Emotion Identification for Self and Other Associated with Callous-Unemotional Traits and Sex Differences in Early Adolescents

Objective Linguistic Markers Associated with Callous-Unemotional Traits in Early Childhood

BACKGROUND

Callous-unemotional (CU) traits are associated with interpersonal difficulties and risk for severe conduct problems (CP). The ability to communicate thoughts and feelings is critical to social success, with language a promising treatment target. However, no prior studies have examined objective linguistic correlates of childhood CU traits in early childhood, which could give insight into underlying risk mechanisms and novel target treatments.

METHODS

We computed lexical (positive emotion, sad, and anger words) and conversational (interruptions and speech rate) markers produced by 131 children aged 5-6 years (M = 5.98; SD = 0.54, 58.8% female) and their parents while narrating wordless storybooks during two online visits separated by 6-8 weeks (M = 6.56, SD = 1.11; two books, order counterbalanced). Audio recordings were diarized, time-aligned, and orthographically transcribed using WebTrans. Conversational markers were calculated using R and word frequencies were calculated using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software. We examined links between child CU traits and linguistic markers, and explored whether relationships were moderated by child sex.

RESULTS

Higher CU traits were associated with fewer positive emotion words produced by parents and children. Higher CU traits were also associated with greater concordance in the degree of interruptions and expression of anger emotion words by parents and children.

CONCLUSIONS

Results suggest that objective linguistic correlates of CU traits are detectable during early childhood, which could inform adjunctive treatment modules that improve outcomes by precisely tracking and targeting subtle communication patterns.

Callous-Unemotional Traits and Emotion Perception Accuracy and Bias in Youths

This study investigated the associations among conduct problems, callous-unemotional (CU) traits, and indices of emotion recognition accuracy and emotion recognition bias obtained from human faces. Impairments in emotion recognition were considered within broader, impaired emotional and social functioning. The sample consisted of 293 middle-school students (51.19% girls; M age = 12.97 years, SD = 0.88 years). In general, CU traits were associated with less accuracy in recognizing emotions, especially fearful and angry faces, and such deficits in emotional recognition were not associated with conduct problems independent of CU traits. These results support the importance of studying potential deficits in the recognition of emotions other than fear. Furthermore, our results support the importance of considering the role of CU traits when studying emotional correlates of conduct problems. For children scoring high on CU traits, the emotion recognition accuracy of anger was low irrespective of the level of conduct problems, whereas in children scoring low on CU traits, less accuracy in recognizing emotions was related to increases in conduct problems. Finally, our results support the need for research to not only focus on accuracy of emotional recognition but also test whether there are specific biases leading to these inaccuracies. Specifically, CU traits were associated not only with lower accuracy in recognizing fearful faces but also with a tendency to interpret fearful faces as angry. This suggests that the emotional deficit associated with CU traits is not just a deficit in empathic concern toward others distress but also includes a tendency to overinterpret emotions as potential threats to oneself.

Cognitive Mechanisms Underlying Prosocial Decision Making in Callous-Unemotional Traits

Callous-unemotional (CU) traits are characterized by a lack of prosocial emotions, which has been demonstrated with prosocial behavior paradigms. While shaping our understanding of prosocial behavior in youth with CU traits, most of this work relies on outcomes that don't reliably capture cognitive processes during prosocial behavior. Examining prosocial cognitive processes can cue researchers into cognitive mechanisms underlying core impairments of CU traits. Drift diffusion modeling is a valuable tool for elucidating more precise outcomes of latent cognitive processes during forced choice tasks such as drift rate (information accumulation toward a decision boundary) and threshold separation (amount of information considered) as well as metrics outside of the decision-making processing including bias (starting point in decision process) and non-decision time (cognitive processes outside of choice). In a sample of 87 adolescents (12-14, 49% female) we applied diffusion modeling to a prosocial behavior task in which participants either accepted or rejected trials where a real monetary value was given to them and taken away from a charity (self-serving trial) or money was given to a charity and taken from them (donation trial). Results revealed that CU traits associated with information accumulation toward accepting self-serving trials. Exploratory sex differences suggested males trended toward rejecting donation trials and females considered more information during self-serving trials. CU trait associations were independent of conduct problems. Results suggest a unique cognitive profile that are differentiated by sex at higher CU traits when making prosocial decisions involving knowledge accumulation toward self-serving decisions.