Implementing innovative gaze analytic methods in clinical psychology: a study on eye movements in antisocial violent offenders

Abstract

A variety of psychological disorders like antisocial personality disorder have been linked to impairments in facial emotion recognition. Exploring eye movements during categorization of emotional faces is a promising approach with the potential to reveal possible differences in cognitive processes underlying these deficits. Based on this premise we investigated whether antisocial violent offenders exhibit different scan patterns compared to a matched healthy control group while categorizing emotional faces. Group differences were analyzed in terms of attention to the eyes, extent of exploration behavior and structure of switching patterns between Areas of Interest. While we were not able to show clear group differences, the present study is one of the first that demonstrates the feasibility and utility of incorporating recently developed eye movement metrics such as gaze transition entropy into clinical psychology.