Perception of emotional facial expressions in aggression and psychopathy.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Altered affective state recognition is assumed to be a root cause of aggressive behavior, a hallmark of psychopathologies such as psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder. However, the two most influential models make markedly different predictions regarding the underlying mechanism. According to the integrated emotion system theory (IES), aggression reflects impaired processing of social distress cues such as fearful faces. In contrast, the hostile attribution bias (HAB) model explains aggression with a bias to interpret ambiguous expressions as angry.

Methods

In a set of four experiments, we measured processing of fearful and angry facial expressions (compared to neutral and other expressions) in a sample of 65 male imprisoned violent offenders rated usin

SUBMITTER: Stein T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11496222 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature