Investigation of the process of perceiving social cues through the processes of recognizing, inferring and attributing emotions from facial expressions in violent and nonviolent offenders

In communication, emotional expressions are highly important. Individuals use facial expressions in order to figure out the existing social context, to understand their own expectations and their emotions, to provide themselves instant feedback and to produce appropriate answer according to current social context. In this thesis, it is aimed to investigate recognition, inferring and interpretation of emotional expressions in violent and non-violent offenders. The study conducted with 51 violent offenders, 32 non-violent offenders, and 28 control participants in Forensic Science Institution (N = 111, mean age: 31.94). Participants were given a test battery including Facial Emotion Identification test, Facial Emotion Discrimination Test, Reading the Mind in the Eyes test, Positive and Negative Affection Scale, and 20 black-white human face photographs, which include no expressions, and they were asked to attribute one of the six basic emotion (happiness, anger, sadness, disgust, fear, and surprise) for these photographs. In order to investigate group differences, one-way ANOVA method was used. According to results, violent and non-violent offenders performed poorly at recognizing emotions, F(2,108) = 18.85, p < .001], discriminating emotions, F(2,106) = 18.85, p < .001, and interpretation of emotions, F(2,110) = 15.48, p < .001, as compared to the control participants. Violent offenders more frequently interpreted "anger" emotion to the neutral expressions than the two other groups, F(2,108) = 7.73, p = .011; meanwhile the control group more frequently interpreted "happiness" emotion to the neutral expressions, F(2,106) = 8.70, p < .001. Moreover, participants with poor ability to recognize emotions are more likely to interpret "fear" emotion to the neutral expressions, r = -.187, p < .05. As a result, it is found that offenders performed poorly at recognizing, inferring and interpretation of emotional expressions as compared to normal individuals and this situation might have destructive effects in perceiving social situations correctly and may produce inappropriate answers. It is suggested that these findings might be helpful for rehabilitation and re-gain of offenders into the society.