Investigating Sex Differences in Emotion Recognition, Learning, and Regulation Among Youths With Conduct Disorder

Abstract

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Neuropsychological Subgroups of Emotion Processing in Youths With Conduct Disorder

“…Thus, studies to date have largely been unsuited or underpowered for testing within-CD, individual variability of the underlying neurocognitive disease mechanism(s), including emotion dysfunction. To address the above-mentioned research gaps, we initiated the largest study to date to comprehensively investigate emotion recognition, emotion learning, and emotion regulation using a broad neuropsychological test battery within a single sample of youths with CD (n = 542) compared to typical controls (n = 710) (17). As traditionally done in this line of research, we first compared the group of youths diagnosed with CD with the typical controls, and based on statistically significant group differences or the lack thereof, we determined whether a CDrelated neurocognitive deficit was present or not.…”

“…Thus, the primary aim of the current study was to adopt a clinically motivated, person-centered (rather than variable-centered) bottom-up analytic approach to explore the neurocognitive diversity of emotion functioning in CD. We accomplished this by re-analyzing the neuropsychological task performance data from our large sample of girls and boys with CD who were comprehensively clinically assessed and reliably diagnosed using standardized, semi-structured interviews (17,31). For each of the three emotion processing tasks that assessed emotion recognition, emotion learning, and emotion regulation, respectively, we defined deficit as task performance within the bottom 10% of an age-matched control group (equivalent to approximately 1.3 standard deviations below the mean), following the common-metric approach usually applied in pediatric neuropsychology and as previously used in neurocognitive studies in ADHD (21,(32)(33)(34)(35).…”

“…Our sample is particularly suited to investigate neurocognitive diversity within CD as it is one of the largest, most representative and clinically well-characterized cohorts of girls and boys with CD (vs. typical controls) recruited from a variety of sources, including the community, specialist schools, mental health clinics, welfare institutions, and youth offending services in different European countries (31). Given the magnitude of the effect sizes observed in our previous study (17), we expected to find subgroups of youths with CD without deficit in any domain vs. those who have deficits in only one domain, two domains, or across all three domains. Most importantly, we tested the extent to which neuropsychologically defined subgroups would map clinically onto the CD subtypes described in the DSM-5, including CD with vs. without the LPE specifier, and as a secondary aim, we explored whether the neuropsychological subgroups would be associated with specific CD-related risk factors.…”

Transdiagnostic Neural Signatures in common Pediatric Psychiatric Disorders: a data-driven meta-analysis of functional neuroimaging studies

“…In fact, although rates of ADHD (≈50%), CD/ODD (≈20%) did not differ between other MAGs, evidence suggests that these disorders may also show deficits in MAG2 regions, particularly during emotion processing tasks (31, 72) which correlates with general psychopathology score (68, 73, 74). In sum, this MAG may reflect general deficits in emotional lability, inherent to DEP, yet frequently observed in children/adolescent with ADHD (75) and/or CD (76).…”

Data_Sheet_1.docx

“…(C) Example layout of the emotion regulation condition from the Emotional Go/Nogo task, including neutral expressions as the "Go" targets and fearful expressions as the "Nogo" non-targets. This Figure was republished from Kohls et al (17) with permission from ELSEVIER. repeated-measures analysis of variance model, followed by posthoc pairwise comparisons in cases where significant main or interaction effects emerged (Bonferroni-corrected for multiple comparisons).…”