Perceiving the evil eye: Investigating hostile interpretation of ambiguous facial emotional expression in violent and non-violent offenders

Abstract

Research into the causal and perpetuating factors influencing aggression has partly focused on the general tendency of aggression-prone individuals to infer hostile intent in others, even in ambiguous circumstances. This is referred to as the ‘hostile interpretation bias’. Whether this hostile interpretation bias also exists in basal information processing, such as perception of facial emotion, is not yet known, especially with respect to the perception of ambiguous expressions. In addition, little is known about how this potential bias in facial emotion perception is related to specific characteristics of aggression. In the present study, conducted in a penitentiary setting with detained male adults, we investigated if violent offenders (n = 71) show a stronger tendency to interpret ambiguous facial expressions on a computer task as angry rather than happy, compared to non-violent offenders (n = 14) and to a control group of healthy volunteers (n = 32). We also investigated if hostile perception of facial expressions is related to specific characteristics of aggression, such as proactive and reactive aggression. No clear statistical evidence was found that violent offenders perceived facial emotional expressions as more angry than non-violent offenders or healthy volunteers. A regression analysis in the violent offender group showed that only age and a self-report measure of hostility predicted outcome on the emotion perception task. Other traits, such as psychopathic traits, intelligence, attention and a tendency to jump to conclusions were not associated with interpretation of anger in facial emotional expressions. We discuss the possible impact of the study design and population studied on our results, as well as implications for future studies.

Out of Context, Beyond the Face: Neuroanatomical Pathways of Emotional Face-Body Language Integration in Adolescent Offenders

“…To date, only a few studies have explored face-body integration processes, targeting only adult offenders. Most of these works have reported impaired facial emotion recognition and attentional biases towards angry body postures (Kret and de Gelder, 2013; Kuin et al, 2017). Violent offenders tend to exhibit a bias towards aggressive body language, including anger or disgust postures (Kret and de Gelder, 2013).…”

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

“…Evidence for the absence of such a relationship can be found in two prior studies that showed no significant correlations between aspects of aggression and a hostile interpretation bias (Kuin et al, 2017;Schwenk et al, 2014). In one of these studies the same emotion recognition paradigm was applied as in the present study (Kuin et al, 2017).…”

“…Moreover, age differences may not only be relevant with respect to aggression, but also in relation to hostile perception of emotions. In fact, in a previous explorative study with the same emotion perception task, was found that the tendency for hostile interpretation of facial expressions declined with age (Kuin et al, 2017), which may imply that the bias could have been less pronounced in the present population than in that of the previous two studies to begin with (this is further elaborated on in the limitations section below).…”

The Eyes Have It: Psychotherapy in the Era of Masks

“…Early research suggested that aggressive and anger-prone individuals tend to respond negatively in socially ambiguous situations (Barefoot et al, 1989;Dodge, 1980); however, research into how these individuals process and interpret facial expressions is mixed (Chapman et al, 2018;Kuin et al, 2017;Mellentin et al, 2015;Smeijers et al, 2017). Theories for the role of facial expressions in provoking aggression in anger-prone individuals are split and differentially emphasize bottom-up perceptual deficits in facial processing versus top-down cognitive biases (e.g., hostile attribution bias, social information processing).…”