Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T08:01:48.024Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Unemotional traits predict early processing deficit for fearful expressions in young violent offenders: an investigation using continuous flash suppression

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 June 2014

A. Jusyte ,
S. V. Mayer ,
E. Künzel ,
M. Hautzinger  and
M. Schönenberg
A. Jusyte*
Affiliation:
Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany LEAD Graduate School, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany
S. V. Mayer
Affiliation:
Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany
E. Künzel
Affiliation:
Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany
M. Hautzinger
Affiliation:
Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany
M. Schönenberg
Affiliation:
Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany
*
*Address for correspondence: Dr A. Jusyte, University of Tübingen, LEAD Graduate School, Europastr. 6, D-72072 Tübingen, Germany. (Email: [email protected])
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Background

Research evidence suggests that cognitive and neural mechanisms involved in social information processing may underlie the key aspects associated with the emergence of aggression and psychopathy. Despite extensive research in this field, it is unclear whether this deficit relates to general attentional problems or affects early stages of information processing. Therefore, the aim was to explore the link between aggression, psychopathic traits, and the early processing deficits in young antisocial violent offenders (YAVOs) and healthy controls (CTLs).

Method

Participants were presented with rapidly changing Mondrian-like images in one eye, while a neutral or emotional (happy, angry, fearful, disgusted, surprised, sad) face was slowly introduced to the other eye. Participants indicated the location in which the face had appeared on the screen, reflecting the time when they became aware of the stimulus. The relative processing advantage was obtained by subtracting mean reaction times for emotional from neutral faces.

Results

The results indicated that individuals with higher levels of unemotional traits tended to exhibit an extensive early processing disadvantage for fearful facial expressions; this relationship was only evident in the YAVO as opposed to the CTL sample.

Conclusions

These findings indicate that an emotion processing deficit in antisocial individuals is present even at the most basic levels of processing and closely related to certain psychopathic traits. Furthermore, this early processing deficit appears to be highly specific to fearful expressions, which is consistent with predictions made by influential models of psychopathy. The clinical significance and potential implications of the results are discussed.

