ArticlePsychological medicine2019
Callous and uncaring traits are associated with reductions in amygdala volume among youths with varying levels of conduct problems.
Article in Psychological medicine, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed, 42 citations in OpenAlex.
- Neuroanatomical Subtypes of Callous-Unemotional Traits in a Community Sample of Youth.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Adults with more severe psychopathy in the community show increased social discounting.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Alterations in Region-Specific Gray Matter Volume Underlying Callous Unemotional Traits in Adolescents.Brain and behavior · 2025Article
- Independent Impacts of Maltreatment and Amygdala Volume on Worsening Callous-Unemotional Traits in High-Risk Youths.Research on child and adolescent psychopathology · 2025Article
- Unique versus shared neural correlates of externalizing psychopathology in late childhood.Journal of psychopathology and clinical science · 2024Article
- Conduct problems among middle adolescents in the community settings: A concept analysis.Belitung nursing journal · 2023Article
- Amygdala-prefrontal connectivity in children with maladaptive aggression is modulated by social impairment.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2022Article
- Reflexive Gaze Shifts and Fear Recognition Deficits in Children with Callous-Unemotional Traits and Impulsivity/Conduct Problems.Brain sciences · 2021Article
- Callous-unemotional traits and reduced default mode network connectivity within a community sample of children.Development and psychopathology · 2021Article
- Psychopathy.Nature reviews. Disease primers · 2021Review
- Validity and utility of Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP): II. Externalizing superspectrum.World psychiatry : official journal of the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) · 2021Article
- Sex differences in medial prefrontal and parietal cortex structure in children with disruptive behavior.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2021Article
- Resting-state network topology characterizing callous-unemotional traits in adolescence.NeuroImage. Clinical · 2021Article
- Disruptive Behavior Problems, Callous-Unemotional Traits, and Regional Gray Matter Volume in the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development Study.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2020Article
- Mapping neural activity patterns to contextualized fearful facial expressions onto callous-unemotional (CU) traits: intersubject representational similarity analysis reveals less variation among high-CU adolescents.Personality neuroscience · 2020Article
- Specific cortical and subcortical alterations for reactive and proactive aggression in children and adolescents with disruptive behavior.NeuroImage. Clinical · 2020Article
- Parsing neurodevelopmental features of irritability and anxiety: Replication and validation of a latent variable approach.Development and psychopathology · 2019Article
- The Impact of Callous-Unemotional Traits and Externalizing Tendencies on Neural Responsivity to Reward and Punishment in Healthy Adolescents.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2019Article
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Authors and funding
8 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundThe emergence of callous unemotional (CU) traits, and associated externalizing behaviors, is believed to reflect underlying dysfunction in the amygdala. Studies of adults with CU traits or psychopathy have linked characteristic patterns of amygdala dysfunction to reduced amygdala volume, but studies in youths have not thus far found evidence of similar amygdala volume reductions. The current study examined the association between CU traits and amygdala volume by modeling CU traits and externalizing behavior as independent continuous variables, and explored the relative contributions of callous, uncaring, and unemotional traits.
methodsCU traits and externalizing behavior problems were assessed in 148 youths using the Inventory of Callous Unemotional Traits (ICU) and the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL). For a subset of participants (n = 93), high-resolution T1-weighted images were collected and volume estimates for the amygdala were extracted.
resultsAnalyses revealed that CU traits were associated with increased externalizing behaviors and decreased bilateral amygdala volume. These results were driven by the callous and uncaring sub-factors of CU traits, with unemotional traits unrelated to either externalizing behaviors or amygdala volume. Results persisted after accounting for covariation between CU traits and externalizing behaviors. Bootstrap mediation analyses indicated that CU traits mediated the relationship between reduced amygdala volume and externalizing severity.
conclusionsThese findings provide evidence that callous-uncaring traits account for reduced amygdala volume among youths with conduct problems. These findings provide a framework for further investigation of abnormal amygdala development as a key causal pathway for the development of callous-uncaring traits and conduct problems.
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