ArticleJournal of clinical and experimental neuropsychology2016
Can the fear recognition deficits associated with callous-unemotional traits be identified in early childhood?
Article in Journal of clinical and experimental neuropsychology, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 36 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
36 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Emotion Recognition Deficits in Children and Adolescents with Psychopathic Traits: A Systematic Review.Clinical child and family psychology review · 2024Pooled it
- Impact VR: A Socioemotional Intervention for Reducing CU Traits, Conduct Problems, and Aggression in Youth with Conduct Disorder.Research on child and adolescent psychopathology · 2025Trial
- Maternal emotional intelligence and negative parenting affect are independently associated with callous-unemotional traits in preschoolers.European child & adolescent psychiatry · 2023Trial
- Disruptive behavior in preschoolers: associations with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and parental psychopathology.BMC psychiatry · 2026Article
- Detecting social cues conveyed by laughter and associations with callous-unemotional traits in early childhood.Journal of experimental child psychology · 2026Article
- Deficits in emotion recognition and processing in children with high callous-unemotional traits: the role of the MAOA gene.European child & adolescent psychiatry · 2024Article
- Evaluating the sensitivity to threat and affiliative reward (STAR) model in relation to the development of conduct problems and callous-unemotional traits across early adolescence.Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines · 2024Article
- Emotion Identification for Self and Other Associated with Callous-Unemotional Traits and Sex Differences in Early Adolescents.Child psychiatry and human development · 2024Article
- Newborn Brain Function and Early Emerging Callous-Unemotional Traits.JAMA psychiatry · 2024Article
- Parasympathetic Nervous System Functioning Moderates the Associations between Callous-Unemotional Traits and Emotion Understanding Difficulties in Late Childhood.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Childhood conduct problems and parent-child talk during social and nonsocial play contexts: a naturalistic home-based experiment.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Diagnosing callous-unemotional personality traits by heart rate orienting responses to images inducing threat and distress.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- A pragmatic, clinically optimized approach to characterizing adolescent irritability: Validation of parent- and adolescent reports on the Multidimensional Assessment Profile Scales-Temper Loss Scale.International journal of methods in psychiatric research · 2023Article
- Article
- Associations between emotion recognition and autistic and callous-unemotional traits: differential effects of cueing to the eyes.Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines · 2023Article
- Associations of interpersonal trust with juvenile offending/conduct disorder, callous-unemotional traits, and criminal recidivism.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Intimate Partner Violence Exposure and Childhood Psychopathology: Associations with Discriminating Fearful and Angry Faces in Young Children.Journal of family violence · 2021Article
- Callous-unemotional traits in youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD): replication of prevalence estimates and associations with gaze patterns when viewing fearful faces.Development and psychopathology · 2021Article
- Callous-Unemotional Traits among Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder, Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, or Typical Development: Differences between Adolescents' and Parents' Views.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2021Article
- Fearlessness and low social affiliation as unique developmental precursors of callous-unemotional behaviors in preschoolers.Psychological medicine · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
introductionCallous-unemotional (CU) traits in the presence of conduct problems are associated with increased risk of severe antisocial behavior. Developmentally sensitive methods of assessing CU traits have recently been generated, but their construct validity in relation to neurocognitive underpinnings of CU has not been demonstrated. The current study sought to investigate whether the fear-specific emotion recognition deficits associated with CU traits in older individuals are developmentally expressed in young children as low concern for others and punishment insensitivity.
methodA subsample of 337 preschoolers (mean age 4.8 years, SD = 0.8) who completed neurocognitive tasks was taken from a larger project of preschool psychopathology. Children completed an emotional recognition task in which they were asked to identify the emotional face from the neutral faces in an array. CU traits were assessed using the Low Concern (LC) and Punishment Insensitivity (PI) subscales of the Multidimensional Assessment Profile of Disruptive Behavior (MAP-DB), which were specifically designed to differentiate the normative misbehavior of early childhood from atypical patterns.
resultsHigh LC, but not PI, scores were associated with a fear-specific deficit in emotion recognition. Girls were more accurate than boys in identifying emotional expressions but no significant interaction between LC or PI and sex was observed.
conclusionsFear recognition deficits associated with CU traits in older individuals were observed in preschoolers with developmentally defined patterns of low concern for others. Confirming that the link between CU-related impairments in empathy and distinct neurocognitive deficits is present in very young children suggests that developmentally specified measurement can detect the substrates of these severe behavioral patterns beginning much earlier than prior work. Exploring the development of CU traits and disruptive behavior disorders at very early ages may provide insights critical to early intervention and prevention of severe antisocial behavior.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.