Social Cognitive Processing in Violent Male Offenders

Abstract

Social cognitive processing deficits are widely believed to play a central causal role in aggressive behaviour. In this study 76 adult male prisoners (38 violent, 38 non-violent) were presented with a video scenario depicting an interpersonal provocation and asked to rate their experience of anger and the likelihood of them acting aggressively in response to the provocation. It was hypothesized that violent offenders would predict that they would be more likely to act aggressively, feel higher levels of anger, and report hostile attributions following an interpersonal provocation than non-violent offenders, but that hostile attributions would be associated with aggression only in those who scored higher on a measure of trait anger. While the results indicated that violent offenders reported significantly higher levels of trait anger and an increased tendency for hostile attributions than their non-violent counterparts, the interaction was non-significant. This suggests that hostile attributions may play a more important role than trait anger in predicting future acts of aggression, and has implications for the development of rehabilitation programmes in the treatment of anger and aggression in offenders.

Key words:

• aggression
• anger
• attribution
• cognition
• offender

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the support of the Singapore Prison Service. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Singapore Prison Service.