In your face: the biased judgement of fear-anger expressions in violent offenders

BMC Psychology
Martin WegrzynJohanna Kissler

Abstract

Why is it that certain violent criminals repeatedly find themselves engaged in brawls? Many inmates report having felt provoked or threatened by their victims, which might be due to a tendency to ascribe malicious intentions when faced with ambiguous social signals, termed hostile attribution bias. The present study presented morphed fear-anger faces to prison inmates with a history of violent crimes, a history of child sexual abuse, and to matched controls form the general population. Participants performed a fear-anger decision task. Analyses compared both response frequencies and measures derived from psychophysical functions fitted to the data. In addition, a test to distinguish basic facial expressions and questionnaires for aggression, psychopathy and personality disorders were administered. Violent offenders present with a reliable hostile attribution bias, in that they rate ambiguous fear-anger expressions as more angry, compared to both the control population and perpetrators of child sexual abuse. Psychometric functions show a lowered threshold to detect anger in violent offenders compared to the general population. This effect is especially pronounced for male faces, correlates with self-reported aggression and prese...Continue Reading

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Citations

Jan 24, 2019·BMC Psychology·Martin WegrzynKirsten Labudda
May 21, 2019·European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience·Viola BulgariGiuseppe Carrà
Oct 20, 2020·Journal of Personality Disorders·Kathryn BerlutiAbigail A Marsh
Jan 9, 2021·Cortex; a Journal Devoted to the Study of the Nervous System and Behavior·Sofia SeinfeldBeatrice de Gelder
Apr 14, 2021·Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience·Claudia KrasowskiThomas Straube

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Software Mentioned

Pandas
Palamedes Toolbox
Python
NimStim
Seaborn
Jupyter Notebook
NumPy
JASP
PsychoPy
SciPy

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