Authors:

Fairchild, G., Stobbe, Y., van Goozen, S.H.M., CALDER, A.J., & Goodyer, I.M.

Reference:

Year of publication:

2010

CBU number:

7109

Abstract:

Background: Recent behavioural and psychophysiological studies have provided converging evidence for emotional dysfunction in Conduct Disorder (CD). Most of these studies focused on males and little is known about emotional processing in females with CD. Our primary aim was to characterize explicit and implicit aspects of emotion function to determine whether deficits in these processes are present in girls with CD. Methods: Female adolescents with CD (n=30) and controls with no history of severe antisocial behavior and no current psychiatric disorder (n=25) completed tasks measuring facial expression and facial identity recognition, differential autonomic conditioning, and affective modulation of the startle reflex by picture valence. Results: Compared to controls, participants with CD showed impaired recognition of anger and disgust, but no differences in facial identity recognition. Impaired sadness recognition was observed in CD participants high in psychopathic traits relative to those lower in psychopathic traits. Participants with CD displayed reduced skin conductance responses to an aversive unconditioned stimulus and impaired autonomic discrimination between the conditioned stimuli, suggesting impaired fear conditioning. Participants with CD also showed reduced startle magnitudes across picture valence types, but there were no significant group differences in the pattern of affective modulation. Conclusions: Adolescent females with CD exhibited deficits in explicit and implicit tests of emotion function and reduced autonomic responsiveness across different output systems. There was however no significant group difference in emotional reactivity. These findings suggest that emotional recognition and learning is impaired in females with CD, consistent with results previously obtained in males with CD.