The Influence Of Situational Cues And Expressions Recognition On The Hostile Attribution Bias Among Offenders

The cognitive theories of aggression state that the interpretation bias of the situation,such as hostile attribution bias,would guide the following behavior of the individual.And the hostile interpretation bias is regard as an important factor of aggressive behavior.The facial expression cues is one of the important social cues in one’s social interaction.It has already been found that people with either high aggression or antisocial personality disorder both have defects in facial expression recognition.Some studies found that antisocial behavior was associated with pooper performance for recognizing neutral faces and other kind emotional faces,which were most often mistaken as angry or high threatening emotion.Some of the researchers hold that kind mistakes are due to the hostile attribution bias,which has already been found in people with high aggression.While other researchers who put the attentional bias,suggest that individuals with high aggression would more sensitive to anger cues in the facial expression,not the hostile attribution bias,is the cause of the bias to the facial expression recognition.Based on those two perspective of the expression recognition bias,the present study has further explored the relationship between the aggression and the hostile attribution to the facial expression cue in violent offenders and non-violent offenders.At the same time,other situational cues are also taken into this study to explore how the interaction between facial cues and situational cues affects the hostile attribution bias to the situation and later aggressive behavior intent of violent offenders.Study 1 compared violent offenders and non-violent offenders in Jinzhou prison,and used the IAT paradigm to detect the hostile attribution bias in them.Result shows that offenders with high aggression had significant hostile attribution to the mixed facial expression blended with anger,while offenders with low aggressive didn’t have such significant hostile attribution bias.This result indicates that the hostile attribution bias in offenders can explain the high aggression trait in them.Study 2 conducted a further measurement of the hostile attribution bias to disgust expression.It also used IAT paradigm to detect the implicit cognition of violent and non-violent offender with mixed facial expression.The result is not consistent with the original hypothesis.Both group of the offenders had significant hostile attrition bias to the mixed facial expression blended with disgust,which support some of the researches before.Study 3 had taken the other situational cues into consideration to explore the how the interaction between facial cues and situational cues influent the hostile attribution bias and later aggressive behavior intention of the violent offenders.The results of the study shows that threat level of other situational cues and anger cues in facial expressions have significant affect on hostile attribution bias and expected aggressive reaction of offenders with high aggression,but the interaction effect between two factors of is not significant.The present study found evidence to the hostile attribution in facial expression recognition from violent offenders,which can explain their recognition bias in emotion expression,As for the disgust,it had found significant hostile attribution bias in both violent and non-violent offenders.Although in a high threat situation,the hostile attribution bias differences from offenders between mixed facial expressions with or without anger cues is bigger than in low threat situation,the difference is not significant,which showed no significant interaction,that is,there is no facial expression context effect.