Abstract
This study aimed to assess whether callous-unemotional traits (CU) are associated with deficits in emotion recognition independent of externalizing behavior and whether such deficits can be explained by aberrant attention. As previous studies have produced inconsistent results, the current study included two different emotion recognition paradigms and assessed the potential influence of factors such as processing speed and attention. The study included N = 94 children (eight to 14 years) with an oversampling of children with conduct problems (CP) and varying levels of CU-traits. Independent of externalizing behavior, CU-traits were associated with slower recognition of angry, sad and fearful facial expressions but not with higher error rates. There was no evidence that the association between CU-traits and emotion processing could be explained by misguided attention. Our results implicate that in children with high levels of CU-traits emotion recognition deficits depend on deficits in processing speed.
Highlights
Aside from body posture and hand gestures, facial expressions are probably one of the most important aspects of nonverbal communication
To investigate if higher levels of callous-unemotional traits (CU)-traits are associated with stronger negative emotion recognition deficits independent of the level of externalizing behavior, we employed several stepwise multiple regressions with the baselinecorrected reaction time or the error rates as the dependent variable
Additional simple slope analysis revealed that CU-traits only significantly predicted the reaction time to find the angry facial expression if externalizing
Summary
Aside from body posture and hand gestures, facial expressions are probably one of the most important aspects of nonverbal communication. Longer or even unlimited viewing times could lead to speed-accuracy-trade-offs, meaning that children can compensate for deficits in emotion recognition through longer processing times. There are only two studies that measured reaction times in addition to error rates when investigating emotion recognition in children with CP and CU-traits [9, 10]. One of these studies does indicate such a trade-off [9] as participants with CP compared to typically developing (TD) participants showed a significantly lower number of errors for sadness and fear but significantly longer reaction times
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