It turns out that violent criminals are more likely to recognize ambiguous facial expressions as 'angry'
A German study of prisoners incarcerated for violent crimes found that aggressive criminals were more likely to perceive neutral facial expressions as angry, which are a mix of opposing emotions.
Perception of emotional facial expressions in aggression and psychopathy | Psychological Medicine | Cambridge Core
Violent offenders more likely to perceive ambiguous faces as angry, study shows
https://www.psypost.org/violent-offenders-more-likely-to-perceive-ambiguous-faces-as-angry-study-shows/
Previous research has suggested that violent criminals may have problems processing fear, leading some experts to suggest that criminals may have difficulty recognizing their own fears and those of others.
To see if this was really the case, a research team from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and the University of Tübingen in Germany conducted four experiments to examine how people perceive facial expressions of fear and anger.
The study involved 65 male violent offenders serving time in a German correctional facility, 21 of whom had high enough scores to be diagnosed as psychopaths on the revised Hare Psychopathy Checklist, a psychopathy test administered prior to the study. A control group of 60 age-matched non-offenders also participated.
In the first two of the series of experiments, participants were asked to find one target with a neutral, happy, or fearful expression among a total of eight facial images, including seven dummy faces and one target. The difference between the two visual search tasks was whether or not the target was colored red; all other conditions were the same.
In the third 'ambivalence task,' participants were asked to look at photographs of faces in which fear and happiness (left), anger and happiness (center), and anger and fear (right) were blended in ratios of '3:7,' '5:5,' and '7:3,' respectively, and to answer which emotion they felt was more dominant.
In the fourth 'morphing task,' participants were shown a neutral face that gradually changed, and the level at which they were able to distinguish the emotions of fear, joy, anger, or sadness was measured.
The results of the experiment found no evidence that violent criminals have difficulty recognizing fear, nor that psychopathic tendencies or aggression are associated with difficulty reading fearful faces.Similarly, there was no association between greater sensitivity to reading angry faces and psychopathic tendencies or aggression.
The researchers point out that this is in line with a growing body of research that casts doubt on the idea that psychopathy and aggression are linked to difficulty recognising fear.
On the other hand, the violent offender group was significantly more likely than the control group to recognize an ambiguous facial expression that was a 50% mix of happy and angry as 'angry,' and this tendency was particularly pronounced in violent offenders who scored high on aggression.
The graph below shows this. Looking at the results for the control group (blue line), the criminal group (yellow line), and the criminal group with particularly high psychopathic tendencies (red line), we can see that the recognition of facial expressions that are half angry and half happy differs significantly between the three groups.
This study only involved male criminals, so it cannot be applied to female criminals or to the general population who are highly aggressive or psychopathic but not incarcerated. In addition, only a portion of emotions were tested, so it does not cover all basic emotions, and since only still images were used, it is possible that differences in the recognition of changes in facial expressions may have been overlooked.
In their paper published in the peer-reviewed medical journal Psychological Medicine, the research group concluded, 'Across all four experiments, we found no association between psychopathic tendencies and impaired perception of emotions, including fear, but did find an association between cognitive biases toward anger and aggression. These results cast doubt on the view that psychopathy arises from abnormalities in emotion processing and support the idea that a 'hostility attribution bias' - a tendency to perceive hostility - underlies aggressive behavior.'
in Science, Posted by log1l_ks