Reflexive Gaze Shifts and Fear Recognition Deficits in Children with Callous-Unemotional Traits and Impulsivity/Conduct Problems.

Luna C Muñoz Centifanti,Timothy R Stickle,Jamila Thomas,Amanda Falcón,Nicholas D Thomson,Matthias Gamer

doi:10.3390/brainsci11101342

Abstract

The ability to efficiently recognize the emotions on others’ faces is something that most of us take for granted. Children with callous-unemotional (CU) traits and impulsivity/conduct problems (ICP), such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, have been previously described as being “fear blind”. This is also associated with looking less at the eye regions of fearful faces, which are highly diagnostic. Previous attempts to intervene into emotion recognition strategies have not had lasting effects on participants’ fear recognition abilities. Here we present both (a) additional evidence that there is a two-part causal chain, from personality traits to face recognition strategies using the eyes, then from strategies to rates of recognizing fear in others; and (b) a pilot intervention that had persistent effects for weeks after the end of instruction. Further, the intervention led to more change in those with the highest CU traits. This both clarifies the specific mechanisms linking personality to emotion recognition and shows that the process is fundamentally malleable. It is possible that such training could promote empathy and reduce the rates of antisocial behavior in specific populations in the future.

Highlights

Assessing or “reading” emotions in others facilitates social communication and empathic responding
As expected, children moved their gaze to the eye region more often when initially fixated on the mouth for anger, fear, and neutral neutral faces, but the opposite was true for happy faces where they shifted to the mouth more more often
Data were missing at random (MAR); they were handled with multiple imputation (MI) [60,61,62] for descriptive statistics and with Full Information Maximum

Summary

Introduction

Assessing or “reading” emotions in others facilitates social communication and empathic responding. Children and adults who lack empathy appear to have trouble accurately reading and labelling fearful expressions when looking at other people’s faces. These individuals are described as displaying callous-unemotional (CU) traits, which have been added to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders [1] as “Limited Prosocial Emotions,” to specify a subset of children with conduct disorder. People with these traits show a callous disregard of others in gaining favors for themselves, as well as a lack of emotional depth. Difficulties reading fearful facial expressions may, in part, explain this lack of cognitive understanding of other people’s emotions and, aggressiveness toward others. It is important to understand what contributes to inaccurate reading of emotions so we can design effective interventions to reduce or correct this deficit

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