Violent offenders show reduced attention orienting to the eyes while viewing faces; although offenders & controls show comparable emotion recognition performance, reduced eye gaze is lined to lower recognition for fearful faces

Attention orienting to the eyes in violent female and male offenders: An eye-tracking study. Nina A. Gehrer et al. Biological Psychology, June 12 2021, 108136. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2021.108136

Highlights

• Violent offenders show reduced attention orienting to the eyes while viewing faces.

• Impairments occur for female as well as male incarcerated offenders.

• Particularly early attention shifts are affected.

• Offenders and controls show comparable emotion recognition performance.

• Reduced eye gaze is related to lower recognition accuracy for fearful faces.

Abstract: Attention to the eyes and eye contact form an important basis for the development of empathy and social competences including prosocial behavior. Thus, impairments in attention to the eyes of an interaction partner might play a role in the etiology of antisocial behavior and violence. For the first time, the present study extends investigations of eye gaze to a large sample (N = 173) including not only male but also female violent offenders and a control group. We assessed viewing patterns during the categorization of emotional faces via eye tracking. Our results indicate a reduced frequency of initial attention shifts to the eyes in female and male offenders compared to controls, while there were no general group differences in overall attention to the eye region (i.e., relative dwell time). Thus, we conclude that violent offenders might be able to compensate for deficits in spontaneous attention orienting during later stages of information processing.

Keywords: female offendersviolent offenderseye gazeattention to the eyeseye tracking

From the first author's PhD thesis:

Discussion 

This study is the first to investigate the association between psychopathic personality traits 

and eye contact during live social interaction. For this purpose, we assessed a group of 

incarcerated offenders who had been convicted of serious crimes (e.g., first-degree murder, 

child molestation, rape, etc.) and had validated psychopathy scores. Eye movements were 

recorded during a semi-structured face-to-face interaction with a mobile eye-tracking headset 

and analyzed using a newly developed automated method for the definition of AOIs (i.e., 

face, eyes and philtrum). Consistent with our hypotheses, higher scores of affective 

psychopathy in particular (but not interpersonal, lifestyle, or antisocial facets of psychopathy) 

were found to significantly predict reduced eye contact in combination with increased 

attention to the lower parts of the face, i.e. the philtrum. Therefore, affective psychopathic 

traits were associated with a different focus within the face, while general attention to the face 

was unrelated to these traits.

Our findings are in line with previous studies that linked reduced eye gaze to high CU (callous unemotional) traits, a precursor of affective psychopathy, in children (Billeci et al., 2019; Dadds et al.,  2008; Dadds et al., 2006; but see also Martin-Key et al., 2018). A few studies replicated this  association between CU traits and eye contact assessed by observer ratings during live parentchild interactions (Dadds et al., 2014; Dadds et al., 2011). In offender samples, however,  reduced attention to the eyes of facial stimuli was only documented in laboratory settings with  existing evidence pointing to an association with interpersonal features of psychopathy  (Dargis et al., 2018). Our study extends previous research in several important ways. For one,  our study is the first to document an association between reduced eye contact and the affective  facet of psychopathy (i.e., impaired empathy, an incapacity of feeling guilt or remorse, and  shallow affect) in incarcerated offenders. Second, we show for the first time that these deficits  generalize to naturalistic settings such as live social interaction and therefore exhibit  behavioral relevance. Taken together, this suggests that impairments in attention to socially  salient features previously documented in children and adolescents with high CU traits  (Dadds et al., 2008; Dadds et al., 2011) presumably persist through life. Therefore, assumed  detrimental effects on the development of social cognition and social competence may play a role in the development and the maintenance of psychopathic personality traits (Bedford et al., 2015; Dadds et al., 2014; Dadds et al., 2011; Vaughan Van Hecke et al., 2007). Similar mechanisms have been posited for social deficits in other psychological or neurological disorders, e.g., autism spectrum disorder or amygdala lesion (Auyeung et al., 2015; Freeth & Bugembe, 2019; Hanley et al., 2015; Hanley et al., 2014; Moriuchi, Klin, & Jones, 2017; Spezio, Huang, Castelli, & Adolphs, 2007; Yoder, Stone, Walden, & Malesa, 2009). Future research is needed in order to understand the mechanisms behind impaired attention processes and their association with these psychopathologies in order to further the understanding of etiology, to improve diagnostic specificity, and to develop new intervention and prevention  strategies. 

This study contains notable strengths as well as a number of limitations. Besides its 

ecological validity, our approach is bolstered by the use of a newly developed method to 

automate AOI labelling in video frames (Duchowski et al., 2019). This is a significant 

improvement of the eye-tracking state-of-the-art (e.g., during social interaction) which, to 

date, has relied on manual frame-by-frame labeling of facial AOIs (Hessels, Benjamins, 

Cornelissen, & Hooge, 2018). The approach presented in this paper offers greater objectivity 

and efficiency of the analysis. Furthermore, psychopathic traits were measured via PCL-R 

scores as assessed by independent experts and we took into account effects of possible 

confounding variables identified by recent research, i.e., age and activity as well as eye 

contact expressed by the experimenter (Gillespie et al., 2017; Hessels et al., 2019; Murphy & 

Isaacowitz, 2010; Rogers et al., 2018). The effects of these variables documented in our study 

fit well with previous findings, e.g., reduced attention to the face when talking compared to 

listening during live interaction (Hessels et al., 2019) or reduced attention to the eyes with 

greater age (Gillespie et al., 2017; Murphy & Isaacowitz, 2010). A clear limitation of our 

study is that we are not able to draw conclusions regarding female psychopaths since gender 

has been linked to scan patterns of faces (Hall, Hutton, & Morgan, 2010; Sullivan, Campbell, 

Hutton, & Ruffman, 2017). Furthermore, future studies need to investigate whether our results 

extend to less structured interaction settings and across different interaction partners. 

However, based on previous findings showing the stability of viewing patterns across 

different interaction partners, the present findings can be expected to generalize despite 

variation of interactional situations (Rogers et al., 2018). 

 In sum, we conclude that early impairments in attention to the eyes of an interaction 

partner are presumably stable over one’s lifespan and affect socialization processes including 

the development of empathy during childhood. Recently, not only psychopathic traits but also

other mental disorders such as autism have been associated with similar attentional deficits. 

Therefore, these impairments may represent a general risk factor for the development of 

psychological disorders characterized by social problems. The underlying mechanisms might 

involve deficient amygdala or ventromedial prefrontal cortex functioning (Spezio et al., 2007; 

Wolf, Philippi, Motzkin, Baskaya, & Koenigs, 2014) but need to be further clarified. It will be 

important to develop effective intervention and prevention strategies that improve visual 

attention and eye contact of children at risk. To date, evidence for lasting changes in eye gaze 

through social attention bias modification training (Alvares et al., 2019; Schönenberg et al., 

2014) or parent training programs (Dadds, English, Wimalaweera, Schollar-Root, & Hawes, 

2019) is still elusive. Thus, these promising approaches and further opportunities that target 

impaired eye contact need to be further investigated and enhanced.