Associations between emotion recognition and autistic and callous‐unemotional traits: differential effects of cueing to the eyes

Leno, Virginia Carter; Pickard, Hannah; Cybulska, Liliana; Smith, Tim J.; Munafò, Marcus R.; Penton-Voak, Ian S.; Simonoff, Emily; Pickles, Andrew; Bedford, Rachael

doi:10.1111/jcpp.13736

Cited by 10 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…In emotion recognition tasks, participants typically spend more time looking at eyes than any other region of the face (Scheller et al, 2012). However, studies have found that children and adolescents with high CU behaviors look less at the eye region of fearful faces, and that this reduced looking contributes to poor fear recognition in these children (Dadds et al, 2006(Dadds et al, , 2008Leno et al, 2022). Prior work has also shown that children with high CU behaviors make less eye contact with their parents in naturalistic child-parent dyadic interactions (Dadds et al, 2011), supporting a working hypothesis that CU traits may arise from a failure to attend to caregivers' eyes in early life (Dadds et al, 2008), a behavioral pattern that may then generalize.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There is also evidence that decreased eye looking may be related to fear recognition deficits in children with high CU behaviors. In one set of studies, experimental and real-world eye looking was positively associated with fear recognition in children with high CU behaviors (Dadds et al, 2008(Dadds et al, , 2011, and cueing children with high CU behaviors to look at eyes specifically improved their fear recognition performance (Carter Leno et al, 2022). However, not all research has found associations between high CU behaviors and reduced eye looking (e.g., Hartmann & Schwenck, 2020), suggesting a need for additional research on this topic.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Less attention to emotional faces is associated with low empathy and prosociality in 12‐to 20‐month old infants

Donohue,

Camacho,

Drake

et al. 2024

Infancy

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The development of empathy and prosocial behavior begins in infancy and is likely supported by emotion processing skills. The current study explored whether early emerging deficits in emotion processing are associated with disruptions in the development of empathy and prosociality. We investigated this question in a large, diverse sample of 147, 11‐ to 20‐month‐old infants (42% female; 61% Black; 67% low socioeconomic status). Infants completed two observational tasks assessing prosocial helping and one task assessing empathy and prosocial comforting behavior. Infants also completed an eye‐tracking task assessing engagement and disengagement with negative emotional faces. Infants who attended less to angry, sad, and fearful faces (i.e., by being slower to look at and/or quicker to look away from negative compared to neutral faces) engaged in fewer helping behaviors, and effect sizes were larger when examining infants' attention toward the eye regions of faces. Additionally, infants who were quicker to look away from the eye regions of angry faces, but not the whole face, displayed less empathy and comforting behaviors. Results suggest that as early as 12 months of age, infants' decreased attention toward negative emotional faces, particularly the eye regions, is associated with less empathy and prosociality during a developmental period in which these abilities are rapidly maturing.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Less attention to emotional faces is associated with low empathy and prosociality in 12‐to 20‐month old infants

Donohue,

Camacho,

Drake

et al. 2024

Infancy

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…The studies included within this review were characterised by multiple difficulties with measurement, including lack of validated measures for identifying psychopathic traits within autistic individuals, highlighting this as an area requiring attention. There was a lack of intervention studies, however there was some evidence to suggest that interventions to improve eye contact may be a helpful strategy to improve emotion recognition in psychopathic individuals but may have a detrimental impact for autistic individuals ( 42 ). The impact of such interventions for individuals with both psychopathy and autism is unclear but clinicians should be aware of the different underlying mechanisms and consider this with implementation of any emotion recognition strategies used.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Several studies investigated the role of eye gaze on emotion recognition ( 33 , 34 , 40 , 42 ). Bours et al.…”

Section: Autism and Callous And Unemotional Traits In Childrenmentioning

confidence: 99%

The relationship between psychopathy and autism: a systematic review and narrative synthesis

Maguire,

Warman,

Blumenfeld

et al. 2024

Front. Psychiatry

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Background and methodsThe aim of this systematic review was to synthesise research examining the relationship between autism and psychopathy to: (a) better understand the relationship between these two constructs, and (b) describe the clinical manifestation of the two when they co-occur. A systematic search of the literature returned 36 studies.ResultsAcross all ages, autistic individuals and those with elevated autistic traits but no autistic diagnoses appeared to have increased callous and unemotional traits or psychopathy relative to the general population. Several studies evidenced that although both constructs are associated with empathetic dysfunction, the underlying mechanisms differ. In adults, psychopathy/psychopathic traits were associated with diminished affective empathy and intact cognitive empathy, whilst the opposite was seen autistic adults and those with elevated autistic traits. In children, those with autistic traits or a diagnosis of autism had diminished cognitive empathy, but not affective empathy, while the relationship between callous and unemotional traits/psychopathy and empathy amongst children was less clear. The co-occurrence of autism and psychopathy was seen to lead to additional empathic and cognitive impairment, but findings were mixed making it challenging to clearly describe the clinical manifestation.ConclusionThere remains a paucity of research investigating the interaction between autism and psychopathy and included studies were characterised by multiple measurement difficulties. Attention should be directed toward developing better methods for identifying psychopathic traits in autistic individuals to advance our understanding of the relationship between autism and psychopathy to allow for the development of appropriate care pathways for this population.Systematic review registrationhttps://www.crd.york.ac.uk/PROSPERO/display_record.php?RecordID=413672, identifier CRD42023413672.

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“…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].…”

Section: Emotion Recognition and Cu Traitsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Callous–Unemotional Traits and Emotion Perception Accuracy and Bias in Youths

Ciucci,

Baroncelli,

Facci

et al. 2024

Children

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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.

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Associations between emotion recognition and autistic and callous‐unemotional traits: differential effects of cueing to the eyes

Abstract: Associations between emotion recognition and autistic and callousunemotional traits: differential effects of cueing to the eyes. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.

Cited by 10 publications

References 38 publications

Less attention to emotional faces is associated with low empathy and prosociality in 12‐to 20‐month old infants

Less attention to emotional faces is associated with low empathy and prosociality in 12‐to 20‐month old infants

The relationship between psychopathy and autism: a systematic review and narrative synthesis

Callous–Unemotional Traits and Emotion Perception Accuracy and Bias in Youths

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