Recognition of Emotion in Facial Expressions and Vocal Tones in Children With Psychopathic Tendencies

Abstract

The authors investigated the ability of children with emotional and behavioral difficulties, divided according to their Psychopathy Screening Device scores (P. J. Frick & R. D. Hare, in press), to recognize emotional facial expressions and vocal tones. The Psychopathy Screening Device indexes a behavioral syndrome with two dimensions: affective disturbance and impulsive and conduct problems. Nine children with psychopathic tendencies and 9 comparison children were presented with 2 facial expression and 2 vocal tone subtests from the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy (S. Nowicki & M. P. Duke, 1994). These subtests measure the ability to name sad, fearful, happy, and angry facial expressions and vocal affects. The children with psychopathic tendencies showed selective impairments in the recognition of both sad and fearful facial expressions and sad vocal tone. In contrast, the two groups did not differ in their recognition of happy or angry facial expressions or fearful, happy, and angry vocal tones. The results are interpreted with reference to the suggestion that the development of psychopathic tendencies may reflect early amygdala dysfunction (R. J. R. Blair, J. S. Morris, C. D. Frith, D. I. Perrett, & R. Dolan, 1999).

Risky decisions and response reversal: is there evidence of orbitofrontal cortex dysfunction in psychopathic individuals?

“…Functional imaging studies suggest that the amygdala responds to sad and fearful expressions, but not to those depicting anger or disgust [17,54,55,61]. In accordance, both psychopathic individuals and patients with amygdala lesions show impaired processing of fearful and sometimes sad facial expressions [1,13,16,25,39,65,66].…”

Neurocognitive elements of antisocial behavior: Relevance of an orbitofrontal cortex account

“…Blair and colleagues have conducted a comprehensive program of studies that examine the parallels between acquired sociopathy and developmental psychopathy (Blair, Morris, Frith, Perrett, & Dolan, 2000), in children Fisher & Blair, 1998), and in adults (Mitchell, Colledge, Leonard, & Blair, 2002), in addition to examining emotional processing in normal controls , in psychopathic children Stevens, Charman, & Blair, 2001), adults (Blair, 2001), and in patients with OFC lesions . One problem noted in this literature is a difficulty for psychopaths in shifting a dominant behavior when contingencies have been reversed.…”

Can a Laboratory Measure of Emotional Processing Enhance the Statistical Prediction of Aggression and Delinquency in Detained Adolescents with Callous-unemotional Traits?

“…For example, using a lexical decision task administered by computer, Loney et al (2003) reported that offending adolescents high on CU traits showed differences in their responses to words with negative emotional valence compared to those who were not high on these traits. Blair and colleagues have reported that youth with CU traits show impairments in recognizing both sad and fearful facial expressions and vocal tones administered using several different computer paradigms Stevens et al 2001). Additionally, Kimonis et al (2006) reported that youth high on CU traits and aggression show reduced attentional orienting to pictures involving distressing content (e.g., persons or animals in pain) on a computerized dot-probe task.…”