Abstract
Adolescent psychopathic tendencies are associated with phenotypic increases in proactive aggression. However, the extent to which an understanding of others’ affective mental states, or affective theory of mind (ToM), contributes to proactive aggression remains unknown. We examined how performance on a well-known test of affective ToM, based on cropped images of the eye region, contributes to reactive and proactive types of aggression in a mixed ethnicity sample of 80 incarcerated adolescent boys. A hierarchical regression model showed that affective ToM predicted proactive aggression over and above the influence of clinically rated psychopathic tendencies. Importantly, affective ToM was unrelated to reactive aggression. Our results suggest that being able to recognize others’ affective mental states may be an important factor in aggressing against others for personal gain. These findings have implications for interventions designed to enhance ToM in youth with conduct problems.
Highlights
Youth with conduct problems (CP) and aggressive, antisocial behavior are a heterogeneous group that incur a considerable societal burden in terms of victimization and financial costs [1, 2]
Age was not associated with either Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET) task performance, or residualized scores for reactive or proactive aggression
We investigated if affective theory of mind (ToM), as assessed with the RMET, contributed to higher levels of reactive (RPQ-R) and proactive (RPQ-P) aggression, over and above the effects of clinically rated psychopathic tendencies (PCL:YV)
Summary
Youth with conduct problems (CP) and aggressive, antisocial behavior are a heterogeneous group that incur a considerable societal burden in terms of victimization and financial costs [1, 2]. One theory suggests that adolescents with elevated psychopathic tendencies show low autonomic arousal, indicated by low resting heart rate, and engage in risk taking and antisocial behaviors as a means of increasing arousal [15] Support for this under arousal theory is scarce, and it remains unclear whether low resting heart rate is related to reactive or proactive aggression [16]. It is suggested that these impairments lead to problems in empathic and moral development, and increased use of proactive aggression [5, 17] In support of this theory, youth and adults with psychopathic tendencies show difficulties in recognizing and processing others facial expressions of emotion [18,19,20,21]. Another dimension parses ToM into more bottom-up, automatic ‘mind reading’ mechanisms, and more cognitively demanding top-down processes, required for inferring another’s mental state based on the environment, and previous knowledge about people and events [29, 34, 35]
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