Recognition of facial affect in girls with conduct disorder (original) (raw)

Deficits in facial expression recognition in male adolescents with early-onset or adolescence-onset conduct disorder

Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 2009

Background: We examined whether conduct disorder (CD) is associated with deficits in facial expression recognition and, if so, whether these deficits are specific to the early-onset form of CD, which emerges in childhood. The findings could potentially inform the developmental taxonomic theory of antisocial behaviour, which suggests that early-onset and adolescence-limited forms of CD are subject to different aetiological processes. Method: Male adolescents with either early-onset CD (n = 42) or adolescence-onset CD (n = 39), and controls with no history of serious antisocial behaviour and no current psychiatric disorder (n = 40) completed tests of facial expression and facial identity recognition. Dependent measures were: (a) correct recognition of facial expressions of anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise, and (b) the number of correct matches of unfamiliar faces. Results: Relative to controls, recognition of anger, disgust, and happiness in facial expressions was disproportionately impaired in participants with early-onset CD, whereas recognition of fear was impaired in participants with adolescence-onset CD. Participants with CD who were high in psychopathic traits showed impaired fear, sadness, and surprise recognition relative to those low in psychopathic traits. There were no group differences in facial identity recognition. Conclusions: Both CD subtypes were associated with impairments in facial recognition, although these were more marked in the early-onset subgroup. Variation in psychopathic traits appeared to exert an additional influence on the recognition of fear, sadness and surprise. Implications of these data for the developmental taxonomic theory of antisocial behaviour are discussed.

Face Emotion Processing in Depressed Children and Adolescents with and without Comorbid Conduct Disorder

Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 2012

Studies of adults with depression point to characteristic neurocognitive deficits, including differences in processing facial expressions. Few studies have examined face processing in juvenile depression, or taken account of other comorbid disorders. Three groups were compared: depressed children and adolescents with conduct disorder (n=23), depressed children and adolescents without conduct disorder (n=29) and children and adolescents without disorder (n=37). A novel face emotion processing experiment presented faces with 'happy', 'sad', 'angry', or 'fearful' expressions of varying emotional intensity using morphed stimuli. Those with depression showed no overall or specific deficits in facial expression recognition accuracy. Instead, they showed biases affecting processing of lowintensity expressions, more often perceiving these as sad. In contrast, non-depressed controls more often misperceived low intensity negative emotions as happy. There were no differences between depressed children and adolescents with and without conduct disorder, or between children with comorbid depression/conduct disorder and controls. Face emotion processing biases rather than deficits appear to distinguish depressed from non-depressed children and adolescents.

Facial Expression Recognition, Fear Conditioning, and Startle Modulation in Female Subjects with Conduct Disorder

Biological Psychiatry, 2010

Background-Recent behavioral and psychophysiological studies have provided converging evidence for emotional dysfunction in conduct disorder (CD). Most of these studies focused on male subjects and little is known about emotional processing in female subjects with CD. Our primary aim was to characterize explicit and implicit aspects of emotion function to determine whether deficits in these processes are present in girls with CD. Methods-Female adolescents with CD (n = 25) and control subjects with no history of severe antisocial behavior and no current psychiatric disorder (n = 30) completed tasks measuring facial expression and facial identity recognition, differential autonomic conditioning, and affective modulation of the startle reflex by picture valence. Results-Compared with control subjects, participants with CD showed impaired recognition of anger and disgust but no differences in facial identity recognition. Impaired sadness recognition was observed in CD participants high in psychopathic traits relative to those lower in psychopathic traits. Participants with CD displayed reduced skin conductance responses to an aversive unconditioned stimulus and impaired autonomic discrimination between the conditioned stimuli, indicating impaired fear conditioning. Participants with CD also showed reduced startle magnitudes across picture valence types, but there were no significant group differences in the pattern of affective modulation. Conclusions-Adolescent female subjects with CD exhibited deficits in explicit and implicit tests of emotion function and reduced autonomic responsiveness across different output systems. There were, however, no differences in emotional reactivity. These findings suggest that emotional recognition and learning are impaired in female subjects with CD, consistent with results previously obtained in male subjects with CD.

