BackgroundConduct Disorder (CD) is defined as aggressive, antisocial, and rule-breaking behavior during childhood. Despite being the major risk factor for developing an antisocial personality disorder, nearly half the patients return to a nearly normal and healthy status. We aimed to identify psychiatric, emotional, and brain volumetric footprints of childhood CD in healthy young adults with a prior history of CD.MethodsWe recruited 156 healthy young adults from the Human Connectome Project: 78 with a prior history of CD (CC) and 78 age-, gender-, and education-matched subjects with no history of CD (HC). Psychiatric, emotional, and personality assessments were based on the Adult Self Report, NIH toolbox emotion battery and Penn emotion recognition task, and NEO-Five Factor Inventory. We acquired MRI volumetric measures and hippocampal and amygdala segmentation values using FreeSurfer. Between-group differences and associations between the assessments and the hippocampal or amygdala nuclei were assessed statistically.ResultsAfter Benjamini-Hochberg correction, we found higher anger aggression, antisocial personality problems, aggressive and rule-breaking behaviors, externalizing, and lower agreeableness in the CC group. No differences between volumetric measures were noted. Interestingly, only in the CC group, better angry face recognition was associated with larger volumes of several hippocampal nuclei.DiscussionDespite having no notable MRI volumetric differences, healthy young adults with a prior history of CD still exhibit some forms of antisocial-like behavior, without evidence of emotional recognition disturbances. Moreover, hippocampal-related learning may provide a compensatory mechanism for angry face recognition deficits in CD, playing a potential protective role.