Recognition of emotion in facial expressions and vocal tones in children with psychopathic tendencies

The authors investigated the ability of children with emotional and behavio ral difficulties, divided according to their Psychopathy Screening Device s cores (P. J. Frick & R. D. Hare, in press), to recognize emotional facial e xpressions and vocal tones. The Psychopathy Screening Device indexes a beha vioral syndrome with two dimensions: affective disturbance and impulsive an d conduct problems. Nine children with psychopathic tendencies and 9 compar ison children were presented with 2 facial expression and 2 vocal tone subt ests from the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy (S. Nowicki & M. P. Duke, 1994). These subtests measure the ability to name sad, fearful, happ y, and angry facial expressions and vocal affects. The children with psycho pathic tendencies showed selective impairments in the recognition of both s ad and fearful facial expressions and sad vocal tone. In contrast, the two groups did not differ in their recognition of happy or angry facial express ions or fearful, happy, and angry vocal tones. The results are interpreted with reference to the suggestion that the development of psychopathic tende ncies may reflect early amygdala dysfunction (R. J. R. Blair, J. S. Morris, C. D. Frith, D. I. Perrett, & R. Dolan, 1999).