Emotional Abilities in Children with Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD): Impairments in Perspective-Taking and Understanding Mixed Emotions are Associated with High Callous-Unemotional Traits.
Most studies of emotion abilities in disruptive children focus on emotion expression recognition. This study compared 74 children aged 4-8 years with ODD to 45 comparison children (33 healthy; 12 with an anxiety disorder) on behaviourally assessed measures of emotion perception, emotion perspective-taking, knowledge of emotions causes and understanding ambivalent emotions and on parent-reported cognitive and affective empathy. Adjusting for child's sex, age and expressive language ODD children showed a paucity in attributing causes to emotions but no other deficits relative to the comparison groups. ODD boys with high levels of callous-unemotional traits (CU) (n = 22) showed deficits relative to low CU ODD boys (n = 25) in emotion perspective-taking and in understanding ambivalent emotions. Low CU ODD boys did not differ from the healthy typically developing boys (n = 12). Impairments in emotion perceptive-taking and understanding mixed emotions in ODD boys are associated with the presence of a high level of CU.
Research School of Psychology, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, 0200, Australia. richard.okearney@anu.edu.au.
Richard
R
O'Kearney
Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand.
Karen
K
Salmon
Research School of Psychology, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, 0200, Australia.
Maria
M
Liwag
Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand.
Clare-Ann
CA
Fortune
Research School of Psychology, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, 0200, Australia.|ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, University of Western of Australia, Perth, Australia.
Amy
A
Dawel
D000342:Affective Symptoms / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000523:psychology; D019958:Attention Deficit and Disruptive Behavior Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000523:psychology; D000067289:Behavior Observation Techniques; D002648:Child; D002652:Child Behavior / Q000523:psychology*; D002675:Child, Preschool; D056348:Emotional Intelligence; D004644:Emotions; D004645:Empathy; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008297:Male; D012737:Sex Factors; D013223:Statistics as Topic
Ambivalent emotions; Callous unemotional traits; Emotional competencies; Oppositional defiant disorder