Keywords

Aggressioncallous-unemotional traitsearly processingemotion recognitionpsychopathy
Type
Original Articles
Information
Psychological Medicine , Volume 45 , Issue 2 , January 2015 , pp. 285 - 297
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ackenheil, M, Stotz, G, Dietz-Bauer, R, Vossen, A (1999). Deutsche Fassung des Mini-international Neuropsychiatric Interview [German Version of The MINI-International Neuropsychiatric Interview] . München: Psychiatrische Universitätsklinik München.Google Scholar
Adolphs, R, Gosselin, F, Buchanan, TW, Tranel, D, Schyns, P, Damasio, AR (2005). A mechanism for impaired fear recognition after amygdala damage. Nature 433, 68–72.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Almeida, J, Pajtas, PE, Mahon, BZ, Nakayama, K, Caramazza, A (2012). Affect of the unconscious: visually suppressed angry faces modulate our decisions. Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience 13, 94–101.Google Scholar
Andersherd, H, Kerr, M, Stattin, H, Levander, S (2002). Psychopathic traits in non-referred youths: a new assessment tool. In Psychopaths: Current International Perspectives (ed. Blauuw, E. and Sheridan, L.), pp. 131–158. Elsevier: The Hague.Google Scholar
Anderson, E, Siegel, E, White, D, Barrett, LF (2012). Out of sight but not out of mind: unseen affective faces influence evaluations and social impressions. Emotion 12, 1210–1221.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aviezer, H, Hassin, RR, Bentin, S, Trope, Y (2008 a). Putting facial expressions back in context. In First Impressions (ed. Ambady, N. and Skowronski, J. J.), pp. 255–286. Guilford Publications: New York, NY, USA.Google Scholar
Aviezer, H, Hassin, RR, Ryan, J, Grady, C, Susskind, J, Anderson, A, Moscovitch, M, Bentin, S (2008 b). Angry, disgusted, or afraid? Studies on the malleability of emotion perception. Psychological Science 19, 724–732.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bar-Haim, Y (2010). Research review: attention bias modification (ABM): a novel treatment for anxiety disorders. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 51, 859–870.Google Scholar
Baskin-Sommers, AR, Curtin, JJ, Newman, JP (2011). Specifying the attentional selection that moderates the fearlessness of psychopathic offenders. Psychological Science 22, 226–234.Google Scholar
Blair, K, Morton, J, Leonard, A, Blair, R (2006). Impaired decision-making on the basis of both reward and punishment information in individuals with psychopathy. Personality and Individual Differences 41, 155–165.Google Scholar
Blair, R (1995). A cognitive developmental approach to morality: investigating the psychopath. Cognition 57, 1–29.Google Scholar
Blair, R (2001). Neurocognitive models of aggression, the antisocial personality disorders, and psychopathy. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry 71, 727–731.Google Scholar
Blair, R (2003). Facial expressions, their communicatory functions and neuro–cognitive substrates. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B: Biological Sciences 358, 561–572.Google Scholar
Blair, R (2008). The amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex: functional contributions and dysfunction in psychopathy. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B: Biological Sciences 363, 2557–2565.Google Scholar
Blair, R, Mitchell, D, Peschardt, K, Colledge, E, Leonard, R, Shine, J, Murray, L, Perrett, D (2004). Reduced sensitivity to others’ fearful expressions in psychopathic individuals. Personality and Individual Differences 37, 1111–1122.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Buss, AH, Perry, M (1992). The aggression questionnaire. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 63, 452–459.Google Scholar
Coccaro, EF, McCloskey, MS, Fitzgerald, DA, Phan, KL (2007). Amygdala and orbitofrontal reactivity to social threat in individuals with impulsive aggression. Biological Psychiatry 62, 168–178.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dadds, M, Allen, JL, McGregor, K, Woolgar, M, Viding, E, Scott, S (2013). Callous-unemotional traits in children and mechanisms of impaired eye contact during expressions of love: a treatment target? Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. Published online: October 2013. doi:10.1111/jcpp.12155.Google Scholar
Dadds, M, El Masry, Y, Wimalaweera, S, Guastella, A (2008). Reduced eye gaze explains ‘fear blindness’ in childhood psychopathic traits. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 47, 455–463.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dadds, M, Perry, Y, Hawes, D, Merz, S, Riddell, A, Haines, D, Solak, E, Abeygunawardane, A (2006). Look at the eyes: fear recognition in child psychopathy. British Journal of Psychiatry 189, 180–181.Google Scholar
