Study reveals that adolescents with callous-unemotional traits show signs of psychopathy

^{Abridged version in English by Diana Taborda}

Young individuals with high levels of emotional detachment show low levels of guilt about the possibility of committing immoral acts and have difficulty judging an immoral act to be wrong, indicating psychopathic signs, according to a pioneering study involving Portuguese adolescents.

The study, which brought together the Universities of Coimbra (UC), Porto (UP) and Minho (UMinho), as well as University College London and Royal Holloway University in the UK, has been published in the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry.

The study involved 47 male adolescents between the ages of 15 and 18 who were assessed for their callous-unemotional (CU) traits, which are defined as a lack of empathy and disregard for the well-being and feelings of others. Forty-seven typically developing adolescents with varying levels of CU traits completed a novel animated cartoon task depicting everyday moral transgressions, indicating how they would feel in such situations and how morally wrong the situations were, such as taking an old lady's seat on public transport or keeping money that fell out of someone else's pocket. Adolescents with higher CU traits reported lower anticipated guilt and lower judgments of the wrongness of the transgressions.

Óscar Gonçalves, a researcher at the Proaction Lab of the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences of the University of Coimbra, explained that "the adolescents were asked how guilty they would feel if they committed these immoral acts themselves, and how wrong they thought these acts were".

Callous-unemotional traits observed in childhood and adolescence are thought to be precursors of psychopathic traits in adulthood, with typically severe antisocial behaviour.

According to the authors of the study, the results will "contribute to the development of a model of severe antisocial behaviour and also allow the development of targets for intervention, rehabilitation and early prevention of antisocial behaviour".

The scientific paper is available here .