Is violence associated with reduced autonomic responses to socio-affective stimuli?

Violently harming another person may reflect a reduced capacity or motivation to empathise with another's pain. According to the Integrated Emotion Systems model, aggression is learned as 'bad' as a result of aversive feedback following transgressions, with this aversive feedback often including the victim's displays of pain or sadness. People who show a reduced capacity or motivation to empathise with the victim's pain, may therefore fail to perceive aggressive acts as 'bad', increasing the likelihood of acting in similar ways in the future.

it is broadly accepted that empathy comprises two major interacting components: an affective and cognitive component. Whilst research suggests that people with violent convictions show problems in various aspects of empathic responding, the functioning of these distinct empathic 'systems' is yet to be systematically examined in forensic samples.

One of the crucial components of empathy, which refers to the tendency to experience what another person is feeling, or to 'feel with' another person, is the extent to which empathy is deliberate versus spontaneous. For example, an empathic response may be generated spontaneously, or a deliberate empathic response can be generated when a person is deliberately instructed to do so. Providing an instruction to empathise can lead to the generation of an empathic response even in people who otherwise show a lack of spontaneous empathy. Clarifying the nature of empathic deficits in individuals with violent convictions has important implications for offender behaviour programmes, with the possibility that people with violent convictions may be capable of empathy if appropriately motivated.

Empathic responding among violent offenders may be particularly impaired among those with elevated psychopathic tendencies, referring to a constellation of affective, interpersonal, and impulsive-antisocial personality traits. These traits are associated with a range of antisocial behaviours, from petty crime to potentially fatal violence. The presence of these traits is associated with a specific deficit in the ability to feel with another person.

Aims:

This project aims to identify the relationship between interpersonal violence and autonomic empathic responding, using psychophysiological techniques to examine the capacity and motivation to empathise in individuals with violent convictions and matched controls.

The proposed work will employ novel paradigms from social-cognitive and affective neuroscience and stimuli depicting others in pain, in combination with state-of-the-art equipment for measuring autonomic arousal based on the pupil dilation response.

My objectives are to a) identify known associations between violence and autonomic empathic responses using a systematic review and meta-analysis, b) examine differences in autonomic responding to emotionally salient stimuli associated with violent offending, and c) examine whether any problems in empathic responding reflect either a reduced capacity or a reduced motivation to empathise.
This approach will allow us to precisely identify deficits in the empathic responses of people with convictions for violence, people with convictions for non-violent offences, and non-offenders.