Abstract
Research into the causal and perpetuating factors influencing aggression has partly focused on the general tendency of aggression-prone individuals to infer hostile intent in others, even in ambiguous circumstances. This is referred to as the ‘hostile interpretation bias’. Whether this hostile interpretation bias also exists in basal information processing, such as perception of facial emotion, is not yet known, especially with respect to the perception of ambiguous expressions. In addition, little is known about how this potential bias in facial emotion perception is related to specific characteristics of aggression. In the present study, conducted in a penitentiary setting with detained male adults, we investigated if violent offenders (n = 71) show a stronger tendency to interpret ambiguous facial expressions on a computer task as angry rather than happy, compared to non-violent offenders (n = 14) and to a control group of healthy volunteers (n = 32). We also investigated if hostile perception of facial expressions is related to specific characteristics of aggression, such as proactive and reactive aggression. No clear statistical evidence was found that violent offenders perceived facial emotional expressions as more angry than non-violent offenders or healthy volunteers. A regression analysis in the violent offender group showed that only age and a self-report measure of hostility predicted outcome on the emotion perception task. Other traits, such as psychopathic traits, intelligence, attention and a tendency to jump to conclusions were not associated with interpretation of anger in facial emotional expressions. We discuss the possible impact of the study design and population studied on our results, as well as implications for future studies.
Highlights
Many intrapersonal and contextual variables have been investigated in the search for risk factors for aggressive behavior
We investigated if hostile interpretation is positively correlated with traits of psychopathy, measured through self-report with the Psychopathic Personality Inventory revised (PPI-R) [20], and a tendency to jump to conclusions, assessed with the beads-in-a-jar task [21]
Intelligence and aspects of attention were not related to threshold scores of the emotion perception task in the violent offenders, and neither was the score on a task to assess a tendency to jump to conclusions
Summary
The aim of the present study was to investigate the presence of a hostile interpretation bias in perception of emotionally ambiguous faces on a morphed sequence on a happy-angry dimension, in a group of detained male violent offenders in contrast to non-violent offenders and healthy volunteers. The first aim of the present study was to compare violent offenders to non-violent offenders and healthy volunteers with respect to their tendency to interpret ambiguous facial expressions as either angry or happy
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