Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health

17: 101–106 (2007)

Published online 12 February 2007 in Wiley InterScience
(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/cbm.641

What do you think you’re looking

at? Investigating social cognition in
young offenders

ALICE P. JONES1,2, ALICE S. FORSTER1 AND DAVID SKUSE1,

1
Institute of Child Health, University College London, 2SGDP Centre,
Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College London, UK

ABSTRACT
Aim This small study was designed to assess the nature and severity of social-
cognitive deficits in antisocial adolescents.
Method Thirty-seven boys aged 15–18 from a Young Offenders Institute and
Community College participated. They were asked to complete a test of general intel-
lectual ability and self-rating of social competence as well as tasks from the Skuse
Schedules for the Assessment of Social Intelligence.
Results Young offenders were poor at recognizing the facial expression of anger,
regardless of intellectual ability. They could not accurately identify the direction of
another’s eye gaze. Their performance on theory of mind tasks, however, was
unimpaired.
Conclusion These preliminary findings imply selective impairment in the cognitive
appraisal of threat, which may contribute to social maladjustment. Further such
study of social cognition among young offenders is indicated. Copyright © 2007
John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Introduction

Disorders of conduct are the most common psychiatric disorders in the commu-
nity and among referrals made to child and adolescent mental health services,
affecting 5–10% of those aged 8–16 (Hill, 2002). Recent reviews on the origins
of antisocial behaviour indicate that the most severe and persistent forms are
mainly found among males with neurodevelopmental anomalies. Antisocial
behaviour is typified by a serious failure of social adaptation. This may result from
genetic vulnerability and impaired cognitive processing, interacting with a mala-
daptive social learning environment (Weiss et al., 1992). Recent research in

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DOI: 10.1002/cbm
102 Jones et al.

children with conduct disorder has demonstrated that at least one-third had
deficient pragmatic language skills (Gilmour et al., 2004). Severe behavioural
problems have also been associated with impaired facial emotion recognition
(Blair and Coles, 2000). Our study tested the hypothesis that antisocial adoles-
cents who were incarcerated in a Young Offenders Institute would have poor
social cognitive functioning, as measured by standardized tasks.

Methods

Participants
Fifteen male adolescents were recruited from a Young Offenders Institute (Feltham
YOI, North West London) to form the ‘experimental group’ (YO). Their perform-
ance on the measures outlined below was compared with that of 22 typically
developing young men matched for age and recruited from a higher education
college in Essex.

Measures
Tests of general ability: The vocabulary subscale from the Wechsler Abbreviated
Scales of Intelligence (WASI; Wechsler, 1999) generated T-scores for subsequent
analyses.

Schedules for the Assessment of Social Intelligence (Skuse et al., 2005): Tasks used
from this computer-based battery measured: (a) recognition of six facial emotions,
namely happiness, surprise, fear, sadness, disgust and anger (Ekman and Freisen,
1976), (b) direction of another’s eye gaze using a novel computerized task to
measure accuracy in detection of gaze direction from static photographs, with
eyes deviated between 5 and 20 degrees from the participant. For each trial,
participants were required to indicate whether the person in the photograph is
looking directly into his eyes or looking to the left/right, and (c) Theory of Mind
(ToM) judged from an animated abstract cartoon (Abell et al., 2000).

Youth Self-Report (Achenbach, 1991): The YSR provides a self-rating of social

competence and problems for 11- to 18-year-olds; a re-rating of the antisocial
behaviour items was also scored (Rowe et al., 2006).

Procedure
The experimenter discussed the research with each participant to ensure he
understood why he had been asked to take part and to assure confidentiality.
Those in the YO group were informed that participation would not influence
their time in the YOI. Written consent was obtained. Testing took place in

Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd 17: 101–106 (2007)
DOI: 10.1002/cbm
 Investigating social cognition in young offenders 103

a quiet room on college or YOI premises. Instructions were read aloud to the
participants, as were questionnaire items for the YO group.

Results

The mean age of the 15 young men from the YOI (16 years 10 months, standard
deviation [sd] = 9.30) was confirmed as similar to that of the 22 age-matched
community college adolescents (17 years and 3 months, sd = 6.77; F(1,35) = 3.70, p
< 0.06). There was a significant difference between the groups on the vocabulary
subtest of the WASI, as shown in Table 1. The distribution of T-scores on each
WASI subtest has a mean of 50 and a standard deviation of 10.

Youth Self-Report
ANOVA was used to analyse the differences in the subscales prescribed by
Achenbach (1991). Significant differences were found between the raw scores on

Table 1: Vocabulary subtest, YSR and social cognitive task scores

Task YO control F p
mean (sd) mean (sd)

