Linking psychometric and multimodal neural measures of socioemotional functioning to early antisocial behavior and environmental risk

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Project Summary/Abstract Youth that engage in antisocial behavior (i.e., behaviors that violate social norms and the rights of others) exact a costly psychological and financial toll on their families, peers, and community. While non-compliance and antisocial behavior are leading causes of treatment referral, conduct disorder (CD) is acutely understudied, resulting in treatments that have limited efficacy and generalizability. Research on the mechanistic processes that uniquely contribute to antisocial behavior are needed to inform our understanding of etiology, risk and protective factors, and provide targets for prevention and treatment. Socioemotional functioning (SEF)--the ability to appropriately orient to, process, and respond to emotional cues--is a collection of psychological processes that distinguishes antisocial behavior from other externalizing disorders. While SEF processes can promote prosocial emotions (e.g., empathy) and behavior (e.g., rule conformity), SEF dysfunction contributes to a callous-unemotional and aggressive personality style, making it easier to hurt others. Known neurobiological correlates implicate structural, functional, and connectomic deficits in regions of the brain involved in emotional response. However, much of the small research literature on SEF has been limited by linking psychometric measures that target extreme deficits in SEF to brain responses in small, clinically referred samples using extreme group designs, which have failed to replicate in representative samples. In this highly innovative project, using data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study and ABCD-Social Development (ABCD-SD) sub-study, we will first improve the measurement of SEF using advanced statistical methods to develop a dimensional index psychometric of SEF and then evaluate this index for measurement bias related to race and/or sex, examining how bias may impact associations with criterion variables. We will also use a multivariate network neuroscience approach to distill key components across multimodal (structural, resting state, functional) neuroimaging data to produce a reliable neural index of SEF. Using these new psychometric and neural indices of SEF we will examine associations with delinquency, comorbid psychopathology, and social functioning, as well as the interplay with known environmental risk and protective factors (e.g., parent-child relationship, victimization) for antisocial behavior. Consistent with NIMH Strategic Objective 2.2, (to “identify clinically useful biomarkers and behavioral indicators that predict change across the trajectory of illness”), completion of this project will yield reliable and unbiased psychometric and multimodal neural indicators of early SEF in a large, diverse sample, which can be used to determine individual risk factors for antisocial behavior both cross-sectionally and in future waves of data collection.