PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT
Children who exhibit externalizing problems including conduct problems, oppositional defiance, and attention-
deficit hyperactivity symptoms exhibit significant psychological difficulties and incur substantial societal and
economic costs. One identified early risk factor for children’s externalizing difficulties is callous-unemotional
(CU) traits, defined by indifference and apathy and diminished sense of guilt and empathy for others. Prior
work has been limited to investigations of correlates of CU traits and externalizing behaviors separately.
However, research has yet to examine process-oriented models to identify explanatory risk mechanisms of the
relation between children’s CU traits and later externalizing problems. Understanding the underlying processes
of this association may help to further refine current early childhood interventions and identify important targets
necessary to disrupt the pathogenic cascade and ensuing externalizing difficulties. Therefore, the present
study plans to address this gap by examining three distinct classes of risk mechanisms as mediators
of the relation between children’s CU traits and subsequent externalizing problems. First, although
conceptual models propose that CU traits modify how children’s encoding and processing of emotional cues
and consequently their increased aggressive behavior towards others, no studies have examined children’s
emotion-biased attentional processes as a risk mechanism of CU traits and externalizing problems. Thus,
the current study examines children’s attentional biases to happy, angry, and sad faces as mediators of this
association (Aim 1). Second, research has indicated that children with CU traits may also experience deficits in
emotion understanding, including emotion identification and emotion perspective taking. In turn, children with
high CU traits are posited to have difficulties tailoring their responses to others due to deficits in understanding
the meaning and consequences of emotional displays. Thus, this project proposes to test children’s emotion
understanding as an explanatory risk mechanism in the relation between children’s CU traits and later
externalizing problems (Aim 2). Lastly, given children with CU traits are more likely to have deficits in the
motivation to recruit resources to address challenges in the environment, this may be instantiated in dampened
reactivity across both the parasympathetic (PNS) and sympathetic (SNS) nervous systems. Thus, the
proposed research will examine whether children’s physiological reactivity mediates the prospective
association between CU traits and externalizing problems (Aim 3). This work addresses the limitations of prior
research by leveraging existing data from a multimethod (i.e., surveys, observations, physiology, eye-tracking),
multi-informant (i.e., mother, partner, child), multilevel (i.e., behavioral, cognitive, biological), longitudinal study
of 238 families and their preschool children. Findings of this work will contribute to the development of
additional clinical tools and improvement of interventions for children’s externalizing problems.
