Implicit Attitudes Toward Violence in a Sample of Adolescent Offenders With Conduct Disorder

Abstract

Few studies have addressed attitudes toward violence in offender populations using implicit measures. The aim of this study is to test whether implicit attitudes toward two types of violence (physical and relational) differ between two groups of adolescent offenders: one group with conduct disorder (CD; n = 36) and the other group without this condition (No-CD; n = 26). We found that adolescent offenders with CD evidenced less negative implicit attitudes toward physical violence than the No-CD group. No differences between groups were observed in the case of relational violence. Our results suggest that CD modulates implicit attitudes toward violence in adolescent offenders and that the influence of CD is stronger in the case of physical rather than relational acts of violence.

Implicit measurement of violence-related cognitions.

“…Gray et al (2003) showed that this effect was significantly weakened in those who had committed murder and were classified as psychopathic (Snowden, Gray, Smith, Morris, & MacCulloch, 2004). This result has been replicated in a Central American sample (Ostrosky-Solis, Rebollar, Garcia, & Villalpando, 2009), with male adolescent offenders with conduct disorder (Olivera-La Rosa et al, 2017), and has been shown to be associated with greater levels of intimate partner violence and poor treatment outcome in offenders (Eckhardt, Samper, Suhr, & Holtzworth-Munroe, 2012). Other studies have shown that a strong negative implicit view of violence (as measured by the violence-IAT) is associated with increased prosocial behaviors and attitudes (Zwets et al, 2015) and with a greater history of trauma (Bluemke et al, 2017).…”

The deviation-from-familiarity effect: Expertise increases uncanniness of deviating exemplars

“…A negative correlation between uncanniness and attractiveness or likability has been demonstrated in previous research [ 33 , 74 ]. Experience of negative affect may decrease perceived attractiveness or likability of an artificial entity, but so can structural deviation: Ugly and Botox (and thus highly distinctive) faces are more creepy than normal faces [ 75 ]. Thus, evaluations of attractiveness and uncanniness may have similar underlying processes of deviation detection.…”

An investigation of Facebook users' implicit associations between Facebook, sexual and prosocial behavior

“…The easiness of the task is evaluated through response latencies (i.e. ; reaction times, RTs): shorter latencies indicate easier stimuli/category assignment (i.e., lesser interference/more compatibility), which is indicative of stronger implicit associations ( Bohner et al., 2008 ; Olivera-La Rosa et al., 2017 ). Therefore, by comparing response latencies between blocks where the target category (i.e., Facebook) is paired with sexual stimuli (i.e., sexual category) and blocks where the target category is paired with prosocial stimuli (i.e., prosocial category), a ST-IAT score can be computed.…”

“…Even though implicit measures (understood as outcomes of measurement procedures caused automatically by psychological attributes; De Houwer et al., 2009 ) have been widely used to study in depth the attitudes towards controversial issues (stereotypes, prejudices, etc. ; see Olivera-La Rosa et al., 2017 ) or that demand responses that are difficult to reach on an introspective level ( De Houwer et al., 2009 ), this is, as far as we know, the first attempt to measure the role of implicit processes in social cognition in online contexts.…”