Social information processing biases in antisocial behaviour

Antisocial behaviours (ASB) and aggressive behaviours have been shown to have a considerable financial and social impact (Eme 2009). Social-cognitive theories and models of aggression have increasingly focused on cognitive biases and their immediate effects on behavioural aggression. This thesis investigated the relationship between cognitive biases, aggression and antisocial traits and behaviours using Crick and Dodge’s (1994) Social-Information Processing (SIP) model which provided a structured approach to the examination of cognitive biases (i.e., systematically distorted representations, Haselton et al., 2015). The model postulates a central role of memory and emotion; however, the mechanisms whereby this influence is exerted on stages of the SIP model or behaviour are not well understood.
Three empirical studies were conducted. A combination of targeted and convenience sampling was used in the first study which recruited participants with antisocial traits and a history of ASB and undergraduate students. The dot-probe task (DPT) was used in the first study to measure attentional bias to threat during encoding. Attentional bias was not related to aggression and CU traits; however, a relationship was found between attentional bias to angry faces and SIP measurements. In the second and third studies, a novel dual working memory (WM) and visual search task demonstrated evidence of WM guidance of visual attention in former offender (study 2) and community (study 3) samples. WM guidance of visual attention to emotional faces was linked to aggression, trait anger, emotion dysregulation, and later stages in social-information processing. Additionally, emotion and ability to regulate emotion has been linked with early and late stages in social-information processing. These experiments were designed to provide a holistic view of how information is processed in social situations and of associations between deviant cognition patterns and aggression, antisocial traits, and behaviours.