Identification of Emotions in Offenders With Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASP)

Abstract

Abstract. A group of offenders with antisocial personality (ASP) and a control group identified facial expressions of emotion under three conditions: monetary reward, monetary response cost, and no contingency, to explore effects on the antisocial offenders’ deficits commonly reported in these tasks. Skin Conductance Responses (SCRs) indexed emotional arousal. Offenders with ASP performed worse than controls under reward and no contingency conditions, but under the response-cost condition results were similar. The offenders with ASP presented higher SCR than the controls in the two monetary conditions. Findings suggest that offenders with ASP are hypersensitive to monetary contingencies; monetary reward seems to interfere negatively in their performance while monetary response cost improves it. Arousal level seems unable to explain ability to identify facial affects, while results suggest that methodological variations may explain the conflicting results in the literature.