Perception of emotional facial expressions in aggression and psychopathy.

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.

Intact prioritization of fearful faces during continuous flash suppression in psychopathy.

Affective state recognition and in particular the identification of fear is known to be impaired in psychopathy. It is unclear, however, whether this reflects a deficit in basic perception ('fear blindness') or a deficit in later cognitive processing. To test for a perceptual deficit, 63 male incarcerated offenders, assessed with the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R), detected fearful, neutral, and happy facial expressions rendered invisible through continuous flash suppression (CFS).

Designing Visual-Arts Education Programs for Transfer Effects: Development and Experimental Evaluation of (Digital) Drawing Courses in the Art Museum Designed to Promote Adolescents' Socio-Emotional Skills.

An active engagement with arts in general and visual arts in particular has been hypothesized to yield beneficial effects beyond arts itself. So-called cognitive and socio-emotional "transfer" effects into other domains have been claimed. However, the empirical basis of these hopes is limited.

Eye contact during live social interaction in incarcerated psychopathic offenders.

Psychopathy is characterized by a lack of empathy, callousness, and a range of severe antisocial behaviors. A deficit to accurately process social cues, which has been widely documented in psychopathic populations, is assumed to underlie their pathological development. Impaired attention to socially salient cues, such as the eyes of an interaction partner, is a possible mechanism compromising the development of social cognition.

Impaired attention toward the eyes in psychopathic offenders: Evidence from an eye tracking study.

Attention orienting to socially salient cues, such as the eyes of interaction partners, is assumed to be crucial for the development of intact social cognition. Dysfunctions in such basic processes that guide the perception of social cues have been suggested to play a role in the development of psychopathy. The present study investigated gaze patterns in two groups of incarcerated psychopathic and non-psychopathic offenders.

Risky business! Behavioral bias and motivational salience of rule-violations in children with conduct disorder.

Conduct disorder is characterized by both habitual aggression as well as non-aggressive rule-breaking behavior. While a large body of research has focused on aggressive behavior to date, the subtype of non-aggressive rule-breaking behavior is poorly understood. The current study represents a first attempt to directly assess decision biases toward rule-breaking behavior, their motivational salience, and the association with interpersonal factors in conduct disorder.

Does Social Exclusion Alter Sensory and Pain Thresholds in Children and Adolescents with Functional Abdominal Pain? - Results from a Preliminary Study.

Objective: Functional abdominal pain (AP) is a prevalent issue in childhood and adolescence. The contribution of psychosocial factors in the development and maintenance of this health problem is rather unclear, and experimental studies about underlying mechanisms are lacking. This study investigates whether experimentally induced social exclusion decreases sensory and pain thresholds in children suffering from AP.

Investigating social-contextual determinants of cooperation in incarcerated violent offenders.

Antisocial and psychopathic personality traits constitute a severe and treatment resistant form of externalizing psychopathology. While deficits in social information processing have been extensively investigated in these individuals, less is known about their capacity for altruism and cooperation. In particular, no studies to date have investigated whether established social-contextual determinants of cooperation, e.

Empathy and altruistic behavior in antisocial violent offenders with psychopathic traits.

Deficiencies in empathic functioning are considered a core characteristic of violent behavior. Enhancing empathy in aggressive populations may thus represent a promising intervention target. Hence, the aims of the present work were two-fold: First, we wanted to thoroughly assess empathic competencies and second, we aimed to investigate effects of an empathy induction on experienced empathy levels and prosocial behavior in a sample of violent offenders relative to matched controls.

Distraction by salient stimuli in adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: Evidence for the role of task difficulty in bottom-up and top-down processing.

The cognitive mechanisms of increased distractibility in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are poorly understood. The current study investigated the influence of two major modulating factors (emotional saliency, task difficulty) on behavioral and electrophysiological parameters underlying distractibility in ADHD. In addition, the attentional focus (indirect and direct processing of distractors) was examined.

Interpretation of ambiguous facial affect in adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.

In addition to impairments in cognitive functioning, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is associated with deficits in interpersonal functioning as well which are assumed to stem from a distorted perception or interpretation of affective information. While previous research suggests that the decoding of negatively valenced facial stimuli is impaired, less is known about the potential interpretation biases in ADHD which are linked to other externalizing psychopathologies. The present study investigated interpretation biases in adults with ADHD (N = 65) and controls (N = 49) using ambiguous facial stimuli (angry/happy, angry/fearful, fearful/happy blends) with different proportions of each emotion.

Behavioral and electrophysiological responses to fairness norm violations in antisocial offenders.

Antisocial personality disorder is characterized by a stable, lifelong pattern of disregard for and violation of others' rights. Disruptions in the representation of fairness norms may represent a key mechanism in the development and maintenance of this disorder. Here, we investigated fairness norm considerations and reactions to their violations.

Recognition of peer emotions in children with ADHD: Evidence from an animated facial expressions task.

