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Scientists believe that a
simple two-hour emotional awareness course aimed at making young offenders less
aggressive could hold the key to significantly reducing the seriousness of
their future crimes.
In the first ever study of its
kind, psychologists from Cardiff University recorded a 44% drop in the severity
of crimes committed by persistent reoffenders, six months following the
completion of a course designed to improve their ability to recognise other
people's emotions. The findings are published in PLOS ONE journal.
Much has been published
previously to suggest that adolescents who display antisocial behaviour have
problems in facial emotional recognition, particularly fear and sadness.
By heightening their ability to
perceive these emotions, researchers believe they can instil in young offenders
a stronger sense of empathy for potential victims, and consequently a reduction
in physical aggression and instances of severe crime.
To explore this idea, they
studied the emotion recognition capabilities and criminal activity of 50
juvenile offenders (with an average age of 16) from the Cardiff and Vale of
Glamorgan Youth Offending Services (YOS).
While all the participants of
the study received their statutory intervention -- involving contact with a
caseworker, as ordered by the courts -- a sub-group of 24 offenders also took
part the research team's facial affect training, aimed at improving their
emotion recognition capabilities and normally used to rehabilitate patients
with brain-damage.
Offenders in the sub-group and
those only receiving statutory intervention were matched for age, socioeconomic
status, IQ and criminal history. During the study, each group was tested twice
for emotion recognition performance, and recent crime data was collected six
months after testing had been completed.
Lead author Professor Stephanie
Van Goozen, from Cardiff University's School of Psychology, said:
"Poor emotion recognition
in children and adolescents can cause antisocial behaviour. Our study shows
that this recognition can be corrected using an approach that is both
cost-effective and relatively quick.
"Our findings support our
belief that a population of individuals, whose combined offending produces the
majority of harm in communities, can be made to behave less aggressively with
the knock-on effect of bringing about a significant drop in serious crime.
"We would like to extend
this research to younger age groups, particularly to children who are at risk
of developing antisocial behaviour later in life that could result in violence,
substance abuse, health problems and psychiatric illness.
"Emotion recognition
training could set children on a much more positive path in life -- one which
doesn't have to involve serious crime or violence against others, to the
benefit of society and themselves."
Researchers measuring the
severity of participants' crimes used a score system ranging from 1-8: '1'
indicates a public order offence while '8' means murder. The average offence
severity of the facial affect training sub-group was 3.75 six months prior to
training, dropping to 2.08 six months after.
Facial affect training consists
of several levels of emotional tasks, where participants are required, among
other scenarios, to identify the emotional expression of a face, to describe an
event that has made them feel that emotion and mimic the emotion using a
mirror. Tasks also include focusing on specified features of an emotional face
and selecting the correct description of that feature from several options.
The emotion recognition test
consists of 150 slides presented on a laptop, displaying facial expressions --
including happy, sad, anger, fear, disgust -- at varying degrees of emotional
intensity. Participants have to guess what emotion is displayed.
These findings are consistent
with the results of a study conducted at Bristol University in 2013, in which
researchers succeeded in modifying a tendency for aggressive youths to
interpret anger in ambiguous expressions. Participants reported feeling less
aggressive and acting less aggressively for two weeks following the
intervention.
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