Emotion recognition and cognitive empathy deficits in adolescent offenders revealed by context-sensitive tasks

Abstract

Emotion recognition and empathy abilities require the integration of contextual information in real-life scenarios. Previous reports have explored these domains in adolescent offenders (AOs) but have not used tasks that replicate everyday situations. In this study we included ecological measures with different levels of contextual dependence to evaluate emotion recognition and empathy in AOs relative to non-offenders, controlling for the effect of demographic variables. We also explored the influence of fluid intelligence (FI) and executive functions (EFs) in the prediction of relevant deficits in these domains. Our results showed that AOs exhibit deficits in context-sensitive measures of emotion recognition and cognitive empathy. Difficulties in these tasks were neither explained by demographic variables nor predicted by FI or EFs. However, performance on measures that included simpler stimuli or could be solved by explicit knowledge was either only partially affected by demographic variables or preserved in AOs. These findings indicate that AOs show contextual social-cognition impairments which are relatively independent of basic cognitive functioning and demographic variables.

Socio-cognitive and personal characteristics of young offenders: a field study

“…These aspects coincide with the results obtained by González-Gadea et al (2014), which indicate that adolescent offenders display difficulties in integrating affective processes (emotion and empathy) with the contextual information from their daily life, as well as with the profile described in other studies, although there are no homogeneous data in this regard. Likewise, our results are in agreement with the work of Arce et al (2011), who reveal the relationship between social incompetence and antisocial and criminal behaviours -which seem to be involved in the escalating effect.…”

The nature and extent of emotion recognition and empathy impairments in children showing disruptive behaviour referred into a crime prevention programme

“…It is possible that one recognises facial expressions, but struggles with these additional elements required for cognitive empathy [41]. Research shows that antisocial individuals are impaired in vocal [42] and postural emotion recognition [43] and struggle to integrate multiple sources of emotional information [44].…”

Una década del programa de Psicología en la Universidad Icesi. Trayectorias y enfoques plurales

“…Los estudios muestran que sujetos con DC presentan alteraciones cerebrales vinculadas con la cognición social (Blair, Colledge, Murray y Mitchell, 2001;De Wied, Van Boxtel, Matthys y Meeus, 2012;Fairchild et al, 2013;Guyer et al, 2007;Nawara, Kronbichler y Thun-Hohenstein, 2012;Woodworth y Waschbusch, 2008). Particularmente, la investigación en las últimas décadas se ha focalizado en el estudio del procesamiento de las emociones y la empatía (Gonzalez-Gadea et al, 2014;Holz et al, 2017;Martin-Key, Brown y Fairchild, 2017;Michalska, Zeffiro y Decety, 2016), empleando principalmente mediciones basadas en modelos clásicos del reconocimiento de rostros como el de Ekman y Friesen (1975). Por ejemplo, estudios comportamentales sobre el procesamiento de emociones en niñas con DC han mostrado que los estímulos basados en las tareas de Ekman y Friesen son sensibles a la medición del reconocimiento de rostros que expresan miedo (Pajer, Leininger y Gardner, 2010) e ira y asco (Fairchild, Stobbe, Van Goozen, Calder y Goodyer, 2010).…”

“…Un estudio similar que utilizó el IRI como medida de empatía en adolescentes con DC evidenció que el nivel de empatía cognitiva y afectiva se reduce en la dimensión de toma perspectiva y preocupación empática (Kostić y Nešić, 2015). También en la literatura se describen estudios que no encontraron diferencias significativas entre adolescentes infractores de la ley vs. controles para la escala total del IRI como para las subescalas que lo componen (Gonzalez-Gadea et al, 2014).…”