Attention orienting to the eyes in violent female and male offenders: An eye-tracking study

•Violent offenders show reduced attention orienting to the eyes while viewing faces.•Impairments occur for female as well as male incarcerated offenders.•Particularly early attention shifts are affected.•Offenders and controls show comparable emotion recognition performance.•Reduced eye gaze is related to lower recognition accuracy for fearful faces. Attention to the eyes and eye contact form an important basis for the development of empathy and social competences including prosocial behavior. Thus, impairments in attention to the eyes of an interaction partner might play a role in the etiology of antisocial behavior and violence. For the first time, the present study extends investigations of eye gaze to a large sample (N = 173) including not only male but also female violent offenders and a control group. We assessed viewing patterns during the categorization of emotional faces via eye tracking. Our results indicate a reduced frequency of initial attention shifts to the eyes in female and male offenders compared to controls, while there were no general group differences in overall attention to the eye region (i.e., relative dwell time). Thus, we conclude that violent offenders might be able to compensate for deficits in spontaneous attention orienting during later stages of information processing.