Facial expression recognition, fear conditioning, and startle modulation in female subjects with conduct disorder

Abstract

Background: Recent behavioral and psychophysiological studies have provided converging evidence for emotional dysfunction in conduct disorder (CD). Most of these studies focused on male subjects and little is known about emotional processing in female subjects with CD. Our primary aim was to characterize explicit and implicit aspects of emotion function to determine whether deficits in these processes are present in girls with CD.

Methods: Female adolescents with CD (n = 25) and control subjects with no history of severe antisocial behavior and no current psychiatric disorder (n = 30) completed tasks measuring facial expression and facial identity recognition, differential autonomic conditioning, and affective modulation of the startle reflex by picture valence.

Results: Compared with control subjects, participants with CD showed impaired recognition of anger and disgust but no differences in facial identity recognition. Impaired sadness recognition was observed in CD participants high in psychopathic traits relative to those lower in psychopathic traits. Participants with CD displayed reduced skin conductance responses to an aversive unconditioned stimulus and impaired autonomic discrimination between the conditioned stimuli, indicating impaired fear conditioning. Participants with CD also showed reduced startle magnitudes across picture valence types, but there were no significant group differences in the pattern of affective modulation.

Conclusions: Adolescent female subjects with CD exhibited deficits in explicit and implicit tests of emotion function and reduced autonomic responsiveness across different output systems. There were, however, no differences in emotional reactivity. These findings suggest that emotional recognition and learning are impaired in female subjects with CD, consistent with results previously obtained in male subjects with CD.

Figure 1

Accuracy of facial expression recognition by group. Relative to control subjects, participants with conduct disorder showed impairments in anger and disgust recognition. **p < .01, ***p < .005.

Figure 2

Effect of psychopathic traits on facial expression recognition, considering participants with conduct disorder only. Participants high in psychopathic traits, as measured using total scores on the Youth Psychopathic traits Inventory, showed a specific deficit in recognition of sadness relative to conduct disorder participants lower in psychopathic traits. ***p < .005.

Figure 3

Skin conductance responses (SCRs) to the 10 presentations of the aversive unconditioned stimulus, by group. Although both groups showed marked habituation of SCRs to the unconditioned stimulus over time, control subjects showed significantly larger SCRs than conduct disorder participants across all trials. US, unconditioned stimulus.

Figure 4

Mean (± SE) skin conductance responses to blue test slides (conditioned stimulus positive unpaired with unconditioned stimulus, solid line and closed symbols) and red control slides (conditioned stimulus negative, dashed line and open symbols) across conditioning phases in: (A) control and (B) conduct disorder groups. Control participants showed enhanced differential conditioning, as shown by a larger difference between skin conductance responses to the conditioned stimulus positive and the conditioned stimulus negative during acquisition phase 1 and acquisition phase 1, relative to conduct participants. ACQ1, acquisition phase 1; ACQ2, acquisition phase 2; CD, conduct disorder; CS–, conditioned stimulus negative; CS+, conditioned stimulus positive; EXT, extinction phase; HAB, habituation phase; SCR, skin conductance response.

Figure 5

Mean (± SE) startle reflex magnitudes to a 97-dB acoustic probe when viewing pictures of different affective valence, by group. Compared with control subjects, conduct disorder participants exhibited reduced startle magnitudes (p < .05) regardless of slide valence, although the pattern of affective modulation did not differ significantly between groups. mV, millivolt.