Our results provide strong evidence that emotion processing plays a causal role in anger and the maintenance of aggressive behaviour. This could potentially lead to novel behavioural treatments in the future.
Encouraging young people at high-risk of criminal offending and delinquency to see happiness rather than anger in facial expressions results in a decrease in their levels of anger and aggression, new research from the University of Bristol has found. The study, led by Professor Marcus Munafò and Professor Ian Penton-Voak , explored the relationship between recognition of emotion in ambiguous facial expressions and aggressive thoughts and behaviour, both in healthy adults and in adolescent youth considered to be at high-risk of committing crime. The researchers showed it was possible to experimentally modify biases in emotion recognition to encourage the perception of happiness over anger when viewing ambiguous expressions. This resulted in a decrease in measures of self-reported anger and aggression in both healthy adults and high-risk adolescents, and also for independently-rated aggressive behaviour in the adolescents. To modify these biases, participants were shown composite images of facial expressions that were happy, angry or emotionally ambiguous and asked to rate them as happy or angry. This established a baseline balance point of how likely they were to read ambiguous faces as angry. The researchers then used feedback to nudge some of the participants away from this negativity bias by telling them that some of the ambiguous faces they had previously labelled as angry were in fact happy.
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