Aggression and trait anger have been linked to attentional biases toward angry faces and attribution of hostile intent in ambiguous social situations. Within social-cognitive models of aggression, memory and emotion play a crucial role in the development and maintenance of aggressive and antisocial behaviours. The mechanisms whereby this influence is exerted are not currently understood. Combining a memory task and a visual search task, this study investigated the guidance of attention allocation toward naturalistic faces during visual search by visual working memory (WM) templates. We expected faster reaction times to targets in the visual search display matching WM templates. Given the bidirectional association between WM and attention, this effect would demonstrate that hostile internal representations, prevalent in aggressive individuals, guide attentional resources toward congruent information which in turn reinforces the hostile template. The data were collected from 113 participants who self-reported having served a custodial sentence. Results showed that WM templates guided attention allocation during visual search for naturalistic face targets. Additionally, visual searches were completed faster when holding angry faces in WM regardless of the emotional valence of the visual search target. In line with the social information processing model of aggression, increased aggression and trait anger predicted an increased WM modulated attentional bias. These results demonstrated that internal representations bias attention allocation to threat in participants with a history of deviant behaviour.Antisocial behaviour (ASB) is a heterogenous concept, its constellation of symptoms and potential treatments requires multiple categorisations. The process of distinguishing between various types of antisocial behaviour is heavily reliant on self-report measures and observation studies. This proposal aims to address the causal link between ASB and information processing biases. According to the Social Information Processing theory (Crick and Dodge 1994), processing involves absorbing and interpreting social information, outlining a desired outcome, producing a number of alternative behavioural responses and their potential outcomes, and finally choosing the most favourable behavioural response. However, cognitive biases may disrupt the logical flow of information processing, resulting in biased beliefs and ultimately deviant or antisocial behaviour.

Data collected using Prolific Academic on the basis of self reporting having served a custodial sentence. The final.csv file comprises aggregated data from the visual task (RTs per condition, bias scores, trial-level bias scores) and self-report measures of reactive-proactive aggression, callous unemotional traits, trait anger, scores on an abbreviated form of the Social-Emotional Information Processing Questionnaire, and demographics.