Changing perception: A randomized controlled trial of emotion recognition training to reduce anger and aggression in violent offenders.

Abstract

Objective:To determine whether emotion recognition training, which previously proved to be effective in adolescents, also reduces anger and aggression in adult violent offenders. Method:Detained male adults were randomized to complete either a 1-week computer training designed to promote the perception of happiness over anger in ambiguous facial expressions (n = 46), or a sham training control procedure (n = 44). Outcome measures were collected immediately after training and at 6-week follow-up, and included the number of faces that were rated as happy rather than angry, self-reported and observed measures of hostility, aggression and prosocial behaviour. The linear regression analyses were statistically corrected for age and presence of (mild) intellectual disability. Results:The training procedure was highly effective in promoting the perception of happiness over anger in the training group as compared to the controls, independent of age or intelligence (95% CI -4.6 to -2.8, p < 0.001). These training effects remained at six weeks post training (95% CI -3.4 to -1.8, p < 0.001). There was no clear change in measures of aggression and hostility, or prosocial behaviour. Conclusions:In contrast to two prior studies with adolescent samples, the present study showed no meaningful impact of the training procedure on aggression in adult offenders, even though the training was effective in altering emotion perception. This may be due to low statistical power, or a lack of generalization of perception of happiness to faces in daily life encounters, or because emotion recognition bias is not causally related to aggression. CHANGING PERCEPTION 2 Public health significance statementSince aggression and violence are globally recognized problems for personal wellbeing and society, it is important to develop more effective interventions to reduce aggressive behaviour. In the present randomized controlled study a new treatment approach was investigated, in which offenders learned to interpret facial expressions of others as happy rather than angry. Although this computer training was successful in changing emotion recognition, this was not accompanied by a decline in measures of aggression.

Emotional Recognition Training Enhances Attention to Emotional Stimuli Among Male Juvenile Delinquents

“…For example, it was found that aggressive, hostile, and prosocial behaviours did not change after a one-week emotional recognition training. 22 , 37 Our results may provide new insights into the discrepancies among previous findings. In the present study, the overall aggression level of juvenile delinquents did not change significantly, while training only reduced hostility.…”

“… 14 , 17 Similar results were also found in a study that adopted a one-week training procedure, which revealed that the training effect remained six weeks later. 37 In addition to angry faces, a study on sad and fearful faces found that two or three sessions of training could bias the recognition of negative faces to positive faces. 38 In the present study, we found that the first day of training could induce a large change in the bias point and that the training effect changed slightly in the remaining days of training, indicating that the amount of training had little influence on the training effect.…”

Mediating effects of impulsivity and alexithymia in the association between traumatic brain injury and aggression in incarcerated males

“…The above mentioned argument on shared method variance could also explain these null results, although-again-the performance based measures did not correlate and previous studies do show that emotion recognition deficits are related to self-reported aggression (for a review, see [Smeijers et al, 2019]). Studies have even assessed the potential beneficial effects of training emotion recognition or response inhibition (Hubble et al, 2015), their results suggest that performance does improve but that it does not always result in less aggressive behavior (Kuin et al, 2020). In line with recommendations made by Grynberg et al (2012), an emotion recognition paradigm with morphed faces was used to limit perceptual information available for emotion identification.…”

Neuroanatomy of complex social emotion dysregulation in adolescent offenders

“…For instance, impaired emotion recognition facilitates violent behavior and recidivism in criminal offenders (Leshem et al, 2019). In addition, research has shown that subsequent crime was greatly reduced by improving facial emotion recognition in offenders (Hubble et al, 2015;Kuin et al, 2019;Timmermann et al, 2017). However, most previous evidence has focused on basic emotions, and no study to date has investigated complex social emotions.…”