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The Eyes Have It: How Callous Children See Fear

Children with high callous-unemotional scores misidentified fearful faces — except when the children concentrated on the eyes.

The amygdala has a major role in fear recognition, and impaired amygdala functioning can lead to adult psychopathy. These investigators examined the ability to perceive emotions in a community sample of 88 boys (age range, 8–17) and used standardized tests to assess callous-unemotional (CU) traits and antisocial behavior in the children and their parents.

Children’s scores were combined with their parents’ scores. In the facial recognition task, which was conducted in classrooms, six sets of faces portraying fear, happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, or neutral emotions were presented in three paradigms: The children were asked to identify emotions and then to identify them while concentrating on the eyes or on the mouth. To avoid contamination by prior instructions, the free-gaze test came first, then the eye-gaze test, and finally the mouth-gaze test.

On both the free- and mouth-gaze tests, high CU scores correlated with poor recognition of fear, which was most commonly misidentified as neutrality or disgust. However, on the eye-gaze test, the association was no longer significant. On all tests, high antisocial scores were associated with poor accuracy in recognizing neutral faces, which were most commonly misidentified as angry.

Comment: These results are consistent with theory of mind — i.e., to recognize fear in others, one must understand that they are sentient beings. Thus, not recognizing fear in others is consistent with the callous, unemotional traits associated with psychopathy in adults. Whether these findings can be translated into clinical interventions for children with callous-unemotional traits in order to prevent later psychopathic development is a hugely important research issue.

— Barbara Geller, MD

Published in Journal Watch Psychiatry October 16, 2006

Citation(s):

Dadds MR et al. Attention to the eyes and fear-recognition deficits in child psychopathy. Br J Psychiatry 2006 Sep; 189:280-1.

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