Dawel, A, O'Kearney, R, McKone, E, Palermo, R (2012). Not just fear and sadness: meta-analytic evidence of pervasive emotion recognition deficits for facial and vocal expressions in psychopathy. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 36, 2288–2304.Google Scholar
DeLisi, M, Umphress, ZR, Vaughn, MG (2009). The criminology of the amygdala. Criminal Justice and Behavior 36, 1241–1252.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dodge, KA (2006). Translational science in action: hostile attributional style and the development of aggressive behavior problems. Development and Psychopathology 18, 791–814.Google Scholar
Essau, CA, Sasagawa, S, Frick, PJ (2006). Callous-unemotional traits in a community sample of adolescents. Assessment 13, 454–469.Google Scholar
Formann, AK, Piswanger, K (1979). Wiener Matrizen-Test. Manual. Beltz Test Gesellschaft: Weinheim.Google Scholar
Formann, AK, Waldherr, K, Piswanger, K (2011). Wiener Matrizen-Test 2. Manual. Beltz Test GmbH: Göttingen.Google Scholar
Frick, PJ, White, SF (2008). Research review: the importance of callous-unemotional traits for developmental models of aggressive and antisocial behavior. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 49, 359–375.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gray, KLH, Adams, WJ, Hedger, N, Newton, KE, Garner, M (2013). Faces and awareness: low-level, not emotional factors determine perceptual dominance. Emotion 13, 537–544.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haas, SM, Waschbusch, DA, Pelham, WE Jr., King, S, Andrade, BF, Carrey, NJ (2011). Treatment response in CP/ADHD children with callous/unemotional traits. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology 39, 541–552.Google Scholar
Han, T, Alders, GL, Greening, SG, Neufeld, RW, Mitchell, DG (2012). Do fearful eyes activate empathy-related brain regions in individuals with callous traits? Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 7, 958–968.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hawes, DJ, Brennan, J, Dadds, MR (2009). Cortisol, callous-unemotional traits, and pathways to antisocial behavior. Current Opinion in Psychiatry 22, 357–362.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Herzberg, PY (2003). Faktorstruktur, Gütekriterien und Konstruktvalidität der deutschen Übersetzung des Aggressionsfragebogens von Buss und Perry [Psychometric evaluation and validity of the German translation of the aggression questionnaire by Buss and Perry]. Zeitschrift für Differentielle und Diagnostische Psychologie 24, 311–323.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jiang, Y, Costello, P, He, S (2007). Processing of invisible stimuli: advantage of upright faces and recognizable words in overcoming interocular suppression. Psychological Science 18, 349–355.Google Scholar
Jiang, Y, He, S (2006). Cortical responses to invisible faces: dissociating subsystems for facial-information processing. Current Biology 16, 2023–2029.Google Scholar
Jiang, Y, Shannon, RW, Vizueta, N, Bernat, EM, Patrick, CJ, He, S (2009). Dynamics of processing invisible faces in the brain: automatic neural encoding of facial expression information. NeuroImage 44, 1171–1177.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jones, A, Laurens, K, Herba, C, Barker, G, Viding, E (2009). Amygdala hypoactivity to fearful faces in boys with conduct problems and callous-unemotional traits. American Journal of Psychiatry 166, 95–102.Google Scholar
Jusyte, A, Schönenberg, M (2013). A laboratory investigation of anxious cognition: how subliminal cues alter perceptual sensitivity to threat. Journal of Experimental Psychopathology 4, 387–404.Google Scholar
Kimonis, ER, Frick, PJ, Fazekas, H, Loney, BR (2006). Psychopathy, aggression, and the processing of emotional stimuli in non-referred girls and boys. Behavioral Sciences & the Law 24, 21–37.Google Scholar
Koenigs, M, Baskin-Sommers, A, Zeier, J, Newman, J (2011). Investigating the neural correlates of psychopathy: a critical review. Molecular Psychiatry 16, 792–799.Google Scholar
Kouider, S, Dehaene, S (2007). Levels of processing during non-conscious perception: a critical review of visual masking. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B: Biological Sciences 362, 857–875.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lake, AJ, Baskin-Sommers, AR, Li, W, Curtin, JJ, Newman, JP (2011). Evidence for unique threat-processing mechanisms in psychopathic and anxious individuals. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience 11, 1–12.Google Scholar
