This is the first study to demonstrate reduced amygdala responsiveness in youths with callous-unemotional traits. These findings support the contention that callous and unemotional personality traits are associated with reduced amygdala response to distress-based social cues.

The presence of distinct episodes and hallmark symptoms can be used to differentiate clinical phenotypes of juvenile mania. The utility and validity of this system can be tested in subsequent research.

To our knowledge, this study provides the first evidence of abnormal ventromedial prefrontal cortex responsiveness in children with psychopathic traits and demonstrates this dysfunction was not attributable to comorbid attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. These findings suggest that reversal learning impairments in patients with developmental psychopathic traits relate to abnormal processing of reinforcement information.

Objective To understand disorder-unique and common pathophysiology, studies in multiple patient groups with overlapping symptoms are needed. Deficits in emotion processing and hyperarousal symptoms are prominent features of bipolar disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and severe mood dysregulation. The authors compared amygdala response during emotional and nonemotional ratings of neutral faces in youths with these disorders as well as a group of healthy comparison youths. Method Blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signal in the amygdala was examined in children with bipolar disorder (N=43), ADHD (N=18), and severe mood dysregulation (N=29) and healthy comparison subjects (N=37). During functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), participants attended to emotional and nonemotional aspects of neutral faces. Results While rating subjective fear of neutral faces, youths with ADHD demonstrated left amygdala hyperactivity relative to the other three groups, whereas youths with severe mood dysregulation demonstrated hypoactivity. Conclusions These findings support the role of unique neural correlates in face-emotion processing among youths with bipolar disorder, ADHD, and severe mood dysregulation.

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With emergence of new technologies, there has been an explosion of basic and clinical research on the affective and cognitive neuroscience of face processing and emotion perception. Adult emotional face stimuli are commonly used in these studies. For developmental research, there is a need for a validated set of child emotional faces. This paper describes the development of the NIMH Child Emotional Faces Picture Set (NIMH-ChEFS), a relatively large stimulus set with high quality, color images of the emotional faces of children. The set includes 482 photos of fearful, angry, happy, sad and neutral child faces with two gaze conditions: direct and averted gaze. In this paper we describe the development of the NIMH-ChEFS and data on the set's validity based on ratings by 20 healthy adult raters. Agreement between the a priori emotion designation and the raters' labels was high and comparable with values reported for commonly used adult picture sets. Intensity, representativeness, and composite "goodness" ratings are also presented to guide researchers in their choice of specific stimuli for their studies. These data should give researchers confidence in the NIMH-ChEFS's validity for use in affective and social neuroscience research.

Findings of impaired social cognition and response flexibility in youths with pediatric bipolar disorder suggest continuity between pediatric bipolar disorder and adult bipolar disorder. These findings provide a foundation for neurocognitive research designed to identify the neural mechanisms underlying these deficits.

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