Inaccuracies in Facial Recognition of Fear and Sadness for Male Domestic Violence Offenders

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to compare males who were court ordered into domestic violence treatment (domestic violence offenders; DVOs) due to family violence against their female partner or spouse (n = 35) and a group of nonviolent males (n = 35) on facial emotion recognition and measures of self-identified empathy, cognitive ability, trauma history, and demographic information. A significant difference was found between the two groups in that DVOs were significantly less accurate in identifying sadness and fear, and identifying emotions of female faces compared to male faces. DVOs were also less accurate in identifying emotions at 40% and 60% emotional intensity when six primary emotions were combined. Clinical implications of the study include emphasizing emotion recognition in treatment for DVOs in order to ameliorate family violence.