ArticleBMC psychology2017
In your face: the biased judgement of fear-anger expressions in violent offenders.
Article in BMC psychology, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed, 33 citations in OpenAlex.
- Effects of acute alcohol consumption on hostile attribution bias towards emotional facial expressions and implicit approach/avoidance tendencies.Journal of psychopharmacology (Oxford, England) · 2026Trial
- Impact of intelligence on social cognition in mentally disordered offenders: preliminary evidence in schizophrenia and personality disorders.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Recognition of dynamic facial expressions of emotions in forensic inpatients who have committed sexual offenses: a signal detection analysis.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2024Article
- Individual differences in social intelligence and perception of emotion expression of masked and unmasked faces.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2022Article
- Two attentive strategies reducing subjective distortions in serial duration perception.PloS one · 2022Article
- Electrophysiological responses to negative evaluative person-knowledge: Effects of individual differences.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2021Article
- Reduced Multivoxel Pattern Similarity of Vicarious Neural Pain Responses in Psychopathy.Journal of personality disorders · 2020Article
- Facial emotion recognition in people with schizophrenia and a history of violence: a mediation analysis.European archives of psychiatry and clinical neuroscience · 2020Article
- Regions of white matter abnormalities in the arcuate fasciculus in veterans with anger and aggression problems.Brain structure & function · 2020Article
- The hidden identity of faces: a case of lifelong prosopagnosia.BMC psychology · 2019Article
- Article
- A combined behavioral and EEG investigation of facial emotion recognition in sexual offenders against minors.International journal of clinical and health psychology : IJCHPArticle
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundWhy is it that certain violent criminals repeatedly find themselves engaged in brawls? Many inmates report having felt provoked or threatened by their victims, which might be due to a tendency to ascribe malicious intentions when faced with ambiguous social signals, termed hostile attribution bias.
methodsThe present study presented morphed fear-anger faces to prison inmates with a history of violent crimes, a history of child sexual abuse, and to matched controls form the general population. Participants performed a fear-anger decision task. Analyses compared both response frequencies and measures derived from psychophysical functions fitted to the data. In addition, a test to distinguish basic facial expressions and questionnaires for aggression, psychopathy and personality disorders were administered.
resultsViolent offenders present with a reliable hostile attribution bias, in that they rate ambiguous fear-anger expressions as more angry, compared to both the control population and perpetrators of child sexual abuse. Psychometric functions show a lowered threshold to detect anger in violent offenders compared to the general population. This effect is especially pronounced for male faces, correlates with self-reported aggression and presents in absence of a general emotion recognition impairment.
conclusionsThe results indicate that a hostile attribution, related to individual level of aggression and pronounced for male faces, might be one mechanism mediating physical violence.
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