Adolescents' Ability to Read Different Emotional Faces Relates to their History of Maltreatment and Type of Psychopathology

Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 2009

A B S T R A C T Emotional processing styles appear to characterize various forms of psychopathology and environmental adversity in children. For example, autistic, anxious, high-and low-emotion conduct problem children, and children who have been maltreated, all appear to show specific deficits and strengths in recognizing the facial expressions of emotions. Until now, the relationships between emotion recognition, antisocial behaviour, emotional problems, callous-unemotional (CU) traits and early maltreatment have never been assessed simultaneously in one study, and the specific associations of emotion recognition to maltreatment and child characteristics are therefore unknown. We examined facial-emotion processing in a sample of 23 adolescents selected for high-risk status on the variables of interest. As expected, maltreatment and child characteristics showed unique associations. CU traits were uniquely related to impairments in fear recognition. Antisocial behaviour was uniquely associated with better fear recognition, but impaired anger recognition. Emotional problems were associated with better recognition of anger and sadness, but lower recognition of neutral faces. Maltreatment was predictive of superior recognition of fear and sadness. The findings are considered in terms of social information-processing theories of psychopathology. Implications for clinical interventions are discussed.

Eye gaze patterns and functional brain responses during emotional face processing in adolescents with conduct disorder

NeuroImage: Clinical, 2021

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Facial emotion recognition in male antisocial personality disorders with or without adult attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

Comprehensive Psychiatry, 2014

Objective: We aimed to investigate facial emotion recognition abilities in violent individuals with antisocial personality disorder who have comorbid attention deficient hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or not. Method: The photos of happy, surprised, fearful, sad, angry, disgust, and neutral facial expressions and Wender Utah Rating Scale have been performed in all groups. Results: The mean ages were as follows: in antisocial personality disorder with ADHD 22.0 ± 1.59, in pure antisocial individuals 21.90 ± 1.80 and in controls 22.97 ± 2.85 (p N 0.05). The mean score in Wender Utah Rating Scale was significantly different between groups (p b 0.001). The mean accurate responses to each facial emotion between groups were insignificant (p N 0.05) excluding disgust faces which was significantly impaired in ASPD + ADHD and pure ASPD groups. Antisocial individuals with attention deficient and hyperactivity had spent significantly more time to each facial emotion than healthy controls (p b 0.05) while pure antisocial individual had more time to recognize disgust and neutral faces than healthy controls (p b 0.05). Conclusion: Study of complex social cognitive abilities in adults with ADHD and violent behaviors is lacking. This study is the first, investigating the differences according to social cognition cues in violent individual that revealed no significance within pure antisocial individuals and antisocial individuals with ADHD.

Facial reactions to emotional films in young children with conduct problems and varying levels of callous‐unemotional traits

Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry

Background: Elevated levels of callous-unemotional (CU) traits have proven useful for identifying a distinct subgroup of children whose conduct problems (CP) are early emerging, severe, persistent, and underpinned by aberrant emotional processing. The early childhood emotional experiences and expressions of CP subtypes are poorly understood, despite their importance to understanding the problematic attachments and atypical social affiliation experienced by children with elevated CU traits. The current study aimed to test for differences in facial emotional reactions to mood-inducing film clips in children with CP and varying levels of CU traits. Method: We compared facial emotional reactions during a developmentally appropriate mood induction task in a mixed-sex sample of clinicreferred preschool children (M age = 3.64 years, SD = 0.63, 66.9% male) classified as CP with elevated levels of CU traits (CP + CU; n = 25) versus low CU traits (CP-only; n = 47), and typically developing children (TD; n = 28). Results: Relative to TD children, children with clinical CP showed less congruent and more incongruent facial emotional expressions to sad and happy film clips, controlling for child sex, age, and ethnicity. Conclusions: Consistent with older samples, young children with CP show atypical facial emotional expressions in response to positive and negative emotional stimuli. Findings have implications for developmental models of childhood antisocial behavior and can inform the development of targeted interventions.

Facial emotion recognition in adolescents with personality pathology

European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 2013

Object: Bipolar disorder (BD) is associated with abnormalities in emotional competence. One of the main aspects of this competency is emotion recognition which is presented in the face. This study aimed to evaluate facial emotion recognition in adolescents with bipolar disorder when they are free of acute symptoms. Method: Thirty patients diagnosed with BD aged 12 to 18 were selected from a large sample of consecutive admitted adolescents in Roozbeh hospital. They were compared with 30 matched normal developing adolescents who were recruited from mainstream schools at Tehran. All participants were evaluated using a facial emotion recognition task. The participants needed to recognize happy, sad, angry and neutral facial expressions The ANOVA was used to analyze the differences between the two groups in terms of emotion recognition variables. Results: The patients with BD showed a significant deficit in recognizing emotions in general (p=.01) which was prominent in the angry faces. Their response time to recognize the facial expressions was longer compared to the normal individuals. This difference was significant in recognizing the happy and neutral faces (p<0.05).