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成长的一个阶段;对另一些人来说，这是一个终生的攻击模式的开始，关系不好和心理健康问题。为什么有些孩子走上这条道路进入成年，而另一些则没有？是否所有有反社会行为的儿童都是一样的，或者我们可以识别出不同类型的儿童处于危险之中？如果我们想帮助那些最脆弱的青少年，我们就需要回答这些问题。对少数人来说，攻击性和反社会行为可能是冷酷和精心策划的，很少或根本不同情受害者。攻击性和反社会行为也可能是头脑发热和冲动的，例如当有人在争吵中“失去冷静”时。我们的研究重点是观察孩子在他们的环境中处理情绪信号的方式是否不同，这取决于他们是否更倾向于计算或头脑发热的反社会行为。例如，我们小组最近的大脑成像研究表明，大脑中一个小小的杏仁状部分，杏仁核，在人类接受周围的情绪信号时非常重要。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，那些反社会行为冷漠和精心策划的孩子的杏仁核是不活跃的。这可能意味着他们的杏仁核并没有告诉他们停止攻击行为，而是什么也没有告诉他们。我们还发现，在那些反社会行为急躁和冲动的孩子身上，杏仁核过度活跃。这可能意味着这些孩子的大脑是“触发快乐”的，这使得他们容易对任何他们认为是威胁的事情做出积极的反应。我们小组最近的这些发现对于帮助我们更好地理解有反社会行为的孩子很重要，但我们需要知道更多。这些孩子处理别人情绪的方式不同，是不是因为他们对自己情绪的体验也不同？我们能让冷漠和算计的孩子把注意力集中在别人的不适上，让他们对别人有更多的感觉吗？我们能让头脑发热、冲动的孩子对别人的情绪反应更少吗？我们计划给有行为问题的孩子一些任务，在大脑扫描仪内和扫描仪外，找出这些问题的答案。了解更多将有助于我们更好地了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，我们就能更有效地开发出针对儿童可能存在的具体问题的干预措施。虽然这是一个基础科学研究项目，其结果将发表在专业的同行评审期刊上，但我们也将寻求将这项研究的临床意义转化为儿童工作者，以促进更适应性的行为模式。我们有很好的条件来做这件事，因为我们中的一个是临床医生，我们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.