Conduct Problems in children: Refining the neurocognitive phenotype

几乎每天都有关于暴力和年轻人的新闻报道。不太严重的反社会行为也很常见，对每个人的生活都有影响。对许多儿童来说，反社会行为只是他们长大后的一个阶段；对另一些人来说，它是终生攻击性模式、糟糕的人际关系和心理健康问题的开始。为什么有些孩子会沿着这条路走到成年，而另一些孩子则不是？所有有反社会行为的儿童都是一样的吗？或者我们能确定不同类型的儿童处于危险之中吗？如果我们想要帮助那些最脆弱的年轻人，我们就需要回答这些问题。对于少数人来说，咄咄逼人和反社会的行为可能是冷酷和刻意的，很少或根本没有对受害者的同情。攻击性和反社会行为也可能是头脑发热和冲动的，例如，当某人在辩论中失去冷静时。我们的研究重点是观察儿童处理环境中情绪信号的方式是否不同，这取决于他们更容易做出有计划的还是头脑发热的反社会行为。例如，我们团队最近的脑成像研究表明，当人类接受周围的情感信号时，大脑中杏仁核的一个微小部分非常重要。我们已经证明，当孩子们看到其他人看起来很害怕的照片时，杏仁核在那些反社会行为冷淡和刻意的孩子中是不活跃的。这可能意味着，他们的杏仁核没有告诉他们停止攻击性行为，而是什么都没有告诉他们。我们还表明，在那些反社会行为急躁和冲动的儿童中，杏仁核过度活跃。这可能意味着这些孩子的大脑“触发快乐”，这让他们很容易对他们认为是威胁的任何事情做出攻击性的反应。我们团队的这些最新发现对于帮助我们更好地理解有反社会行为的儿童很重要，但我们需要知道更多。这些儿童处理他人情绪的方式不同，因为他们体验自己的情绪也不同吗？我们能让冷酷刻意的孩子们把注意力集中在别人的不适上，让他们对别人有更多的同情吗？我们能让头脑发热、冲动的孩子对别人的情绪少些反应吗？我们计划给有行为问题的儿童一些任务，包括大脑扫描仪内外的任务，以找出这些问题的答案。更多的发现将帮助我们更好地理解不同类型的反社会行为儿童如何看待他们周围的世界。我们知道的越多，我们就能越有效地制定干预措施，考虑到儿童可能存在的具体问题。虽然这是一个基础科学研究项目，结果发表在专家、同行评议的期刊上，但我们也将寻求将这项研究的临床意义转化为那些与儿童合作的人，以促进更多适应能力更强的行为模式。我们很有条件这样做，因为我们中的一位是临床医生，我们两人都与教育心理学家和教师合作。

Rarely a day goes by without a news story of violence and young people. Less serious antisocial behaviour is also commonplace and has an impact on everyone's life. For many childhood antisocial behaviour is just a phase which they grow out of; for others it is the beginning of a lifelong pattern of aggression, poor relationships and mental health problems.Why do some children follow this path into adulthood while others do not? Are all children with antisocial behaviour the same or can we identify different types of children at risk? We need to answer these questions if we want to help those youngsters who are most vulnerable. For a minority, aggressive and antisocial behaviour can be cold and calculated, with little or no empathy for the victim. Aggressive and antisocial behaviour can also be hot-headed and impulsive, for example when someone 'loses their cool' during an argument.Our research focuses on looking at whether the way a child deals with emotional signals in their environment is different depending on whether they are more prone to calculated or hot-headed antisocial behaviour. For example, recent brain imaging research by our group suggests that a tiny almond-shaped part of the brain, the amygdala, is important when human beings take in the emotional signals around them. We have shown that when children view pictures of other people looking scared, amygdala is under-active in those children whose antisocial behaviour is cold and calculated. This could mean that instead of their amygdala telling them to stop their aggressive behaviour, it is telling them nothing at all. We have also shown that amygdala is over-active in those children whose antisocial behaviour is hot-headed and impulsive. This could mean that these children's brains are 'trigger happy', which makes them vulnerable to react aggressively to anything they see as a threat. These recent findings from our group are important in helping us understand children with antisocial behaviour better, but we need to know more.Do these children process other people's emotions differently, because they experience their own emotions differently too? Can we get the cold and calculated children to feel more for other people by focusing their attention on other people's discomfort? Can we get the hot-headed and impulsive children to be less reactive to other people's emotions? We plan to give children with behavioural problems a number of tasks, both in the brain scanner and outside it, to find out answers to these questions. Finding out more will help us to better understand how different types of children with antisocial behaviour see the world around them. The more we know, the more effectively we can develop interventions that take into account specific problems a child may have.While this is a basic science research project, with the results being published in specialist, peer-reviewed journals, we will also seek to translate the clinical implications of this research to those who work with children in order to promote more adaptive patterns of behaviour. We are well placed to do this as one of us is a clinician and both of us work with educational psychologists and teachers.