Thinking about Others’ Minds: Mental State Inference in Boys with Conduct Problems and Callous-Unemotional Traits

Abstract

Children with conduct problems (CP) and high levels of callous-unemotional traits (CP/HCU) have been found to have an intact ability to represent other minds, however, they behave in ways that indicate a reduced propensity to consider other people’s thoughts and feelings. Here we report findings from three tasks assessing different aspects of mentalising in 81 boys aged 11–16 [Typically developing (TD) n = 27; CP/HCU n = 28; CP and low levels of callous-unemotional traits (CP/LCU) n = 26]. Participants completed the Movie Assessment of Social Cognition (MASC), a task assessing ability/propensity to incorporate judgements concerning an individual’s mind into mental state inference; provided a written description of a good friend to assess mind-mindedness; and completed the Social Judgement Task (SJT), a new measure assessing mentalising about antisocial actions. Boys with CP/HCU had more difficulty in accurately inferring others’ mental states in the MASC than TD and CP/LCU boys. There were no group differences in the number of mind-related comments as assessed by the mind-mindedness protocol or in responses to the SJT task. These findings suggest that although the ability to represent mental states is intact, CP/HCU boys are less likely to update mental state inferences as a function of different minds. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1007/s10802-020-00664-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Callous-Unemotional Traits Moderate Anticipated Guilt and Wrongness Judgments to Everyday Moral Transgressions in Adolescents

“…The ability to understand the thoughts of others and flexibility in taking another's perspective into account seems to be still developing in late adolescence and early adulthood ( 73 ). Plus, recent evidence suggests that, although adolescents with higher levels of CU traits do not seem to be less able than their peers to infer the thoughts of others, they seem to be less prone to take others' thoughts into account, at least in a spontaneous and effortless manner ( 74 ). This could explain why more lenient moral appraisals are observed in adolescents with higher levels of CU but not in adults with higher levels of psychopathic traits.…”

Cognitive Empathy in Subtypes of Antisocial Individuals

“…Research using behavioral tasks shows a divergence between cognitive and affective subcomponents of cognitive empathy. Across studies, neither youth with CU nor adults with psychopathy showed neural differences or behavioral deficits in cognitive ToM, suggesting intact cognitive ToM in psychopathy (65)(66)(67)(68)(69)(70)(71)(72)(73)(74)(75)(76)(77)(78)(79). By contrast, the evidence regarding the relationship between affective perspective-taking/ToM and psychopathy is more mixed.…”

“…For the antisocial-only subtype, questionnaire-based evaluations of cognitive empathy suggested that these processes are intact (70,87). Similarly, when assessed behaviorally, several studies demonstrated that individuals in the antisocial-only subtype, across all developmental stages, exhibit intact cognitive empathy (68,75,76,(88)(89)(90). Though, admittedly examination of cognitive empathy in the antisocial-only subtype has been less systematic than research in the psychopathic subtype.…”

“…For example, Sharp and Vanwoerden ( 78 ) used a video of a dinner party as their task stimulus, requiring participants to process and track various pieces of information over the 15-min duration of the video. By contrast, other studies used relatively simple, static cartoon images, requiring participants to process and track, at most, three frames of information [( 73 , 76 , 77 , 79 ); see Roberts et al ( 75 ) for a similar effect in cognitive ToM]. Similarly, Shamay-Tsoory et al ( 77 ) reported that psychopathy-related difficulties in affective ToM were limited to complex, second-order judgments, which were not examined in any of the other studies.…”

“…However, incarcerated individuals higher on psychopathy compared to incarcerated individuals lower on psychopathy displayed significantly less interference on the self-trials (i.e., their reaction time was not affected by the perspective of the avatar). These findings suggest that psychopathic individuals do not implicitly evaluate others' mental states [i.e., they do not implicitly engage cognitive perspective-taking ( 84 )], but can do so explicitly [see ( 75 ) for evidence of explicit abilities in CD+CU youth].…”