WASI vocabulary 37.4 (11.42) 51.3 (6.14) 22.55 0.0001

YSR
Thought problems 3.20 (2.31) 1.67 (1.53) 5.77 0.022
Delinquency 9.65 (4.61) 4.57 (3.11) 16.35 0.0001
Rowe et al.
additional scoring:
Aggression 2.30 (1.69) 0.71 (1.19) 11.44 0.001
Oppositionality 6.63 (3.40) 4.95 (2.78) 3.62 0.109
Emotions:
Happy 9.53 (0.64) 9.86 (0.47) 3.30a (3.21)b 0.078a (0.083)b
Surprise 8.73 (1.67) 8.81 (1.26) 0.03 (0.06) 0.861 (0.808)
Fear 5.73 (2.40) 7.55 (1.74) 7.10 (2.57) 0.012 (0.119)
Sad 6.80 (1.90) 7.36 (1.43) 1.06 (0.74) 0.310 (0.397)
Disgust 5.60 (2.35) 7.68 (1.73) 9.64 (5.38) 0.004 (0.027)
Anger 6.00 (1.69) 7.45 (1.41) 8.11 (4.15) 0.007 (0.050)
Eye gaze:
Accuracy 52.14 (8.77) 60.23 (8.61) 7.76 0.009
Reaction time 2103.51 (807.40) 1346.61 (576.09) 10.81 0.002
Theory of Mind:
Intentionality 3.62 (1.00) 3.38 (0.61) 0.276 0.611
Appropriateness 1.08 (0.47) 1.08 (0.30) 0.000 1.00

a
MANOVA; bMANCOVA covarying for vocabulary t-scores.

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DOI: 10.1002/cbm
104 Jones et al.

the subscales measuring ‘thought problems’ and ‘delinquency’. In both cases the
YO group scored higher, indicating more severe problems in these areas. Rescoring
of the YSR (Rowe et al., 2006) showed significant differences between groups on
the ‘aggression’ subscale, with YO reporting more difficulties. There was no sig-
nificant difference for ‘oppositionality’.

Emotion recognition
Following bivariate correlations between ability to recognize six facial emotions
and vocabulary performance and attention (as indexed by the YSR ‘attention’
subscale), a significant relationship between ‘fear’ recognition and vocabulary was
found (r = 0.40, p < 0.05). Performance on the vocabulary subtest was used as a
covariate in subsequent analyses. After adjusting for vocabulary score, a sign-
ificant difference remained for recognition of anger and disgust. The significant
difference between groups for fear recognition was no longer apparent after
this adjustment.

Eye gaze
Overall performance on this task was not correlated with verbal ability or atten-
tion. ANOVA was used to analyse the total eye gaze score by group; YO per-
formed less well. To exclude the possibility that this difference was due to YO
impulsivity, reaction time was also analysed. Responses of YO were significantly
slower than those of the controls.

Theory of Mind (ToM)

No group differences were found in the complexity (level of intentionality attrib-
uted to the character’s actions) or appropriateness of mental state words used to
describe the animated cartoons. The results charted in Table 1 have been scored
using the system used by Castelli et al. (2000).

Discussion

No previous study has measured these social cognitive skills in young offenders.
While the results of this study must be interpreted with some caution, given the
small number and possibly diverse nature of antisocial behaviour in the YO
sample, this study suggests that antisocial adolescent males have impairments in
interpreting facial emotions of anger and disgust, and in correctly identifying the
direction of another person’s eye gaze. Future studies with young offenders would
benefit from investigating the profile of subgroups (e.g. those with callous/unemo-
tional traits or delineated by proactive/reactive aggression).

Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd 17: 101–106 (2007)
DOI: 10.1002/cbm
 Investigating social cognition in young offenders 105

A deficit in recognizing anger could reflect a problem interpreting threatening

stimuli. Vulnerable individuals may suspect they are being threatened, when
they are not, and respond inappropriately. Such difficulties have been associated
with dysfunction in the amygdala and its cortical connections (Whalen et al.,
2001).
This study was the first to investigate the recognition of gaze direction in
antisocial individuals. The finding that these adolescent offenders were signifi-
cantly poorer at correctly identifying direction of eye gaze is interesting, because
eye gaze plays a crucial role in social interaction. From the early years, mutual
gaze plays an important role in establishing attachment to caregivers. Moreover,
it is likely that an appropriate response to another’s social attention, or eye
contact, is a prerequisite to initiating and developing functional social interac-
tions. In these young offenders, impairment in this skill may have been a mediat-
ing negative effect on their social development.
We found no ToM impairment in the YO group. Antisocial individuals may
have intact abilities in this domain (Richell et al., 2003; Dolan and Fullam, 2004;
Blair, 2005), possibly because it may have an adaptive function for conducting a
criminal lifestyle. Future studies would benefit from investigating this aspect of
mentalization and its role in more detail.
Overall, our findings suggest that antisocial male adolescents may have some
social cognition difficulties compared with their non-criminal peers. While some
of these may be associated with generalized cognitive impairments as measured
by intelligence tests, others seem to be independent of these. Our findings could
aid early identification of potentially long-term conduct problems in children,
and also inform design of anger-management and social skills training.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank everyone at Feltham Young Offenders Institute
who made this study possible, particularly Dr Kevin Cleary and Marion Rayment.
Thanks are also offered to staff and students at Chelmsford College for generously
giving their time.

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Address correspondence to: Alice Jones, SGDP Centre, Box 080, Institute of
Psychiatry, De Crespigny Park, London, SE5 8AF, UK. Email: Alice.Jones@iop.
kcl.ac.uk

Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd 17: 101–106 (2007)
DOI: 10.1002/cbm