RESUMO
Objective:To explore the difference of emotion recognition ability between impulsive violent criminals and the controls.Methods:Fifty-nine impulsive violent criminals were selected from 90 violent criminals in a prison.The control group consisted of 35 service workers and security guards recruited from a university.The 2 group (impulsive violent criminals group, control group) ×4 emotion (happiness, anger, sadness, fear) hybrid design was used in this study.The emotion recognition score, errors number and changed response number for each of the four emotions, including happiness, anger, sadness and fear, were obtained through an emotional expression multimorph task to investigate the difference of emotion recognition ability between the two groups.Results:Four participants with error rate more than 30％ were excluded.The effective data involved 58 impulsive violent criminals and 32 control subjects.The impulsive violent criminals had significant higher recognition scores of happiness [ (18.6±3.4) vs. (16.4±4.0), P＜0.01] and anger [ (16.2±2.4) vs. (14.1±3.2), P＜0.01] than the control group.In impulsive violent criminals, the recognition scores of facial expressions ranked from high to low were that of happiness, anger, fear and sadness (Ps＜0.05).In the control group, the recognition scores of facial expressions ranked from high to low were that of happiness, anger, fear/sadness (Ps＜0.05), but there was no significant difference between recognition scores of fear and sadness (P＞0.05).Conclusion:It suggests that the impulsive violent criminals might have a higher sensitivity to happy and angry facial expressions.