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When a smile becomes a fist: the perception of facial and bodily expressions of emotion in violent offenders

Previous reports have suggested an enhancement of facial expression recognition in women as compared to men. It has also been suggested that men versus women have a greater attentional bias towards angry cues. Research has shown that facial expression recognition impairments and attentional biases t...

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Autores principales: Kret, M. E., de Gelder, B.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2013
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3710410/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23828232
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00221-013-3557-6
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author Kret, M. E.
de Gelder, B.
author_facet Kret, M. E.
de Gelder, B.
author_sort Kret, M. E.
collection PubMed
description Previous reports have suggested an enhancement of facial expression recognition in women as compared to men. It has also been suggested that men versus women have a greater attentional bias towards angry cues. Research has shown that facial expression recognition impairments and attentional biases towards anger are enhanced in violent criminal male offenders. Bodily expressions of anger form a more direct physical threat as compared to facial expressions. In four experiments, we tested how 29 imprisoned aggressive male offenders perceive body expressions by other males. The performance of all participants in a matching-to-sample task dropped significantly when the distracting image showed an angry posture. Violent offenders misjudged fearful body movements as expressing anger significantly more often than the control group. When violent offenders were asked to categorize facial expressions and ignore the simultaneously presented congruent or incongruent posture, they performed worse than the control group, specifically, when a smile was combined with an aggressive posture. Finally, violent offenders showed a greater congruency effect than controls when viewing postures as part of an emotionally congruent social scene and did not perform above chance when categorizing a happy posture presented in a fight scene. The results suggest that violent offenders have difficulties in processing emotional incongruence when aggressive stimuli are involved and a possible bias towards aggressive body language.
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spelling pubmed-37104102013-07-23 When a smile becomes a fist: the perception of facial and bodily expressions of emotion in violent offenders Kret, M. E. de Gelder, B. Exp Brain Res Research Article Previous reports have suggested an enhancement of facial expression recognition in women as compared to men. It has also been suggested that men versus women have a greater attentional bias towards angry cues. Research has shown that facial expression recognition impairments and attentional biases towards anger are enhanced in violent criminal male offenders. Bodily expressions of anger form a more direct physical threat as compared to facial expressions. In four experiments, we tested how 29 imprisoned aggressive male offenders perceive body expressions by other males. The performance of all participants in a matching-to-sample task dropped significantly when the distracting image showed an angry posture. Violent offenders misjudged fearful body movements as expressing anger significantly more often than the control group. When violent offenders were asked to categorize facial expressions and ignore the simultaneously presented congruent or incongruent posture, they performed worse than the control group, specifically, when a smile was combined with an aggressive posture. Finally, violent offenders showed a greater congruency effect than controls when viewing postures as part of an emotionally congruent social scene and did not perform above chance when categorizing a happy posture presented in a fight scene. The results suggest that violent offenders have difficulties in processing emotional incongruence when aggressive stimuli are involved and a possible bias towards aggressive body language. Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2013-07-05 2013 /pmc/articles/PMC3710410/ /pubmed/23828232 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00221-013-3557-6 Text en © The Author(s) 2013 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/ Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and the source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Kret, M. E.
de Gelder, B.
When a smile becomes a fist: the perception of facial and bodily expressions of emotion in violent offenders
title When a smile becomes a fist: the perception of facial and bodily expressions of emotion in violent offenders
title_full When a smile becomes a fist: the perception of facial and bodily expressions of emotion in violent offenders
title_fullStr When a smile becomes a fist: the perception of facial and bodily expressions of emotion in violent offenders
title_full_unstemmed When a smile becomes a fist: the perception of facial and bodily expressions of emotion in violent offenders
title_short When a smile becomes a fist: the perception of facial and bodily expressions of emotion in violent offenders
title_sort when a smile becomes a fist: the perception of facial and bodily expressions of emotion in violent offenders
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3710410/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23828232
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00221-013-3557-6
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