‘Gaze vs. face: emotion recognition and personality traits in community and offending male adolescents’

Objective To compare emotion-recognition performance in community male adolescents and male adolescent offenders, and to examine whether callous–unemotional (CU) traits, trait anxiety, and trait anger are associated with recognition difficulty across stimulus condition and response stage.Method The sample included 129 male adolescents from the Community of Madrid (47 community youth, 81 offenders in juvenile detention). Participants completed gaze-only and full-face emotion-recognition tasks and self-report measures of anxiety, anger, and CU traits. Difficulty scores, reaction times, and confusion patterns were analyzed.Results Offenders showed higher anxiety, anger, and CU traits, as well as greater emotion-recognition difficulty than community youth, especially at the stop stage and in gaze-only trials. CU traits were selectively associated with poorer recognition, particularly for sadness and disgust, whereas anxiety and anger showed limited and inconsistent effects. Disgust was the most error-prone emotion and was often confused with anger.Conclusions Male adolescent offenders showed greater early difficulty decoding emotional cues, especially from the eyes. CU traits were linked to specific emotion-recognition difficulties rather than global impairment, suggesting potential targets for intervention.