Autores UNAM:
ANA FRESAN ORELLANA; JAIRO IGNACIO MUÑOZ DELGADO;

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Autores externos:

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Idioma:
Inglés

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Año de publicación:
2017

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Palabras clave:

Criminological contexts; Human ethology; Social cognition

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Resumen:

Introduction: Social cognition is a part of the cognitive spectrum in humans and primates. It refers to how people process social information, its encoding, storage, retrieval, and application in social situations. Facial emotion recognition - defined as the capacity of individuals to recognize basic forms of affective expression that appear in faces - is one of the most important skills for social interaction and communication. Several studies report that emotion recognition is impaired in individuals with a history of violent offences, in particular, the recognition of fear and sadness in other faces. In this way, if a person cannot correctly identify the distress they are causing to another person, they are more likely to continue with the behavior that is causing the harm. Consistent with this rationale, these results have been replicated in several adult populations as well as in adolescents. Other studies in adolescent offenders have found that the misattribute expressions of disgust as anger or perceive neutral expression as negative which may also lead to more frequent antisocial behavior and even more dangerous and threatening due to the misattribution of emotions as anger. However, the use of solely clear emotional facial expressions does not provide a full view of how emotion recognition can be affected in juvenile offenders. This, as emotion expression is not a static phenomenon and each emotion can be expressed with different intensities having a diverse impact on offenders. For example, some studies have found that young offenders have an adequate recognition of anger in high intensity expressions, but were impaired in detecting anger with lower levels of expression intensity. Despite the large body of evidence with impaired emotion recognition in offenders, the evidence in juvenile offenders is still scarce and more research is needed. Antisocial behavior in adolescence has many negative outcomes in adulthood which have a direct cost to the individual and the society. If facial emotion recognition is impaired in this particular population, intervention strategies can be implemented to improve their recognition and reducing the misattribution of other emotions that may lead to antisocial behaviors. Objective: The aims of the present study were: a) to describe facial emotion recognition in a group of juvenile offenders and compare it with a group of non-offender adolescents; b) to determine which emotions were misrecognized and for which one they were mistaken (misattribution) in both groups. We hypothesized that juvenile offenders will have a worse recognition of facial emotions and that general emotions will be more misattributed with negative emotions such as fear and anger. Method: A total of 61 male juvenile offenders from a juvenile detention center and 69 non-offender male adolescents were recruited in the states of Puebla and Tlaxcala, Mexico. The non-offender adolescents had no history of criminal offenses. The juvenile offenders had history of serious offenses (as homicide, injuries, kidnapping, robbery with violence, sexual abuse, etc.). Due to policies of the ministry of the detention center, no additional information from the center or the juvenile offenders is included. Facial emotion recognition was assessed with the Facial Expressions of Emotions - Stimuli and Tests (FEEST) which explores the six basic affective expressions: happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, surprise and anger. The absence of emotion or neutral emotion was also included. Each basic affective expression was assessed with a varying level of intensity (100%, 75%, 50% and 25%). For each emotion, an equivalent set of 11 expressions was developed, three for the expressions for each 25%, 50% and 75% intensity of the expression and 2 more for the prototype emotional expression (100%). The neutral expression was exhibited in 4 images. Results: Juvenile offenders were older than non-offender adolescents (17.0 vs 16.1 years; p < 0.001). A low emotion recognition was observed in the sample, where surprise (58.3%) and happiness (58.1%) were the emotions with higher percentage of recognition. Happiness, fear and neutral emotion recognition by intensity level were similar in both groups. Anger and disgust were also similar between groups except in the assessment of these emotions at a 50% intensity level, where juvenile offenders reported a lower recognition (anger: 34.4%; disgust: 32.7%) than non-offender adolescents (anger: 45.8%; disgust: 43.4%; p < 0.05 in both comparisons). The most important differences were found in the recognition of surprise and sadness. Juvenile offenders had a lesser recognition of surprise at an intensity level of 100% to 50% (p < 0.01) while sadness at 100% and at 25% intensity level was better recognize by juvenile offenders than non-offender adolescents (100%: 56.5% vs 43.4%, p = 0.03; 25%: 16.3% vs 8.6%, p = 0.01). Surprise, sadness and disgust were more frequently misattributed to neutral emotion in both groups, while anger was misattributed with anger and with neutral emotion. Also, neutral emotion was more frequently recognized as anger. Conclusion: Our findings provide additional support for our hypothesis that juvenile offenders showed a general deficit in recognizing facial emotions when these are presented in different intensity levels. Our results indicate that offenders are equally capable of recognizing prototype emotional expressions with the exception of sadness which has been previously reported in adolescent with high levels of psychopathic traits and disruptive behaviors. However, social environment may also play an important role in the recognition of this emotion as they may come from environments less supportive to the development and open expression of sadness. Somehow surprising, the most important recognition deficit was found with surprise. We considered that this emotion may be partially perceived as an alarm sign that may induce offenders to a relati

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Entidades citadas de la UNAM:

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