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Empathy is critical to young children’s socioemotional development and deficient levels characterize a severe and pervasive type of Conduct Disorder (i.e., with limited prosocial emotions). With the emergence of novel, targeted early interventions to treat this psychopathology, the critical limitations of existing parent-report empathy measures reveal their unsuitability for assessing empathy levels and outcomes in young children. The present study aimed to develop a reliable and comprehensive parent-rated empathy scale for young children. This was accomplished by first generating a large list of empathy items sourced from both preexisting empathy measures and from statements made by parents during a clinical interview about their young child’s empathy. Second, this item set was refined using exploratory factor analysis of item scores from parents of children aged 2 to 8 years (56.6% male), recruited online using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. A five-factor solution provided the best fit to the data: Attention to Others’ Emotions, Personal Distress (i.e., Emotional Contagion/Affective Empathy), Personal Distress–Fictional Characters, Prosocial Behavior, and Sympathy. Total and subscale scores on the new “Measure of Empathy in Early Childhood” (MEEC) were internally consistent. Finally, this five-factor structure was tested using confirmatory factor analysis and model fit was adequate. With further research into the validity of MEEC scores, this new rater-based empathy measure for young children may hold promise for assessing empathy in early childhood and advancing research into the origins of empathy and empathy-related disorders.

Objective: Research shows that youth who engage in early delinquency have higher callous-unemotional (CU) traits than youth with a later start. This study extends prior research to determine the optimal delinquency onset age cutoff for identifying youth high versus low on CU traits and the average age of delinquency onset for youth with clinically significant CU traits. Hypotheses: We hypothesized that youth with childhood-onset delinquency would have higher CU traits than those with adolescent-onset delinquency. We hypothesized that youth with clinically significant CU traits would have an earlier delinquency onset than youth without CU traits. We explored differences in delinquency onset between antisocial youth categorized into low-anxious primary CU variant, high-anxious secondary CU variant, and low-CU/low-anxious control groups. Method: Participants were 456 adjudicated, incarcerated boys (M age = 16.24 years, SD = 1.33, range 12-19; 40.4% White, 39.7% Black, 13.8% Hispanic/Latino, 6.1% other race/ethnicity) in the United States. We measured age of delinquency onset using self-report and official records. Results: Boys who were 11 years old or younger when they first engaged in delinquency had higher CU traits than those who were 12 years old or older (η 2 p range = .009-.012), controlling for conduct problem severity and race/ethnicity. On average, boys with clinically significant CU traits first engaged in delinquency 1 year earlier (at 7.81 years old) than those without CU traits (η 2 p = .012). Low-anxious primary CU variants were 1 year younger at their first official charge (12.65 years old) than controls (η 2 p = .026). There were no statistically significant differences between low-anxious primary and high-anxious secondary CU variants. Conclusions: Elevated CU traits were over-represented among boys who were youngest at their first legal contact, suggesting that this may be an opportune time to identify this subgroup of youth to provide nuanced intervention to prevent later serious delinquency and criminal justice involvement. Public Significance StatementAntisocial youth with callous-unemotional traits begin engaging in arrestable behaviors at 7 years old, on average, and are likely over-represented among the youngest youth who come into contact with juvenile courts. This first point of contact with the justice system represents an opportune time to engage youth in tailored, intensive, multimodal, and evidence-based (TIMEly) interventions that target the unique risk factors involved in their developmental pathway to chronic criminality.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – Fifth Edition (DSM-5) features hundreds of diagnoses comprising a multitude of symptoms, and there is considerable repetition in the symptoms among diagnoses. This repetition undermines what we can learn from studying individual diagnostic constructs because it can obscure both disorder- and symptom-specific signals. However, these lost opportunities are currently veiled because symptom repetition in the DSM-5 has not been quantified. This descriptive study mapped the repetition among the 1,419 symptoms described in 202 diagnoses of adult psychopathology in Section II of the DSM-5. Over a million possible symptom comparisons needed to be conducted, for which we used both qualitative content coding and natural language processing. In total, we identified 628 distinct symptoms: 397 symptoms (63.2%) were unique to a single diagnosis, whereas 231 symptoms (36.8%) repeated across multiple diagnoses a total of 1022 times (median 3 times per symptom; range 2-22). Some chapters had more repetition than others: For example, every symptom of every diagnosis in the Bipolar and Related Disorders chapter was repeated in other chapters, but there was no repetition for any symptoms of any diagnoses in the Elimination Disorders, Gender Dysphoria, or Paraphilic Disorders. The most frequently repeated symptoms included insomnia, difficulty concentrating, and irritability—listed in 22, 17, and 16 diagnoses, respectively. Notably, the top 15 most frequently repeating diagnostic criteria were dominated by symptoms of major depressive disorder. Overall, our findings lay the foundation for a better understanding of the extent and potential consequences of symptom overlap.