Facial Emotion Perceptual Tendency in Violent and Non-violent Offenders

Emotion perception has a vital influence on social interaction. Previous studies discussed mainly the relationship between facial emotion perception and aggressive behavior from the perspective of hostile attributional bias and the impaired violence inhibition mechanism. The present study aims to provide new evidence of different emotion perception patterns between the violent and non-violent criminal samples through a new indicator of the facial emotion recognition test, Facial Emotion Perception Tendency (FEPT), calculated by counting the times a participant recognizes a set of emotional stimuli as a particular specific emotion, and to further examine the association between aggressive behaviors and FEPT. 101 violent and 171 non-violent offenders, as well as 81 non-offending control participants, were recruited to complete the emotion recognition task with morphed stimuli (Study 1). We further recruited 62 non-offending healthy male participants to finish the Buss -Perry Aggression Questionnaire (BPAQ) after the emotion recognition task in Study 2. Both non-violent and violent offenders were significantly lower in overall accuracy of emotion recognition and disgust FEPT, but higher in happy FEPT, than non-offending healthy controls. Non-violent offenders had significantly lower fear FEPT than violent offenders, and had higher anger FEPT than non-offending controls. The results also revealed that the level of physical aggression was positively correlated with fear FEPT, while negatively correlated with anger FEPT. The current study demonstrated that FEPT was associated with aggressive behavior and implies the importance of improving the emotion decoding ability of offenders. Also, the concept “FEPT” proposed in this study is of significance for further exploration of how individuals’ tendency to perceiving a particular emotion can be correlated with social behaviors.

M135. DEVELOPMENT OF VISUAL SCANPATH PATTERN ANALYSIS BASED ON FACIAL EMOTION PERCEPTION ENHANCEMENT TRAINING PROGRAM IN SCHIZOPHRENIA PATIENTS

Background Facial expression is an important non-verbal way of expressing the person’s emotional state. If the process of perceiving facial features is impaired, the ability to recognize the emotional state of others is degraded, which may make it difficult to maintain interpersonal and social communications. Many studies have reported on the association between deficit of facial emotion perception (FEP) and the social functioning in schizophrenia. Therefore, we developed visual scanpath pattern analysis based FEP enhancement training program in schizophrenia. Methods We enrolled patients visited and admitted Gongju National Hospital and those lived in shared housing facilities for rehabilitation from Sep 2018 to May 2019. 128 patients attended to FEP training program as open, blind and randomized-controlled cross-over design. Both FEP training and mock programs were provided twice a week for a month treatment period with a 4-week washout period between treatment periods. Primary outcome was results of heatmaps based on visual scanpath patterns. Results Among 128 patients, 121 completed the study and 7 was dropped out. In FEP training group, their visual scanpath pattern somewhat closer to normal than mock group. When they had an efforts to perceive the emotion of face pictures, FEP training group tended to scan the face pictures more broadly including eye rims, middle of forehead and sided of the mouth in addition to eyes, nose and mouth whereas mock group tended to gaze eyes, nose and mouth intensively. Discussion This FEP training program may improve the ability to integrate facial expression cues through visual scanpath pattern changes in schizophrenia patients. Acknowledgement: This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) (Grant number NRF-2016R1E1A2A01953732 & 2018R1E1A2A02059043).

Normal observers show no evidence for blindsight in facial emotion perception

Some researchers have argued that normal human observers can exhibit “blindsight-like” behavior: the ability to discriminate or identify a stimulus without being aware of it. However, we recently used a bias-free task to show that what looks like blindsight may in fact be an artifact of typical experimental paradigms’ susceptibility to response bias. While those findings challenge previous reports of blindsight in normal observers, they do not rule out the possibility that different stimuli or techniques could still reveal perception without awareness. One intriguing candidate is emotion processing, since processing of emotional stimuli (e.g. fearful/happy faces) has been reported to potentially bypass conscious visual circuits. Here we used the bias-free blindsight paradigm to investigate whether emotion processing might reveal “featural blindsight,” i.e. ability to identify a face’s emotion without introspective access to the task-relevant features that led to the discrimination decision. However, we saw no evidence for emotion processing “featural blindsight”: as before, whenever participants could identify a face’s emotion they displayed introspective access to the task-relevant features, matching predictions of a Bayesian ideal observer. These results add to the growing body of evidence that perceptual discrimination ability without introspective access may not be possible for neurologically intact observers.