Attentional bias toward negative and positive pictorial stimuli and its relationship with distorted cognitions, empathy, and moral reasoning among men with intellectual disabilities who have committed crimes

Abstract

The aims of this study were to examine: (a) whether men with intellectual disabilities who have a history of criminal offending attend to affective pictorial stimuli in a biased manner, and (b) whether there is a relationship between an affective attentional bias and offense‐supportive cognitions, empathy, and moral reasoning. Forty‐six men with intellectual disabilities who had a documented history of criminal offending, and 51 men who also had intellectual disabilities, but no such history, were recruited and asked to complete a computer‐based dot‐probe task using affective pictorial stimuli with randomization, along with measures of distorted cognitions, empathy, and moral reasoning. Those with a history of criminal offending endorsed significantly more offense‐supportive cognitions, had significantly lower general empathy, and more “mature” moral reasoning, as well as a significant attentional bias toward affective pictorial stimuli. Attentional bias significantly predicted offense‐supportive cognitions, and vice versa, having controlled for offense history, and Full‐Scale IQ, but this was not the case for empathy or moral reasoning. While the findings require replication, interventions that aim to modify attention bias with this population should be tested.

Auditory and cross-modal attentional bias toward positive natural sounds: Behavioral and ERP evidence

“…Second, only healthy adults were included in the present study. It may be extremely useful to examine the cognitive and neural mechanism of attention bias toward positive auditory emotional stimuli in clinical samples (e.g., depression, anxiety and dysphoric individuals), because doing so could help us understand the mechanisms that underline the etiology and maintenance of emotion disorders (Elgersma et al, 2018;Sadek et al, 2020). Third, emotion appraisal theory proposes that the psychological mechanism that drives emotional attention is the detection of a stimulus that is relevant to the observer's concerns and goals (Sander et al, 2005).…”

Measuring empathy in youth and young adults with mild intellectual disabilities or borderline intelligence in residential care - The validation of an adapted basic empathy scale: The BES-MID

“…Previous research indicates that having a Mild Intellectual Disability or borderline intelligence (MID/BI, IQ = 50–85) is associated with a lack of empathy [ 7 ], inadequate reactions to the emotion ‘sadness’ [ 8 ], biased perception of someone's emotions [ 9 ], and distorted empathic skills [ 10 , 11 ], which all may increase the risk for the development of antisocial behaviour [ 12 ]. Persons with MID/BI show difficulties in abstract thinking and perspective taking, tend to take abstract information too literally (and act accordingly), and have difficulties in distinguishing jokes from serious information [ 13 ].…”