Early Preventive Intervention for Young Children With Sex Chromosome Trisomies (XXX, XXY, XYY): Supporting Social Cognitive Development Using a Neurocognitive Training Program Targeting Facial Emotion Understanding.

Background: Sex Chromosome Trisomies (SCTs; XXX, XXY, XYY) are genetic conditions that are associated with increased risk for neurodevelopmental problems and psychopathology. There is a great need for early preventive intervention programs to optimize outcome, especially considering the increase in prenatal diagnoses due to recent advances in non-invasive prenatal screening. This study is the first to evaluate efficacy of a neurocognitive training in children with SCT. As social behavioral problems have been identified as among the key areas of vulnerability, it was targeted at improving a core aspect of social cognition, the understanding of social cues from facial expressions. Methods: Participants were 24 children with SCT and 18 typically developing children, aged 4-8 years old. Children with SCT were assigned to a training ( Results: The SCT training group improved significantly more than the SCT no-training and TD no-training group on facial emotion recognition (large effect size; Conclusions: The significant improvement in facial emotion recognition, with large effect sizes, suggests that there are opportunities for positively supporting the development of social cognition in children with an extra X- or Y-chromosome, already at a very young age. This evidence based support is of great importance given the need for preventive and early training programs in children with SCT, aimed to minimize neurodevelopmental impact.