Emotion recognition and perspective-talking in a sample of detained adolescents

In the light of the increase in crime severity among teenagers and the conflicting results found in literature regarding the underlying mechanisms of different types of aggressive behaviour, the main aim of our study was to identify the independent contribution of the two components of social cognition (emotion recognition and perspective-taking) to the reactive and proactive aggression in a forensic sample of adolescent and a control group. We expected that detained adolescents would show impairment in the performances on a multimodal emotion recognition task and a perspective-taking task and that these impairments would differently relate to the aggression subtypes. Results indicated significant impairments among the detained adolescents in perspective-taking and an emotion-specific impairment in the recognition of anxiety defined as fear of low intensity. None of these results were explained by aggression subtypes..