Abstract
Adolescents with conduct problems and low callous-unemotional traits are characterised by high levels of reactive aggression. Prior studies suggest that they can have exaggerated neural and behavioural responses to negative emotional stimuli, accompanied by compromised affect regulation and atypical engagement of prefrontal areas during cognitive control. This pattern may in part explain their symptoms. Clarifying how neurocognitive responses to negative emotional stimuli can be modulated in this group has potential translational relevance. We present fMRI data from a cognitive conflict task in which the requirement to visually scan emotional (vs. calm) faces was held constant across low and high levels of cognitive conflict. Participants were 17 adolescent males with conduct problems and low levels of callous-unemotional traits (CP/LCU); 17 adolescents with conduct problems and high levels of callous-unemotional traits (CP/HCU, who typically show blunted reactivity to fear), and 18 typically developing controls (age range 10–16). Control participants showed typical attenuation of amygdala response to fear relative to calm faces under high (relative to low) conflict, replicating previous findings in a healthy adult sample. In contrast, children with CP/LCU showed a reduced (left amygdala) or reversed (right amygdala) attenuation effect under high cognitive conflict conditions. Children with CP/HCU did not differ from controls. Findings suggest atypical modulation of amygdala response as a function of task demands, and raise the possibility that those with CP/LCU are unable to implement typical regulation of amygdala response when cognitive task demands are high.
Highlights
Young people with conduct disorder (CD) and conduct problems (CP) exhibit antisocial behaviour that violates the rights of others
This study investigated the interaction between cognitive conflict and the processing of task-irrelevant emotion in children with conduct problems
We hypothesised that typically developing controls would show a similar profile of amygdala response to typical adults (attenuation of amygdala response to fear relative to calm faces under high conflict) (Sebastian et al, 2017), but that children with CP/LCU and CP/HCU would show different patterns, suggesting dysregulated cognition-emotion interactions
Summary
Young people with conduct disorder (CD) and conduct problems (CP) exhibit antisocial behaviour that violates the rights of others. This was paralleled by increased RT interference for fear/compatible trials relative to calm, but no RT difference between emotions on incompatible trials When such a pattern of results is seen in a perceptual load task (in which exogenous attention is manipulated as opposed to controlled, e.g. Pessoa et al, 2002), findings are typically interpreted in line with perceptual load theory (e.g. Lavie, 2005), i.e. on high load trials, attentional processing capacity is focused on the central task, leaving little spare capacity to be captured by task-irrelevant emotional stimuli, which are typically spatially segregated from the relevant task stimulus. While it is likely that overall task effects are mediated by cortical-subcortical interactions, we focused our hypotheses on the amygdala in order to reduce the possibility of false positive results This was the most conclusive result in our previous fMRI study, and is a region where atypical responses have been well-characterised in both CP/LCU and CP/ HCU. Since studies in the cognitive load domain (e.g. Hwang et al, 2016) have not reported such an effect, and because mechanisms underpinning attentional vs. cognitive load are likely distinct (Lavie, 2005), we did not make specific predictions regarding interactions with cognitive conflict for CP/HCU
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