A growing body of literature suggests that ADHD is associated with emotion recognition impairments that may be linked to deficient interpersonal functioning. However, our understanding of the mechanisms underlying these recognition impairments is extremely limited. Here, we used dynamic stimuli to investigate whether impaired emotion recognition in children with ADHD may be associated with impairments in perceptual sensitivity.

Frontal alpha asymmetry and callous-unemotional traits in imprisoned violent offenders: A pilot study.

Based on the approach-withdrawal model of hemispheric asymmetry, anger and aggression have been linked to an approach-related pattern, characterized by stronger relative left-hemispheric anterior cortical activity. Recent work suggests that also in individuals with extremely violent tendencies, such as imprisoned offenders, approach-related asymmetry may be associated with self-reported trait anger and aggression. A putative association between alpha asymmetry and further characteristics relevant for aggression, such as callous-unemotional (CU) traits, remains to be explored.

Preliminary evidence for increased parasympathetic activity during social inclusion and exclusion in adolescents with functional abdominal pain.

Objective: Peer victimization (e.g. social exclusion) has been shown to be associated with physical health problems such as functional somatic complaints and especially symptoms of pain.

Binocular rivalry transitions predict inattention symptom severity in adult ADHD.

Attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a prevalent childhood disorder that is often maintained throughout the development and persists into adulthood. Established etiology models suggest that deficient inhibition underlies the core ADHD symptoms. While experimental evidence for impaired motor inhibition is overwhelming, little is known about the sensory inhibition processes, their changes throughout the development, and the relationship to ADHD symptoms.

Impaired social cognition in violent offenders: perceptual deficit or cognitive bias?

Aggressive behavior is assumed to be associated with certain patterns of social information processing. While some theories link aggression to a tendency to interpret ambiguous stimuli as hostile (i.e.

Empathy promotes altruistic behavior in economic interactions.

What are the determinants of altruism? While economists assume that altruism is mainly driven by fairness norms, social psychologists consider empathy to be a key motivator for altruistic behavior. To unite these two theories, we conducted an experiment in which we compared behavior in a standard economic game that assesses altruism (the so-called Dictator Game) with a Dictator Game in which participants' behavioral choices were preceded either by an empathy induction or by a control condition without empathy induction. The results of this within-subject manipulation show that the empathy induction substantially increased altruistic behavior.

Smooth criminal: convicted rule-breakers show reduced cognitive conflict during deliberate rule violations.

Classic findings on conformity and obedience document a strong and automatic drive of human agents to follow any type of rule or social norm. At the same time, most individuals tend to violate rules on occasion, and such deliberate rule violations have recently been shown to yield cognitive conflict for the rule-breaker. These findings indicate persistent difficulty to suppress the rule representation, even though rule violations were studied in a controlled experimental setting with neither gains nor possible sanctions for violators.

Theory of mind abilities in patients with psychogenic nonepileptic seizures.

Background: Psychogenic nonepileptic seizures (PNES) have been frequently linked to deficits in affect regulation and altered processing of emotionally salient information. However, less is known about how patients suffering from PNES actually process and interpret affective social stimuli. Thus, the present study aimed to investigate basal facial affect recognition as well as mind-reading skills in a sample of patients with PNES and matched control subjects.

Processing of Dynamic Affective Information in Adults With ADHD.

Objective: ADHD has been repeatedly linked to problems in social functioning. Although some theories assume that the emotion recognition deficits are explained by general attentional deficits, mounting evidence suggests that they may actually constitute a distinct impairment. However, it remains unclear whether the deficient processing affects specific emotional categories or may generalize to all basic emotions.

Temporal estimation of threatening stimuli in social anxiety disorder: investigation of the effects of state anxiety and fearfulness.

Background And Objectives: Prior studies suggest that particularly negative emotional events tend to be experienced as temporally dilated. Perceptual characteristics of the threat cue (averted or directed angry face), state as well as individual anxiety levels have been shown to contribute to the temporal distortions, but the interplay between these factors is not well understood. The present study investigated the relative contributions of these factors in a first study using clinical sample with social anxiety disorder (SAD) and healthy controls (HC).

Subliminal cues bias perception of facial affect in patients with social phobia: evidence for enhanced unconscious threat processing.

Socially anxious individuals have been shown to exhibit altered processing of facial affect, especially expressions signaling threat. Enhanced unaware processing has been suggested an important mechanism which may give rise to anxious conscious cognition and behavior. This study investigated whether individuals with social anxiety disorder (SAD) are perceptually more vulnerable to the biasing effects of subliminal threat cues compared to healthy controls.

Threat processing in generalized social phobia: an investigation of interpretation biases in ambiguous facial affect.

Facial affect is one of the most important information sources during the course of social interactions, but it is susceptible to distortion due to the complex and dynamic nature. Socially anxious individuals have been shown to exhibit alterations in the processing of social information, such as an attentional and interpretative bias toward threatening information. This may be one of the key factors contributing to the development and maintenance of anxious psychopathology.