Callousness and Distress Processing: An ERP Investigation of Attention and Emotion in Adolescence.

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Project Summary. Efforts to reduce public health burdens associated with crime must incorporate research on risk factors for antisocial behavior. Callousness is a dispositional trait involving unemotionality and disregard for others that can be identified in childhood and confers prospective risk for chronic, severe antisocial behavior.1 Programs that aim to intervene with youth at risk for antisocial behavior are less effective for individuals high in callousness, and few effective treatments have been shown to directly reduce dispositional callousness.2 One area of particular promise for revitalizing stalled intervention research efforts across clinical psychology is an increased attention to neurobiological processes contributing to psychopathology, as reflected in the National Institute of Mental Health’s Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) initiative.3,4 Theories of callousness posit that basic empathic deficits in callous individuals preclude the development of normative checks on antisocial behavior over time.5 An inadequate understanding of empathic disruptions associated with callousness in adolescence has hampered the development of effective early intervention programs to prevent antisocial behavior. The proposed study will investigate callousness-related empathic dysfunction through multiple measurement modalities, including behavioral emotion recognition accuracy and various electrophysiological responses to affective faces. Specifically, we will (a) clarify the nature of emotion recognition deficits in adolescent callousness with regard to particular facial expressions, (b) examine relations of adolescent callousness to electrophysiological responses reflecting attentional engagement with and affective processing of facial expressions, and (c) investigate the specificity of empathic deficits in adolescence to callousness, over and above the related trait of disinhibition. Importantly, whereas most research to date has focused on youths already demonstrating severe conduct problems, this project will utilize a community adolescent sample to investigate whether these behavioral and physiological features are associated with callousness prior to the emergence of antisocial behavior. Results will directly inform improvements in neurobiologically informed assessment and intervention with adolescents at risk for antisocial behavior. In addition, the training experiences gained through this fellowship will prepare the applicant for a productive academic career as an independent developmental psychophysiologist examining dispositional traits and early risk for antisocial behavior.