Social cognition in intellectually disabled male criminal offenders: a deficit in affect perception?

Wilson Rogers, LP, Robertson, J, Marriott, M ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7743-5262, Belmonte, MK ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4633-9400 and Dale, C, 2018. Social cognition in intellectually disabled male criminal offenders: a deficit in affect perception? Journal of Intellectual Disabilities and Offending Behaviour, 9 (1), pp. 32-48. ISSN 2050-8824

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Abstract

Purpose: Although intellectual disability (ID) and criminal offending have long been associated, the nature of this link is obfuscated by reliance on weak, historical means of assessing ID and fractionating social cognitive skills. This paper addresses current and future research in social perception, social inference and social problem-solving in ID violent offenders.
Methodology: Literature is reviewed on comorbidity of criminal offending and ID, and on social problem-solving impairment and offending. In an exploratory case-control series comprising six violent offenders with ID and five similarly able controls, emotion recognition and social inference are assessed by the Awareness of Social Inference Test (TASIT) and social problem-solving ability and style by an adapted Social Problem-Solving Inventory (SPSI-R).
Findings: Violent offenders recognised all emotions except ‘anxious’, which they tended to misidentify as ‘surprise’. While offenders could interpret and integrate wider contextual cues, absent such cues offenders were less able to use paralinguistic cues (e.g. emotional tone) to infer speakers' feelings. Offenders in this sample exceeded controls' social problem-solving scores.
Value: ID offenders, like neurotypical offenders, display specific deficits in emotion recognition- particularly fear recognition. Concurrently, enhanced social problem solving (at least as measured by the SPSI-R) in offenders is a novel preliminary finding which requires follow-up in a larger sample. Findings are discussed within the social processing framework, highlighting the need for tighter service-user baseline measures and further research into the causes of ID offending.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Journal of Intellectual Disabilities and Offending Behaviour
Creators:	Wilson Rogers, L.P., Robertson, J., Marriott, M., Belmonte, M.K. and Dale, C.
Publisher:	Emerald
Date:	12 March 2018
Volume:	9
Number:	1
ISSN:	2050-8824
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1108/JIDOB-09-2017-0022 DOI
Divisions:	Schools > School of Social Sciences
Record created by:	Jonathan Gallacher
Date Added:	20 Feb 2018 15:41
Last Modified:	12 Jan 2021 15:06
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/32760

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