Sex difference in processing negative emotion in adolescents with different level of callous unemotional trait / 中国心理卫生杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective: To examine the sex difference in the emotional processing of adolescents with elevated callous unemotional (CU) trait. Methods: A total of 770 middle school students completed the inventory of Callous-Unemotional Traits (ICU). According to the prevalence of psychopathy in the general population, the top 5％ and the last 5％ of ICU scores were selected as higher and lower CU trait groups. Finally, 33 students in each group participated in the experiment, including 27 males and 39 females. In the facial expression recognition task, the participants were presented with happy, neutral, sad and fear facial expressions and were asked to identify these four facial expressions. Accuracy and response time were recorded as dependent variables and were analyzed by repeated ANOVA. Results: The accuracy of males was lower than that of females [ (73. 3 ± 22. 1) ％ vs. (81. 6 ± 16. 2) ％, P ＜ 0. 05] and the response time of males was shorter than that of females [ (850 ± 236) ms vs. (939 ± 158) ms, P ＜ 0. 05]. Moreover, when identifying fear emotions, compared to lower CU trait males, the males with higher CU trait had lower accuracy [ (60. 4 ± 24. 6) ％vs. (86. 0 ± 10. 1) ％, P ＜ 0. 01], whereas the difference of the response time between the males with higher and lower CU trait was not significant. While between higher and lower CU trait females, the accuracy and response time were not significantly different. When identifying other emotions, there was no significant difference in the accuracy and response time between higher and lower CU trait groups of both males and females. Conclusion: The higher callous unemotional trait adolescent males may display deficits in processing fear emotions, but adolescent females with higher callous unemotional trait can accurately recognize fear emotion.