Jul 06, 2015 11:38 AM EDT By Staff Reporter, UniversityHerald Reporter

New research suggests that giving juvenile offenders emotional awareness training can significantly reduce crime rates.

Researchers at Cardiff University found that a two-hour emotional awareness course aimed at making young offenders less aggressive could reduce the seriousness of their future crimes -- if they commit any at all after the course -- by 44 percent.

"Poor emotion recognition in children and adolescents can cause antisocial behavior. Our study shows that this recognition can be corrected using an approach that is both cost-effective and relatively quick," Stephanie Van Goozen, lead author of the study, said in a statement.

For the study, researchers studied the emotion recognition capabilities and criminal activity of 50 juvenile offenders, with the average age of 16 years old. While all the participants of the study received their statutory intervention -- involving contact with a caseworker, as ordered by the courts -- a sub-group of 24 offenders also took part the research team's facial affect training, aimed at improving their emotion recognition capabilities and normally used to rehabilitate patients with brain-damage.

During the study, each group was tested twice for emotion recognition performance, and recent crime data was collected six months after testing had been completed.

"Our findings support our belief that a population of individuals, whose combined offending produces the majority of harm in communities, can be made to behave less aggressively with the knock-on effect of bringing about a significant drop in serious crime," Van Goozen said.

Based on the findings, researchers concluded that emotion recognition training could set children on a much more positive path in life.

"One which doesn't have to involve serious crime or violence against others, to the benefit of society* and themselves," Van Goozen said.

The findings are detailed in the journal PLOS One.

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