Abstract
The purpose of this study was to compare males who were court ordered into domestic violence treatment (domestic violence offenders; DVOs) due to family violence against their female partner or spouse (n = 35) and a group of nonviolent males (n = 35) on facial emotion recognition and measures of self-identified empathy, cognitive ability, trauma history, and demographic information. A significant difference was found between the two groups in that DVOs were significantly less accurate in identifying sadness and fear, and identifying emotions of female faces compared to male faces. DVOs were also less accurate in identifying emotions at 40% and 60% emotional intensity when six primary emotions were combined. Clinical implications of the study include emphasizing emotion recognition in treatment for DVOs in order to ameliorate family violence.
Highlights
Domestic violence has been a predominant emotional, systemic, and financially costly problem in the United States
The purpose of this study was to compare males who were court ordered into domestic violence treatment due to family violence against their female partner or spouse (n = 35) and a group of nonviolent males (n = 35) on facial emotion recognition and measures of self-identified empathy, cognitive ability, trauma history, and demographic information
The present study sought to ascertain the relationship between self-identified empathy, demographic factors, and facial emotion recognition for domestic violence offenders (DVOs) participants compared to a control group of nonviolent men
Summary
Domestic violence has been a predominant emotional, systemic, and financially costly problem in the United States. While at its basic form, domestic violence is about partners harming one another, it is viewed as a problem of men’s oppression of women, a broad public health problem, a criminal justice problem, and an economic problem both for the victims and society (Whitaker & Lutzker, 2009) [1]. In the United States, 24.3% of women have experienced severe physical aggression by a partner, and 48.4% have experienced psychological aggression by a partner (Jaffe, Simonet, Tett, Swopes, & Davis, 2015) [2]. Previous research on facial emotion recognition found that abused and neglected children were less accurate in recognizing facial emotions (Luke & Banerjee, 2013) [4]
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