Behavioral Inhibition and Activation System Factors in Offenders and Non-Offenders

Abstract Objective The main aim was to investigate whether forensic psychiatric inpatients can be distinguished from prisoners and non-offender healthy controls based on their performance on neurocognitive tasks measuring behavioral inhibition and behavioral activation. Method This study used preexisting data from 120 male forensic psychiatric inpatients, 60 male prisoners and 66 male non-offender healthy controls. A multinomial logistic regression analysis was used to study the links between our outcome measures and group membership. To this end, we used outcome measures from a Continuous Performance task, an emotional Stroop task and behavioral inhibition system and behavioral activation system (BIS/BAS) questionnaire. Results BIS/BAS scores had discriminatory power for distinguishing forensic psychiatric inpatients from prisoners. Measures from the Continuous Performance task and the emotional Stroop task did not significantly differ between the offender groups. Conclusions BIS/BAS are relevant concepts in the context of criminal behavior and could play a role in the development of new approaches to subtype offender populations, because they seem useful for differentiating forensic psychiatric inpatients from prisoners. For clinical practice, our results suggest that these concepts should be routinely assessed as part of neuropsychological testing in forensic psychiatric settings.