I C U but I don't care: Callous-unemotional traits and approach-avoidance behaviour in conduct disorder

Conduct disorder (CD) is associated with deficits in social-emotional behaviour, such as increased levels of aggression. Callous-unemotional (CU-) traits foster those deficits and contribute to severe rates of instrumental aggression in CD. Previous studies of that increase in aggression have mainly focused on intentional aspects of behaviour. Unintentional behaviour, such as automatic approach and avoidance, has not been taken into account despite being highly relevant for behaviour. Therefore, the relevance of CU-traits for automatic actions and the feasibility of an approach-avoidance-task to measure those actions in CD-patients were investigated in a study series.

Study 1 22 CD-patients executed an approach-avoidance task, where participants pushed or pulled pictures of emotional faces using a joystick. CU-traits were assessed via parent-report. Study 2 28 CD-patients and 19 typically developing children (TD) executed the AAT. Again, CU-traits were assessed via parent-report.

The AAT was a feasible instrument to measure automatic action tendencies and revealed that, while TD-children showed an avoidance bias towards angry faces, CD-patients showed a lack of automatic avoidance of anger. Across the whole sample (TD and CD combined), CU-traits predicted less threat avoidance.

The small sample size may have limited the power to detect smaller approach-avoidance tendencies towards other emotions.

The findings suggest that CD is associated with a lack of automatic avoidance of social threat and that CU-traits predict that lack of avoidance. Divergent automatic threat responding might underlie the extreme levels of instrumentally aggressive behaviour observed in CD-patients with distinctive CU-traits.