Working memory guidance of visual attention to threat in offenders.

Tamara S Satmarean,Richard Rowe,Elizabeth Milne

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0261882

Abstract

Aggression and trait anger have been linked to attentional biases toward angry faces and attribution of hostile intent in ambiguous social situations. Memory and emotion play a crucial role in social-cognitive models of aggression but their mechanisms of influence are not fully understood. Combining a memory task and a visual search task, this study investigated the guidance of attention allocation toward naturalistic face targets during visual search by visual working memory (WM) templates in 113 participants who self-reported having served a custodial sentence. Searches were faster when angry faces were held in working memory regardless of the emotional valence of the visual search target. Higher aggression and trait anger predicted increased working memory modulated attentional bias. These results are consistent with the Social-Information Processing model, demonstrating that internal representations bias attention allocation to threat and that the bias is linked to aggression and trait anger.

Highlights

Antisocial behaviour (ASB) encompasses a wide range of traits and behaviours with substantial negative consequences for both victims and offenders [1]
This study examined how emotional faces as working memory (WM) templates biased visual search and whether this bias was predicted by self-reported aggression, trait anger, and social-emotional information processing variables
Higher antisocial traits predicted an increased WM bias of visual perception, meaning that participants displaying higher aggression and trait anger were more efficient in identifying emotional faces identical to the induced internal representations

Summary

Introduction

Antisocial behaviour (ASB) encompasses a wide range of traits and behaviours with substantial negative consequences for both victims and offenders [1]. ASB comes at a high cost, varying as a function of harm caused to the victim, to property, to the community, and costs incurred within the criminal justice system [2]. These impacts highlight the importance of ASB reduction [3]. Recent violence reduction and prevention practices have increasingly drawn on social-cognitive models of aggression and violent behaviour [4, 5]. These models propose a sequence of information processing steps involved in social interaction. Interventions may target bias reduction at specific steps to reduce ASB

Objectives

Results

Discussion

Conclusion