Langner, O, Dotsch, R, Bijlstra, G, Wigboldus, DH, Hawk, ST, van Knippenberg, A (2010). Presentation and validation of the Radboud Faces Database. Cognition and Emotion 24, 1377–1388.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lecrubier, Y, Sheehan, D, Weiller, E, Amorim, P, Bonora, I, Harnett Sheehan, K, Janavs, J, Dunbar, G (1997). The Mini International Neuropsychiatric Interview (MINI). A short diagnostic structured interview: reliability and validity according to the CIDI. European Psychiatry 12, 224–231.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lee, TH, Lim, SL, Lee, KY, Choi, JS (2009). Facilitation of visual processing by masked presentation of a conditioned facial stimulus. NeuroReport 20, 750–754.Google Scholar
Marsh, AA, Blair, R (2008). Deficits in facial affect recognition among antisocial populations: a meta-analysis. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 32, 454–465.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Marsh, AA, Finger, E, Mitchell, D, Reid, M, Sims, C, Kosson, D, Towbin, K, Leibenluft, E, Pine, D, Blair, R (2008). Reduced amygdala response to fearful expressions in children and adolescents with callous-unemotional traits and disruptive behavior disorders. American Journal of Psychiatry 165, 712–720.Google Scholar
Mitchell, DGV, Fine, C, Richell, RA, Newman, C, Lumsden, J, Blair, KS, Blair, RJR (2006). Instrumental learning and relearning in individuals with psychopathy and in patients with lesions involving the amygdala or orbitofrontal cortex. Neuropsychology 20, 280–289.Google Scholar
Moul, C, Killcross, S, Dadds, MR (2012). A model of differential amygdala activation in psychopathy. Psychological Review 119, 789.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Muñoz, LC (2009). Callous-unemotional traits are related to combined deficits in recognizing afraid faces and body poses. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry 48, 554–562.Google Scholar
Newman, JP, Baskin-Sommers, AR (2012). Early selective attention abnormalities in psychopathy. In Cognitive Neuroscience of Attention (ed. Posner, M. I.), pp. 421–440. The Guilford Press: New York.Google Scholar
Newman, JP, Curtin, JJ, Bertsch, JD, Baskin-Sommers, AR (2010). Attention moderates the fearlessness of psychopathic offenders. Biological Psychiatry 67, 66–70.Google Scholar
Öhman, A (2002). Automaticity and the amygdala: nonconscious responses to emotional faces. Current Directions in Psychological Science 11, 62–66.Google Scholar
Öhman, A (2009). Of snakes and faces: an evolutionary perspective on the psychology of fear. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 50, 543–552.Google Scholar
Palermo, R, Rhodes, G (2007). Are you always on my mind? A review of how face perception and attention interact. Neuropsychologia 45, 75–92.Google Scholar
Pessoa, L (2005). To what extent are emotional visual stimuli processed without attention and awareness? Current Opinion in Neurobiology 15, 188–196.Google Scholar
Pessoa, L, Japee, S, Sturman, D, Ungerleider, LG (2006). Target visibility and visual awareness modulate amygdala responses to fearful faces. Cerebral Cortex 16, 366–375.Google Scholar
Poythress, NG, Dembo, R, Wareham, J, Greenbaum, PE (2006). Construct validity of the Youth Psychopathic Traits Inventory (YPI) and the Antisocial Process Screening Device (APSD) with justice-involved adolescents. Criminal Justice and Behavior 33, 26–55.Google Scholar
Roose, A, Bijttebier, P, Decoene, S, Claes, L, Frick, PJ (2010). Assessing the affective features of psychopathy in adolescence: a further validation of the inventory of callous and unemotional traits. Assessment 17, 44–57.Google Scholar
Rowe, R, Maughan, B, Moran, P, Ford, T, Briskman, J, Goodman, R (2010). The role of callous and unemotional traits in the diagnosis of conduct disorder. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 51, 688–695.Google Scholar
Schönenberg, M, Christian, S, Gaußer, AK, Mayer, SV, Hautzinger, M, Jusyte, A (2014). Addressing perceptual insensitivity to facial affect in violent offenders: first evidence for the efficacy of a novel implicit training approach. Psychological Medicine 44, 1043–1052.Google Scholar
Schönenberg, M, Louis, K, Mayer, S, Jusyte, A (2013). Impaired identification of threat-related social information in male delinquents with antisocial personality disorder. Journal of Personality Disorders 27, 496–505.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schönenberg, M, Mares, L, Smolka, R, Jusyte, A, Zipfel, S, Hautzinger, M (in press). Facial affect perception and mentalizing abilities in female patients with persistent somatoform pain disorder. European Journal of Pain. Published online: January 2014. doi:10.1002/j.1532-2149.2013.00440.x.Google Scholar
