背景:改变的情感状态识别被认为是攻击行为的根本原因,精神病和反社会人格障碍等精神病理学的标志。然而,两个最有影响力的模型对潜在机制做出了明显不同的预测。根据综合情绪系统理论(IES),侵略反映了社会痛苦线索的处理能力受损,例如恐惧的面孔。相比之下,敌对归因偏见(HAB)模型用偏见解释侵略,以将模棱两可的表达解释为愤怒。
方法:在一组四个实验中,我们测量了使用野兔精神病检查表(PCL-R,野兔,R.D.(1991)。精神病检查表修订。多伦多,ON:多卫生系统)和60名年龄匹配的对照参与者。
结果:没有证据表明暴力罪犯存在恐惧缺陷,也没有证据表明精神病或攻击性与恐惧面孔加工受损有关。同样,没有证据表明与精神病或侵略有关的愤怒面孔存在感知偏见。然而,使用高度模糊的刺激,需要明确的情绪标签,暴力罪犯对愤怒表现出分类偏见,这种愤怒偏见与自我报告的特质侵略有关(但与精神病无关)。
结论:这些结果增加了越来越多的文献,使人们对攻击性个体和精神病患者的恐惧处理受到损害的观念产生怀疑,并为攻击性与敌对归因偏见有关的观点提供了支持。后感知处理阶段。
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. In contrast, the hostile attribution bias (HAB) model explains aggression with a bias to interpret ambiguous expressions as angry.
METHODS: In a set of four experiments, we measured processing of fearful and angry facial expressions (compared to neutral and other expressions) in a sample of 65 male imprisoned violent offenders rated using the Hare
Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R, Hare, R. D. (1991). The
psychopathy checklist-revised. Toronto, ON: Multi-Health Systems) and in 60 age-matched control participants.
RESULTS: There was no evidence for a fear deficit in violent offenders or for an association of
psychopathy or aggression with impaired processing of fearful faces. Similarly, there was no evidence for a perceptual bias for angry faces linked to
psychopathy or aggression. However, using highly ambiguous stimuli and requiring explicit labeling of emotions, violent offenders showed a categorization bias for anger and this anger bias correlated with self-reported trait aggression (but not with psychopathy).
CONCLUSIONS: These results add to a growing literature casting doubt on the notion that fear processing is impaired in aggressive individuals and in psychopathy and provide support for the idea that aggression is related to a hostile attribution bias that emerges from later cognitive, post-perceptual processing stages.