Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
NEW RESEARCHReduced Eye Gaze Explains “Fear Blindness” in Childhood Psychopathic Traits
Section snippets
METHOD
The study was conducted in a private school in Sydney, Australia, after approval was obtained from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Ethics Review and school boards. Participants were N = 100 boys ranging in age from 8 to 15 years (mean 12.4, SD 2.2) from relatively homogeneous middle to upper middle-class backgrounds, similar to the previous study of CU traits and eye gaze. Eighty-two percent came from two-parent families; parents' modal education level was the university level, and
RESULTS
First, we compared accuracy of emotion recognition by gaze condition and emotion type. There were main effects for gaze condition (F2,89 = 14.25; p < .001) and emotion type (F5,83 = 53.94; p < .001), which were qualified by an interaction between the two (F10,82 = 3.54; p < .001). Follow-up Bonferroni tests showed that fear and disgust were recognized less accurately than the other emotions and that disgust was significantly more poorly recognized in the eye gaze condition. This is consistent
DISCUSSION
These results show that CU traits, the personality dimension that specifies the subgrouping of psychopathy within AB, are associated with deficits in naturally occurring attention to the eye region of other peoples' faces. This deficit occurred independently of the emotion being portrayed by the target face, occurred across multiple and various indices of eye gaze, and was not associated with the other aspect of childhood adjustment or maladjustment (e.g., AB, anxiety/emotional problems). It
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This research was supported by grant ID#300432 from the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia to the first author. We are grateful to all who participated in this study.
This article is the subject of an editorial by Dr. Ami Klin in this issue.
Disclosure: The authors report no conflicts of interest.