Callousness and Affective Face Processing: Clarifying the Neural Basis of Behavioral-Recognition Deficits Through the Use of Brain Event-Related Potentials

Abstract

Callousness encompasses a lack of guilt, shallow affect, and deficient affiliative tendencies and relates to severe antisocial behavior. Across developmental stages, callousness is associated with abnormalities in emotional processing, including decreased physiological reactivity to emotional faces. The current study recruited an adult participant sample to investigate selective associations of callousness with deficits in behavioral performance and reduced neurophysiological response within a face-processing task. Participants who scored higher in callousness demonstrated decreased reactivity to fearful faces across temporal components of the electrocortical response along with reduced accuracy in identifying fearful faces. Further analyses demonstrated that late-positive potential amplitude alone was related to behavioral response and mediated the association between callousness and impaired recognition of fearful faces. These findings clarify the nature of face-processing deficits in relation to callousness and have implications for biologically informed interventions to reduce antisocial behavior.

Toward a multimodal measurement model for the neurobehavioral trait of affiliative capacity

“…Of importance to the current work, evidence from behavioral, neuroimaging, and neurophysiological modalities supports the notion that CA, as a manifestation of AFF−, involves a deficit in social processing, specifically in the ability to recognize and respond to others' distress (Shirtcliff et al, 2009;Marsh et al, 2008;Marsh, 2016;Viding et al, 2012;Brislin & Patrick, 2019). For example, children, adolescents, and adults high in trait CA show reduced accuracy in categorizing emotional faces as fearful or sad (Marsh & Blair, 2008;White et al, 2015) and amygdala hypoactivity to fearful faces, in particular (Marsh & Blair 2008;Marsh, 2016;Viding et al, 2012).…”

“…For example, children, adolescents, and adults high in trait CA show reduced accuracy in categorizing emotional faces as fearful or sad (Marsh & Blair, 2008;White et al, 2015) and amygdala hypoactivity to fearful faces, in particular (Marsh & Blair 2008;Marsh, 2016;Viding et al, 2012). More recently, in adult samples, self-reported CA has been linked to reductions in brain-eventrelated potential (ERP) reactivity to fearful faces (Brislin & Patrick, 2019;Brislin et al, 2018). Specifically, individuals high in CA show blunted amplitude of ERP components thought to reflect face detection/categorization and emotional encoding processesnamely, N170 and P2, respectively (Shannon, Patrick, Venables, & He, 2013).…”

“…Taken together, reliable and valid self-report CA scales, already established in the literature (e.g., Patrick, Kramer, Krueger, & Markon, 2013), have served as an anchor for research on the neural correlates of AFF (i.e., biomarkers of facial emotional processing, N170, and P2; Brislin & Patrick, 2019;Brislin et al, 2018). These findings suggest that social-emotional processing deficits associated with dispositional CA can be indexed psychometrically to facilitate the shift of the AFF− vector into the cross-modal space that is more representative of the underlying construct and may not be accessible solely through the use of the self-report or behavioral measures.…”

“…biomarkers of facial emotional processing, which plays a critical underlying role in social affiliation (e.g., Blair, Leibenluft, & Pine, 2014;Brislin & Patrick, 2019;Brislin et al, 2018). To reduce the potentially confounding effect of task-specific variance in the development of the multimodal measure, the ERPs were derived from two separate experimental tasks.…”

A Model-Based Strategy for Interfacing Traits of the DSM-5 AMPD With Neurobiology

“…Future efforts to interface traits of the AMPD with neurobiology would also benefit from consideration of neural measures that relate selectively to callous-aggressiveness ("meanness"; Patrick et al, 2009), the biobehavioral counterpart to the Antagonism domain of the AMPD trait model. Neural measures of callous-aggressiveness include reduced amygdala activation and reduced early brain-ERP (N170, P200) response to affective face stimuli (fearful faces in particular; Brislin et al, 2018;Brislin & Patrick, 2019;Jones, Laurens, Herba, Barker, & Viding, 2009;Marsh et al, 2008). Work of this kind would help to advance understanding of biobehavioral pathways to distinct forms of externalizing psychopathology marked by deficient inhibitory control versus predatory exploitativeness.…”