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Depicting other emotion identification accuracy for individual emotions association with CU traits interaction with sex. A depicts happy other identification. B depicts sad other identification. C depicts scared other identification
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Callous-unemotional traits (CU) associates with impairments in emotional responsivity. However, there is less evidence on associations with specific emotions and sex differences utilizing both self and other oriented emotional stimuli. Given that the nuance of associations with specific emotions (including sex effects) is critical for understanding...
Citations
... At a population level, it is well established that parents socialize boys and girls differently, including through the language they express (Barnett & Scaramella, 2013;Denham et al., 1994;Leaper et al., 1998), while sex differences in emotional expression emerge in early childhood (Chaplin & Aldao, 2013;Leaper & Smith, 2004). Notably, boys also tend to have higher CU traits (Fontaine et al., 2011) and exhibit greater difficulties recognizing facial expressions of emotion (Winters & Sakai, 2022). Thus, it is plausible that associations between linguistic markers and CU traits differ by sex. ...
Background. Callous-unemotional (CU) traits are associated with interpersonal difficulties and risk for severe conduct problems (CP). The ability to communicate thoughts and feelings is critical to social success, with language a promising treatment target. However, no prior studies have examined objective linguistic correlates of childhood CU traits in early childhood, which could give insight into underlying risk mechanisms and novel target treatments. Methods. We computed lexical (positive emotion, sad, and anger words) and conversational (interruptions and speech rate) markers produced by 131 children aged 5–6 years ( M = 5.98; SD = 0.54, 58.8% female) and their parents while narrating wordless storybooks during two online visits separated by 6–8 weeks ( M = 6.56, SD = 1.11; two books, order counterbalanced). Audio recordings were diarized, time-aligned, and orthographically transcribed using WebTrans. Conversational markers were calculated using R and word frequencies were calculated using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software. We examined links between child CU traits and linguistic markers, and explored whether relationships were moderated by child sex. Results. Higher CU traits were associated with fewer positive emotion words produced by parents and children. Higher CU traits were also associated with greater concordance in the degree of interruptions and expression of anger emotion words by parents and children. Conclusions. Results suggest that objective linguistic correlates of CU traits are detectable during early childhood, which could inform adjunctive treatment modules that improve outcomes by precisely tracking and targeting subtle communication patterns.
... A closer examination of the four components of emotional intelligence revealed that the ability to appraise others' emotions was not significantly associated with hope. One likely explanation for this finding is that emotional capacities develop gradually during adolescence (Young et al., 2019), and the ability to recognize the emotions of others is not as developed in early adolescence as the ability to recognize and regulate one's own emotions (Winters & Sakai, 2022). Another possible reason is that other-emotion appraisal is a double-edged sword in its influence on hope in a Chinese society. ...
Hope has been identified as an important contributor to adaptive coping and overall wellbeing. However, there are mixed results regarding the relation between friend social support and hope in adolescents. The current study aimed to extend prior work by examining not only the direct effect of friend social support and adolescents’ levels of hope, but also the indirect effect via multiple dimensions of emotional intelligence. The longitudinal relations between friend social support, hope and emotional intelligence were analysed using cross-lagged models. The sample was 910 adolescents with a mean age of 13.86 in Hong Kong, a special administrative region in China. Findings of this study showed that friend social support predicted hope in adolescents, and this relationship was partially mediated by self-emotion appraisal, use of emotion, and regulation of emotion. This study contributed by providing an additional explanation on the psychological mechanism between social support and hope for adolescents in the Chinese context. The results also have practical significance by implying interventions focused on increasing social support and emotional intelligence to enhance levels of hope in adolescents.
... While some impairment in recognition is often found in research as being related to CU traits, the extent of the impairments is unclear. For instance, while some studies found that impairment was evident to some extent across many different emotions [5,14,22,[26][27][28], other studies mainly focused on deficits in the processing of negative emotional stimuli [19], and, in particular, facial depictions of distress, such as sadness [23,24,29] and fear [15,21,29,30]. Moreover, not all studies have confirmed these impairments; for instance, some studies have found a positive association between CU traits and fear recognition [24,[31][32][33]. ...
