Emotion recognition and cognitive empathy deficits in adolescent offenders revealed by context-sensitive tasks.
Emotion recognition and empathy abilities require the integration of contextual information in real-life scenarios. Previous reports have explored these domains in adolescent offenders (AOs) but have not used tasks that replicate everyday situations. In this study we included ecological measures with different levels of contextual dependence to evaluate emotion recognition and empathy in AOs relative to non-offenders, controlling for the effect of demographic variables. We also explored the influence of fluid intelligence (FI) and executive functions (EFs) in the prediction of relevant deficits in these domains. Our results showed that AOs exhibit deficits in context-sensitive measures of emotion recognition and cognitive empathy. Difficulties in these tasks were neither explained by demographic variables nor predicted by FI or EFs. However, performance on measures that included simpler stimuli or could be solved by explicit knowledge was either only partially affected by demographic variables or preserved in AOs. These findings indicate that AOs show contextual social-cognition impairments which are relatively independent of basic cognitive functioning and demographic variables.
Laboratory of Experimental Psychology and Neuroscience, Institute of Cognitive Neurology Buenos Aires, Argentina ; National Scientific and Technical Research Council Buenos Aires, Argentina ; UDP-INECO Foundation Core on Neuroscience, Diego Portales University Santiago, Chile.
Maria Luz
ML
Gonzalez-Gadea
Laboratory of Experimental Psychology and Neuroscience, Institute of Cognitive Neurology Buenos Aires, Argentina ; National Scientific and Technical Research Council Buenos Aires, Argentina ; Universidad Autonoma del Caribe Barranquilla, Colombia.
Eduar
E
Herrera
UDP-INECO Foundation Core on Neuroscience, Diego Portales University Santiago, Chile ; Human Cognitive Neuroscience, Psychology Department, University of Edinburgh Edinburgh, UK ; Scottish Dementia Clinical Research Network Perth, UK ; Neuropsy and Biomedical Unit, Health School, University Surcolombiana Neiva, Colombia.
Mario
M
Parra
Universidad del Norte Barranquilla, Colombia.
Pedro
P
Gomez Mendez
Laboratory of Experimental Psychology and Neuroscience, Institute of Cognitive Neurology Buenos Aires, Argentina ; National Scientific and Technical Research Council Buenos Aires, Argentina ; UDP-INECO Foundation Core on Neuroscience, Diego Portales University Santiago, Chile.
Sandra
S
Baez
Laboratory of Experimental Psychology and Neuroscience, Institute of Cognitive Neurology Buenos Aires, Argentina ; National Scientific and Technical Research Council Buenos Aires, Argentina ; UDP-INECO Foundation Core on Neuroscience, Diego Portales University Santiago, Chile ; Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, Australian Research Council Sydney, NSW, Australia.
Facundo
F
Manes
Laboratory of Experimental Psychology and Neuroscience, Institute of Cognitive Neurology Buenos Aires, Argentina ; National Scientific and Technical Research Council Buenos Aires, Argentina ; UDP-INECO Foundation Core on Neuroscience, Diego Portales University Santiago, Chile ; Universidad Autonoma del Caribe Barranquilla, Colombia ; Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, Australian Research Council Sydney, NSW, Australia.
Agustin
A
Ibanez
adolescence; contextual processing; delinquency; ecological tasks; offenders; social cognition