Psychophysiological responses to sadness in girls and boys with conduct disorder.

Abstract

Reduced responsiveness to emotions is hypothesized to contribute to the development of conduct disorder (CD) in children and adolescents. Accordingly, blunted psychophysiological responses to emotions have been observed in boys with CD, but this has never been tested in girls. Therefore, this study compared psychophysiological responses to sadness in girls and boys with and without CD, and different clinical phenotypes of CD: with versus without limited prosocial emotions (LPE), and with versus without comorbid internalizing disorders (INT). Nine-hundred and 27 girls (427 CD, 500 controls) and 519 boys (266 CD, 253 controls) aged 9 -18 years participated. Psychophysiological responses were measured while participants watched two validated sad film clips, specifically: heart rate (HR), respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA; indexing parasympathetic activity), preejection period (PEP; indexing sympathetic activity). Girls and boys with CD showed larger HR responses to sadness than controls. This effect was rendered nonsignificant, however, after controlling for covariates. We observed aberrant RSA responses to sadness in CD compared with controls. Similarly, we found a significant positive association

Neuropsychological Characterization of Aggressive Behavior in Children and Adolescents with CD/ODD and Effects of Single Doses of Medications: The Protocol of the Matrics_WP6-1 Study

“…Although subjects with CD may exhibit different levels of deficits in both cold (i.e., working memory, response inhibition, attentional control, planning..) and hot (i.e., motivation, delay aversion, sensitivity to reward and punishment, emotional processing), executive functions and may show abnormal physiological parameters (such as heart rate, electrodermal activity, and cortisol levels), data on the prevalence of these characteristics are still conflicting, and the relationships between the different types of deficits have not been completely clarified. Results of the recent largest psychophysiological study to date in this field revealed no evidence for emotional under-responsiveness in CD and a very small effect for respiratory sinus arrhythmia response to sadness [ 28 ]. No difference has been found between CD subjects and controls in both sexes also on baseline heart rate, heart rate variability, and pre-ejection period, while only respiratory rate resulted higher in CD female participants [ 29 ].…”