... As for sex, the existing literature has suggested that girls have an advantage in facial expression recognition due to greater attention to the eyes [46]. Furthermore, Winters and Sakai [28] reported that CU traits were more strongly associated with problems in emotion recognition in boys. Thus, we explored the possible moderating role of sex and predicted that association between CU traits with emotion recognition accuracy and emotion recognition bias would be stronger for boys. ...
... Importantly, conduct problems were not associated with accuracy in recognizing fear, even in zero-order correlations (see Table 1), suggesting that this difficulty recognizing fear may be even more specific to CU traits. However, contrary to our hypotheses, this association was not moderated by sex, as predicted by Winters and Sakai [28], nor was it moderated by age, as predicted by Frick and Kemp [45]. That is, Frick and Kemp [45] proposed that emotional deficits may become less associated with CU traits as child ages and learns that recognizing emotions may have value in social interactions, particularly allowing a child to be more successful in manipulating others. ...
This study investigated the associations among conduct problems, callous–unemotional (CU) traits, and indices of emotion recognition accuracy and emotion recognition bias obtained from human faces. Impairments in emotion recognition were considered within broader, impaired emotional and social functioning. The sample consisted of 293 middle-school students (51.19% girls; M age = 12.97 years, SD = .88 years). In general, CU traits were associated with less accuracy in recognizing emotions, especially fearful and angry faces, and such deficits in emotional recognition were not associated with conduct problems independent of CU traits. These results support the importance of studying potential deficits in the recognition of emotions other than fear. Furthermore, our results support the importance of considering the role of CU traits when studying emotional correlates of conduct problems. For children scoring high on CU traits, the emotion recognition accuracy of anger was low irrespective of the level of conduct problems, whereas in children scoring low on CU traits, less accuracy in recognizing emotions was related to increases in conduct problems. Finally, our results support the need for research to not only focus on accuracy of emotional recognition but also test whether there are specific biases leading to these inaccuracies. Specifically, CU traits were associated not only with lower accuracy in recognizing fearful faces but also with a tendency to interpret fearful faces as angry. This suggests that the emotional deficit associated with CU traits is not just a deficit in empathic concern toward others distress but also includes a tendency to overinterpret emotions as potential threats to oneself.
... This method of calculation required we used nine items from this measure to indicate those that qualified for the low prosocial emotion specifier and those that did not. This low prosocial emotion specifier calculation approach has been used by multiple studies (e.g., Kimonis et al., 2015;Sakai et al., 2016;Winters & Sakai, 2022). If participants qualified, we used this as an indicator they are high in CU traits and those they did not qualify were considered normative. ...
... However, for recruitment matching on high and normative CU traits, we identified those higher or normative on CU traits using the low prosocial emotion specifier coding method. This approach of recruiting for severity indicator using the low prosocial emotion specifier and analyzing on the continuous measure has been used in prior work (e.g., Winters & Sakai, 2022). ...
Callous-unemotional (CU) traits are characterized by a lack of prosocial emotions, which has been demonstrated with prosocial behavior paradigms. While shaping our understanding of prosocial behavior in youth with CU traits, most of this work relies on outcomes that don’t reliably capture cognitive processes during prosocial behavior. Examining prosocial cognitive processes can cue researchers into cognitive mechanisms underlying core impairments of CU traits. Drift diffusion modeling is a valuable tool for elucidating more precise outcomes of latent cognitive processes during forced choice tasks such as drift rate (information accumulation toward a decision boundary) and threshold separation (amount of information considered) as well as metrics outside of the decision-making processing including bias (starting point in decision process) and non-decision time (cognitive processes outside of choice). In a sample of 87 adolescents (12–14, 49% female) we applied diffusion modeling to a prosocial behavior task in which participants either accepted or rejected trials where a real monetary value was given to them and taken away from a charity (self-serving trial) or money was given to a charity and taken from them (donation trial). Results revealed that CU traits associated with information accumulation toward accepting self-serving trials. Exploratory sex differences suggested males trended toward rejecting donation trials and females considered more information during self-serving trials. CU trait associations were independent of conduct problems. Results suggest a unique cognitive profile that are differentiated by sex at higher CU traits when making prosocial decisions involving knowledge accumulation toward self-serving decisions.
