Psychotically driven aggression is associated with greater mentalizing challenges in psychotic spectrum disorders.

Background: Some aggressive acts committed by individuals with psychotic spectrum disorders (PSD) are understandable in the context of interpersonal conflict or goal attainment, yet others are unpredictable, arising from delusions or hallucinations (psychotically driven aggressive acts, PDA). It is unknown if there are underlying differences in cognitive or perceptive social cognition in relation to aggression motivation in PSD.

Method: We compared differences in social cognition performance between 49 individuals with PSD who had committed PDA with those exhibiting other types of aggression (n = 31) (non-PDA) and to community controls (n = 81) on the Swedish version of Double Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition - Multiple Choice (DMASC-MC).

Impaired facial emotion perception of briefly presented double masked stimuli in violent offenders with schizophrenia spectrum disorders.

Social interactions require decoding of subtle rapidly changing emotional cues in others to facilitate socially appropriate behaviour. It is possible that impairments in the ability to detect and decode these signals may increase the risk for aggression. Therefore, we examined violent offenders with schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD) and compared these with healthy controls on a computerized paradigm of briefly presented double masked faces exhibiting 7 basic emotions.