Attentional Bias Toward Social Violent Information In Violent Adolescence: An Eye Tracking Study

It’s an increasing tendency for adolescence to commit violent crime, and this phenomenon should urgently be solved. Adolescences’ violent crimes could be influenced by various factors, especally the attentional bias which is a kind of psychological process belongs to social recognition. Attentional bias is a special processing linkof the social perception,limits crime production in some degree.As a result, this research through empirical comparative study, to explore the characteristics of attentional bias to social violent information among the violent offenders, in order to thorough understanding adolescence violence crime of the formation to provide theoretical and practical basis.The present research asks 100 college students and 100 violent offenders chosen by cluster sampling method to rate the violent level and crisis level of the neutral pictures and violent pictures, and then we choose 6 pairs of pictures from them as experimental materials.32 college students and 28 violent offenders are chosen randomly as subjects. We ask them to evaluate violent information of 6 pairs of pictures, and their eye movements were also recorded and analyzed using EyelinkⅡeye tracking instrument, the eye movement indexes include first fixation time, first fixation index, first gaze ratio, fixation ratio, fixation count, first fixation duration, dwell time, pupil size average and pupil size max of interest area, and fixation count of picture .We analyze the data with T test, ANOVA and factor analysis.Results:(1)We put the pictures into four categories including neutral pictures, low level violent pictures, moderate level violent pictures, and high level violent pictures according to the rating scores. We find that the rating scores of violent offenders on violent levels and crisis levels to neutral pictures and low level violent pictures are higher than rating scores of college students, on contrast, the rating scores of violent offenders on high level violent pictures significantly lower than the scores of college students.(2) According to analyzing the eye movement indexes of the violent offenders and college students on neutral pictures and violent pictures, we find these:a. there are interactions among first fixation time, first fixation index and fixation ratio of interest area; on group factor, all indexes beside dwell time, and pupil size max exert main effect; on attributes of pictures, all indexes except for first gaze ratio ,fixation ratio, first fixation index and pupil size average exert main effect.b. according to the factor analyzing the eye indexes, we find that the eye indexes of college students on neutral pictures and violent pictures could be divided into three factors, and indexes each factor included are similar; the eye indexes of violent offenders on neutral pictures could be divided into two factors, and violent pictures could be divided into four factors, yet the indexes each factor included are different. We can draw the inclusions as following:(1)Compared with the average persons, the violent offenders are more vigilant to the outside information, more tolerant to the social violent information, but are less sensitive to the change of social violent information.(2) Violence committed to have facilitated attention for social violence information, but not displayed delayed disengagement from social violence information;(3) The violent offenders always keep vigilant to all of the outside information, but their levels of emotional arousing are higher than average persons, but the levels of highest emotional arousing are lower than average persons. (4) There are four cognitive components toward social violent information in violent offenders: feature detect system,analysis of valence feature system, resource allocation management system and neural networks arousal system. The cognitive components toward neutral information in violent offenders include two parts: feature detects system and neural networks arousal system. While normal individuals include active system, resource allocation management system and neural networks arousal system.