Emotional Recognition Training Enhances Attention to Emotional Stimuli Among Male Juvenile Delinquents

Abstract

Objective: Juvenile delinquents have deficits in emotional recognition that might play a critical role in the development of aggression. The present study aimed to investigate the effect of emotional recognition training and its consequences on emotional attention and aggression.

Methods: Seventy-three male juvenile delinquents were randomly assigned to two groups. One group was the modification group, which received eight days of training on an emotional recognition task. The purpose of the training was to modify interpretative biases in emotion recognition to encourage the perception of happiness over anger in ambiguous expressions. The other group was the waitlist group, which did not perform a task and continued with their usual programme. Before and after the training, participants completed the aggression questionnaire (AQ) and two behavioural tasks, including the emotional recognition task and a visual search task with happy and angry faces as targets.

Results: The modification group recognized more faces as happy after emotional recognition training than the waitlist group. Furthermore, the hostility in the modification group decreased significantly. Importantly, emotional recognition training further affected attention to emotional faces as participants responded faster in searching for happy and angry faces after training.

Conclusion: Emotional recognition training could modify juvenile delinquents' emotional recognition, enhance their visual attention to emotional faces and reduce hostility.

Keywords: aggression; emotional attention; emotional recognition training; juvenile delinquents.

Figure 1

Stimuli and procedure of the emotional recognition task. (A) A demonstration of a “happy-angry” continuum. The prototypical happy face and the prototypical angry face from the same identity are the endpoints of the continuum. Fifteen equally spaced face images are generated. (B) The procedure of the emotional recognition task. The upper one demonstrates a typical trial in the pre-training and post-training test phases. No feedback is provided. The lower one demonstrates a typical trial in the training phase. Feedback is provided after the participant’s response.

Figure 2

The procedure of the visual search task. Participants are required to search for a happy or angry face among 7 neutral distractors.

Figure 3

Results from the emotional recognition experiment. Day 1 and Day 10 are pre-training and post-training tests, respectively, while Day 2 to Day 9 is the eight-day training phase. A higher balance point indicates a higher proportion of happy responses in recognizing a face continuum. The error bar denotes 1 standard error of the mean.

Figure 4

RT results from the visual search experiment. The left panel demonstrates the results from the modification group, while the right panel demonstrates the results from the waitlist group. The error bar denotes 1 standard error of the mean.