Recognition of Salient Emotions and Parenting in Children With Conduct Problems and Callous-Unemotional Traits

Callous Unemotional traits (CU) and Conduct Problems (CP) in children are associated with different responses to emotional faces compared to Typically Developing (TD) children. However, recent research questions whether emotion recognition deficits in children with CU traits are due to a deficit in recognising emotions or whether emotions capture less attention for these children. In addition, parenting can affect how children’s CU traits and CP develop, and consequently how they respond to emotions. Therefore, this study investigated how children with CU and/or CP traits respond in one emotion recognition task and another emotion capture task within a cross-sectional analysis, and how responses were affected by maternal psychopathic traits and parenting behaviours within a longitudinal model. Participants and their mothers were recruited from community and clinical populations in Germany and consisted of 77 TD children, 46 children with CU traits only, 43 children with CP only, and 44 children with combined CU/CP. Participants completed an Emotion Recognition Morphing Task and a novel Emotion Detection Task, with TD children and children with CU traits only and their mothers returning eight months after first data collection to repeat the tasks. A mediation model was tested for the effects of maternal psychopathic traits on children cross-sectionally, and a structural equation model was tested for longitudinal effects of psychopathic traits on parenting and task response time. There were no significant group differences in response time generally or in relation to specific emotions, and no significant interactions with emotion recognition or emotion capture. When making errors, children in the CU/CP group responded significantly differently to sad and happy expressions than children in the TD group. This may indicate impulsive response patterns, where children with CU/CP are responding too quickly to fully take in the emotion that is displayed. Maternal psychopathic traits did not significantly mediate the relationship between CU traits and reaction times, nor did they significantly relate to parenting in the longitudinal model. Maternal parenting behaviours did not significantly predict changes in response time in the longitudinal model. However, the maternal boldness trait was associated with increased parental involvement with children in an exploratory analysis and may be the result of parents displaying a mixture of loving and abusive behaviours. Overall, results did not indicate significant associations between CU traits or CP and response times on either task, and future studies may need to examine primary and secondary variants of CU traits to account for differences between these variants.