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.
LAY ABSTRACT
Do some people become violent because they don’t understand how to respond constructively to others’ feelings, or because they simply don’t understand others’ feelings in the first place? This small, exploratory study suggests that in the absence of broader contextual cues to emotional state, violent criminals with mental retardation may have difficulty using paralinguistic signals (e.g. emotional tone of voice) to infer speakers’ feelings, and that within this specific mentally retarded and violent population, social cognitive impairment might have more to do with basic processes of emotion recognition than with any more complex aspects of social cognition. This suggestion carries possible clinical significance in that it implies that mentally retarded prisoners (and the society to which they must return rehabilitated) might be best served by interventions targeting low-level processes, such as fear perception, rather than adaptations of treatment strategies developed for non-retarded offenders which target high-level social problem-solving.