Callous-Unemotional Features are Associated with Emotion Recognition Impairments in Young ODD Children with Low but not
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Callous‑Unemotional Features are Associated with Emotion Recognition Impairments in Young ODD Children with Low but not High Affective Arousal Richard O’Kearney1 · Ren Ying Chng1 · Karen Salmon2 Accepted: 21 September 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Despite increasing support for the distinction between primary and secondary variants of callous-unemotional features in children with disruptive behavioural disorders, evidence about whether emotion recognition deficits are only characteristic of primary CU is inconclusive. We tested whether, in young children with Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD; N = 74), level of affective arousal moderated the association between CU and performance on behavioural measures of emotional abilities. The association between CU and emotion recognition abilities was dependent on the child’s level of affective arousal with higher CU associated with poorer emotion recognition abilities for ODD children with lower affective arousal (r = − 0.49; p = .007) but not for those with higher levels (r = 0.03; p = .838). Our results replicate recent findings and give support to the notion that the primary CU variant is characterised emotionally by under arousal of affect, low affect dysregulation and impaired emotion recognition abilities. Keywords CU traits · Affective arousal · Emotional abilities · ODD Callous-unemotional traits (CU) in children and adolescents reflect an emotional and interpersonal style characterised by impaired empathy, lack of concern for and cruelty towards others and deficits in the ability to feel guilt [1, 2]. High CU is observed in children as young as 2 to 5 years old [3, 4] and is associated with higher risk to severe and persistent antisocial behaviours [4–7]. In children with Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) high CU predicts poorer responsiveness to parenting interventions [5]. Children with high CU are typically considered to share features of fearlessness and deficits in response to threat and punishment [5] as well as impairments in foundational * Richard O’Kearney [email protected] Ren Ying Chng [email protected] Karen Salmon [email protected] 1
Research School of Psychology, Australian National University, Canberra 2601, Australia
School of Psychology, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand
2
emotional abilities such as emotion recognition of fear and distress [8, 9]. Recently, however, there has been renewed interest in heterogeneity [10, 11] amongst children and adolescents with high CU, which differentiates them by levels of anxiety, emotionality and experiences of maltreatment [12–17]. Those with high CU and low anxiety are described as the primary variant whereas those with high CU and high anxiety, in the context of historical, social or environmental adversity such as maltreatment or abuse, are regarded as the secondary variant [12, 15, 18]. The latter group have poorer psychological adjustment than those with the primary variant [19–21] as we
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