Facial reactions to emotional films in young children with conduct problems and varying levels of callous‐unemotional traits

Abstract

Background: Elevated levels of callous-unemotional (CU) traits have proven useful for identifying a distinct subgroup of children whose conduct problems (CP) are early emerging, severe, persistent, and underpinned by aberrant emotional processing. The early childhood emotional experiences and expressions of CP subtypes are poorly understood, despite their importance to understanding the problematic attachments and atypical social affiliation experienced by children with elevated CU traits. The current study aimed to test for differences in facial emotional reactions to mood-inducing film clips in children with CP and varying levels of CU traits. Method: We compared facial emotional reactions during a developmentally appropriate mood induction task in a mixed-sex sample of clinicreferred preschool children (M age = 3.64 years, SD = 0.63, 66.9% male) classified as CP with elevated levels of CU traits (CP + CU; n = 25) versus low CU traits (CP-only; n = 47), and typically developing children (TD; n = 28). Results: Relative to TD children, children with clinical CP showed less congruent and more incongruent facial emotional expressions to sad and happy film clips, controlling for child sex, age, and ethnicity. Conclusions: Consistent with older samples, young children with CP show atypical facial emotional expressions in response to positive and negative emotional stimuli. Findings have implications for developmental models of childhood antisocial behavior and can inform the development of targeted interventions.

Clinical utility of diagnosing limited prosocial emotions in young children using the Clinical Assessment of Prosocial Emotions (CAPE).

“…Similar to the ICU, the CAPE manual operationalizes the shallow/deficient affect symptom as incongruent affect to situations and a lack of intense emotions except in an ingenuine way or to benefit oneself. A recent study found that 3-to 5-year-old children with elevated LPE had more incongruent facial emotional responses to sad and happy film clips than typically developing children, but this incongruence of emotion to situations did not differ significantly from children with conduct problems but without LPE (Kimonis et al, 2023). It is possible that differences in emotional deficits may be too subtle to be apparent to outward observers.…”

Ensemble Convolution Neural Network for Robust Video Emotion Recognition Using Deep Semantics

“…Facial expressions have been analysed for various applications. However, not all the facial regions contribute to expression detection, and a few areas do not change with varied terms [11,12]. Determining human behaviour from facial expressions is an excellent application in healthcare, tourism and hospitality, and the retail industry.…”

“…It is calculated for each pixel value in the input image. Te gradient x is computed by equation ( 11) and gradient y is computed by equation (12) in which R and C represent the row and column of each image matrix A. After the gradient value computation of each pixel in the image, the magnitude and angle values are computed by equations ( 13) and (14).…”