 patients who had taken Redux developed heart defects

The worst case that revealed the fatal dark side of the diet pills is ______.

A．82 patients on fen-phen and seven on Redux had developed heart defects

B．a woman patient on fen-phen had died of abnormally high blood pressure

C．a woman patient on fen-phen had died of a lung disease

D．both diet pills cause brain damage

The worst case that revealed the fatal dark side of the diet pills is______.

A．82 patients on fen-phen and seven on Redux had developed heart defects

B．both diet 15ills cause brain damage

C．a woman patient on fen-phen had died of a lung disease

D．a woman patient on fen phen had died of abnormally high blood pressure