By Emily C. Kemp
Children who show signs of limited empathy, remorse, and emotional expression, all of which characterize callous-unemotional (CU) traits, are at greater risk for serious behavior problems, including aggression and conduct disorders. These traits can signal future challenges with relationships (e.g., with parents, teachers, peers, romantic partners), rule-following, and emotional understanding or responsiveness. Our study aimed to better understand whether children with CU traits struggle to recognize emotions in others, especially sad or fearful expressions, which may help to explain how and why they are at increased risk for conduct problems and harm toward others. We further aimed to understand how difficulties in emotion recognition may differ depending on age (i.e., is this difficulty the same across time or specific to younger children as past studies have been inconsistent) or whether they also have conduct problems.
We worked with over 250 school-age children who were in 3 rd , 6 th , or 8 th grade, asking them to identify emotions from facial expressions while collecting information from parents and teachers about their behavior. We found that CU traits alone didn’t always predict difficulties in emotion recognition – instead, problems were more likely when CU traits co-occurred with higher levels of conduct problems, and this was true for general emotion recognition ability for a broad range of emotions, including happiness, anger, and disgust, and for specific recognition of fearfulness and sadness. Interestingly, younger children (3 rd and 6 th graders) with CU traits were more likely to have trouble recognizing others’ emotions, but older children (8 th graders) with these traits sometimes showed stronger emotion recognition, possibly using it to their social advantage, like manipulation or social dominance. These findings help us understand how emotional skills develop in children with CU traits and behavior concerns and can guide more targeted, age-appropriate interventions, like enhancing emotion recognition skills in younger, pre-adolescent children, to prevent long-term problems.