Schulze, L, Domes, G, Köppen, D, Herpertz, SC (2012). Enhanced detection of emotional facial expressions in borderline personality disorder. Psychopathology 46, 217–224.Google Scholar
Sebastian, CL, McCrory, EJ, Cecil, CA, Lockwood, PL, De Brito, SA, Fontaine, NM, Viding, E (2012). Neural responses to affective and cognitive theory of mind in children with conduct problems and varying levels of callous-unemotional traits. Neural responses to affective and cognitive ToM. Archives of General Psychiatry 69, 814–822.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stein, T, Hebart, MN, Sterzer, P (2011). Breaking continuous flash suppression: a new measure of unconscious processing during interocular suppression? Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 5, 1–17.Google Scholar
Sterzer, P, Hilgenfeldt, T, Freudenberg, P, Bermpohl, F, Adli, M (2011). Access of emotional information to visual awareness in patients with major depressive disorder. Psychological Medicine 41, 1615–1624.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Suslow, T, Ohrmann, P, Bauer, J, Rauch, AV, Schwindt, W, Arolt, V, Heindel, W, Kugel, H (2006). Amygdala activation during masked presentation of emotional faces predicts conscious detection of threat-related faces. Brain and Cognition 61, 243–248.Google Scholar
Sweeny, TD, Grabowecky, M, Suzuki, S, Paller, KA (2009). Long-lasting effects of subliminal affective priming from facial expressions. Consciousness and Cognition: An International Journal 18, 929–938.Google Scholar
Sylvers, PD, Brennan, PA, Lilienfeld, SO (2011). Psychopathic traits and preattentive threat processing in children: a novel test of the fearlessness hypothesis. Psychological Science 22, 1280–1287.Google Scholar
Tamietto, M, de Gelder, B (2010). Neural bases of the non-conscious perception of emotional signals. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 11, 697–709.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Troiani, V, Price, ET, Schultz, RT (2014). Unseen fearful faces promote amygdala guidance of attention. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 9, 133–140.Google Scholar
Tsuchiya, N, Koch, C (2005). Continuous flash suppression reduces negative afterimages. Nature Neuroscience 8, 1096–1101.Google Scholar
Tsuchiya, N, Moradi, F, Felsen, C, Yamazaki, M, Adolphs, R (2009). Intact rapid detection of fearful faces in the absence of the amygdala. Nature Neuroscience 12, 1224–1225.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Viding, E, Sebastian, CL, Dadds, MR, Lockwood, PL, Cecil, CA, De Brito, SA, McCrory, EJ (2012). Amygdala response to preattentive masked fear in children with conduct problems: the role of callous-unemotional traits. American Journal of Psychiatry 169, 1109–1116.Google Scholar
Vizueta, N, Patrick, CJ, Jiang, Y, Thomas, KM, He, S (2012). Dispositional fear, negative affectivity, and neuroimaging response to visually suppressed emotional faces. NeuroImage 59, 761–771.Google Scholar
Wallace, GL, White, SF, Robustelli, B, Sinclair, S, Hwang, S, Martin, A, Blair, RJR (2014). Cortical and subcortical abnormalities in youths with conduct disorder and elevated callous-unemotional traits. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry 53, 456–465.Google Scholar
Whalen, PJ, Rauch, SL, Etcoff, NL, McInerney, SC, Lee, MB, Jenike, MA (1998). Masked presentations of emotional facial expressions modulate amygdala activity without explicit knowledge. Journal of Neuroscience 18, 411–418.Google Scholar
White, SF, Williams, WC, Brislin, SJ, Sinclair, S, Blair, KS, Fowler, KA, Pine, DS, Pope, K, Blair, RJ (2012). Reduced activity within the dorsal endogenous orienting of attention network to fearful expressions in youth with disruptive behavior disorders and psychopathic traits. Development and Psychopathology 24, 1105–1116.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Willenbockel, V, Lepore, F, Nguyen, DK, Bouthillier, A, Gosselin, F (2011). Spatial frequency tuning during the conscious and non-conscious perception of emotional facial expressions–an intracranial ERP study. Frontiers in Psychology 3, 237–237.Google Scholar
Yang, E, Blake, R (2012). Deconstructing continuous flash suppression. Journal of Vision 12, 8.Google Scholar
Yang, E, Zald, DH, Blake, R (2007). Fearful expressions gain preferential access to awareness during continuous flash suppression. Emotion 7, 882–886.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Yang, Y, Raine, A, Narr, KL, Colletti, P, Toga, AW (2009). Localization of deformations within the amygdala in individuals with psychopathy. Archives of General Psychiatry 66, 986–994.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: File

Jusyte Supplementary Material

Table 3

Download Jusyte Supplementary Material(File)
File 31 KB