(PS6-6) Decoding Subtle Emotions: Reading Emotions in the Eyes in Children with Callous-unemotional Traits

Callous-unemotional (CU) traits, such as lack of empathy or remorse, are a precursor to adult psychopathy and increase children’s risk of chronic aggression and antisocial behavior problems. CU traits are associated with facial emotion recognition (FER) deficits, especially for emotional expressions of distress. These FER deficits might be in part due to a lack of attention to the eye region of observed faces, causing children with CU traits to miss critical socio-emotional cues about others’ expressed feelings, thereby interfering with their development of conscience and prosocial tendencies. Importantly, while lab-based FER measures typically use facial stimuli displaying full-intensity emotional expressions, in naturalistic settings, others’ emotional expressions can be more subtle and subdued, which can also impact FER. Little is known, however, about the role of emotion expression intensity in FER patterns in children with CU traits, or how expression intensity relates to the visual attention patterns underpinning FER. Furthermore, FER studies in children with CU traits tend to be in non-diverse, predominantly Caucasian samples. The current study helps fill these gaps in the literature and fits ABCT’s mission to advance scientific approaches to behavioral, cognitive, and biological evidence-based approaches to behavioral health, and its commitment to diversity and inclusion. Specifically, we aimed to examine visual attention and FER abilities in a diverse sample of children with CU traits based on facial emotion intensity using facial stimuli at a 50% emotion intensity and at 100% intensity. We hypothesized these children experience poorer FER for both happy and fearful facial emotions displayed at 50% versus 100% intensity, and that visual attention to the eye region of the observed face is associated with better fear recognition. Children, ages 6-11 (M= 8.5 years, SD= 1.74; 60.7% male, 39.3% female; 60.7% African American, 35.7% Non-Hispanic White, 3.5% Other) with elevated CU traits completed a computerized FER task with eye tracking. Age was positively associated with FER for 100% intensity fear expressions (r = .519, p = .01) while racial group was unrelated to FER. Generalized linear mixed effects modeling revealed that children with CU traits were better at recognizing 100% intensity than 50% intensity expressions (b = 2.236, p</em> < .001), and at recognizing happy than fearful expressions (b = .437, p = .036). Eye gaze frequency showed a moderate-sized positive association with FER accuracy for happy expressions at 50% intensity (r = .551, p = .002) as well as eye gaze duration (r = .631, p = .002). There was also a low-sized marginal association between eye gaze duration and FER for fear at 50% intensity (r = .373, p = .095) and between eye gaze fixation and FER for fear at 100% intensity (r = .399, p = .073). These findings extend prior investigations of FER deficits in children with CU traits by suggesting these deficits are more pronounced for subtle, naturalistic emotional expressions and might be partly mediated by eye gaze. We discuss how this finding could help inform the development of FER-based interventions for these youth.