Callous-unemotional traits, emotional processing of discrete emotions, and aggressive behavior in preadolescents

Background: Extant research on CU traits and externalizing behaviors has indicated that adolescents high on CU traits and who show a deficit in their responses to visual depictions of distress exhibit the highest levels of aggression and violent delinquency. Aim(s): The present study investigated the independent and interactive contributions of CU traits and emotion processing abilities to aggressive behavior. Methods: 251 Italian middle-school students (133 girls; mean age=158.87 months, SD=8.75 months) completed the Inventory of Callous-Unemotional Traits (ICU) and a peer nomination on mean aggression. Moreover, they were tested with the Emotional Faces Dot-Probe Task (500 milliseconds version) containing picture pairs of child faces with various emotional expressions (i.e., happiness, anger, sadness, and fear) in order to obtain an index of emotional facilitation. Data were analyzed using logistic regressions. Results: Higher levels of CU traits were associated with greater aggression among students with lower levels of anger facilitation, and among students with lower levels of fear facilitation (this latter relation was significant only in 8th grade students). Conclusion: These results suggest that the association between CU traits and aggression may be moderated by level of reactivity to emotional faces, with the association being significant only when CU traits are accompanied by reduced reactivity to emotional expressions.